Hirelings is a cancelled fantasy platform game that was in development in 2000 by Cinematix Studios for the Playstation 2 and PC. As we can read on MobyGames, Cinematix was founded by Jong Yoon and Ben Cooley in 1993, and has released only two PC games: Total Mayhem (Published by Domark in 1996), and Revenant (Published by Eidos Interactive in 1999). After those titles, the studio was working on Hirelings and Renegade Zero, but neither of them was ever released. Cinematix had to close down after a while, probably for economic issues.
Thanks to derboo we were able to preserve some images from the game, found in Korean mag PC Power Zine (October 2000 issue) and from Cinematix’s old website though the Wayback Machine.
Developed by Capcom, Street Fighter II was released in 1991 as a sequel to the original 1987 Street Fighter and it’s credited for starting the fighting game boom during the 1990s. Its success led to the production of a series of updated versions, each offering additional features and characters over previous versions, as well as several home versions. The roster initially included Ryu and Ken plus six new characters from different nationalities. [Info from Wikipedia]
In EGM issue #33 there was an interesting article with some early character designs, that show different versions of Vega (Balrog), Chun Li and Blanka.
As we can read on Wikipedia, Kasumi Ninja is a 1994 one-on-one fighting game developed by Hand Made Software and published by Atari Corporation for the Atari Jaguar. The game went through several changes before it was released to the public. Kasumi Ninja was previewed approximately 8 months before its original release by a virtual game magazine distributed via CD. In this preview, Kasumi Ninja had a very heavy story element to it. Beating the game with each character would produce a specific key which, when combined, would unlock the gates to the final confrontation with Lord Gyaku.
This method of gameplay would have required the player to invest more time in order to complete the story mode. Players would have to navigate the labyrinth to find their opponents, and characters would be unlocked for play only as they were defeated by Senzo and Habaki.
Many of the backgrounds and character designs went through several revisions. For example, Alaric’s default outfit had red trim, as opposed to blue. Habaki was garbed in black, but this was changed to represent Lord Gyaku. A fourth palette-swap ninja, garbed in blue, was seen in previews but apparently never made it to the final game.
The final game became a rush job. Pressuring the development team to get Kasumi Ninja out in a “timely fashion” (holiday season 1994), Kasumi’s story mode was dropped in favor of the fighting concept sans storyline. The labyrinth exploration and key gathering concept was condensed, but the character unlocking system remained intact. Video from viMasterJag’s YouTube Channel!
As we can read in Wikipedia, OutRun 2 is a racing game released by Sega in 2003. Developing the game precipitated some changes for its developers, Sega-AM2, who had historically written their games using Unix systems. Writing for an Xbox-based system meant they had to adapt to the Microsoft Windows kernel. In Seganaomi’s Youtube Channel we can see a video from a beta version of the game, with some minor differences:
Outrun 2: Arcade beta test version running on my Sega Universal driving cab, powered by Chihiro hardware, the beta has a different intro & more interestingly you can continue when the timer runs out aswell as loads more views available including “birds eye view” as you can see not all the music made it into this test version, enjoy !
Gumshoe is an adventure game that was in development by Hiding Buffalo in 2002 / 2003 for the PC and the original XBOX. As we can read in the original press release:
The concept for the game along with a working prototype were created as Hiding Buffalo’s entry in the 2002 Dare to be Digital competition, which challenges groups of students to create a new and original piece of digital content. Entries are judged by a panel of industry experts on their originality and commercial potential. Gumshoe was chosen by a majority of the judges thanks to it’s unusual concept, naturalistic dialogue system and innovative gameplay and episodic approach.
In the end, they never found a publisher interested in the project and so Gumshoe was cancelled. It’s interesting to notice that Hiding Buffalo did released a flash version of the game in 2006, even if it looked much different from the PC and Xbox version.
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