Sony

Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

WWF Smackdown: Just Bring It [PS2 – Beta]

monokoma
10-09-2010
1 Comment

WWF SmackDown! Just Bring It is a professional wrestling fighting game developed by YUKE’s Future Media Creators and published by THQ for the PlayStation 2 in 2001. In the early screenshots from the beta version Lionheart noticed some differences:

Jericho, Angle and Jeff Hardy had different costumes in the final game, these models can still be used with a gameshark/codebreaker

The game had 3D announcers sitting at the announcers table, who would sometimes pop-up in a “picture in picture” view to talk about the match. Both of these features where cut out of the final game (Although you can see a picture of Tazz and Micheal Cole commentating on the back of the boxart).

You were able to attack the announcers during the match

In the final game there is only one ladder in ladder/tlc matches, while in the beta there were a lot.

There are no big ladders at all in the final game.

In the beta it was possible to do attacks with the ladder which were removed from the final game (Dropkicking the ladder into the face).

You can also notice an alternate start screen.

Thanks to Lionheart for the contribution!

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GameCube, Microsoft, Nintendo, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow [XBOX PS2 GC – Beta]

monokoma
09-09-2010
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Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (also know as Shadow Strike during its development) is a third-person stealth game in the Splinter Cell series, developed and published by Ubisoft Shanghai in 2004. Below you can see a video compiled by Silenceofthehills, with lots of early concept arts and beta screens. Text and video annotations in the video help explain the differences between the earlier planned renditions and the final version of various spots in each area.

As seen in the video, a fully missing level map is viewed under the first game‘s HUD. Since the first game had cut a level and used it as an extra in another version of the game, its quite possible that these shots are from a missing level. Its also possible that these are merely early renditions of a previous level, or even simply a test level considering the unaltered HUD.

Secondly, we can also see the previous incarnation of the PS2 and GameCube port before it had be delayed and taken under various graphical tweaks to ensure the artwork was nearer to par with the original versions of the game. This is also available in the GameInformer article scan as well, which also oddly contains a beta HUD akin to that of the online mode’s. This HUD was also apparently shared between all versions of the game.

Below is the direct quote on this from Gamespot itself, posted on February 4, 2004 by Justin Calvert.

“Ubisoft has today announced that while the Xbox, PC, GBA, and cell phone versions of Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow are still on track for release next month, the PS2 and GameCube versions will now launch at a later date. The only reason given for the delay is that the development team is committed to making sure that the other two console versions are as good as the Xbox version.”

Thanks to Silenceofthehills for the contribution!

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Terminus [Saturn, Playstation, PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
31-07-2010
6 Comments

Terminus is a cancelled action adventure / shooter game that was in development by Scavenger Inc for the Sega Saturn, Playstation and PC in 1996. As they wrote in their press release, the project was meant “to give Tomb Raider a run for it’s money” but sadly it was already too late, as the company ran out of money and Terminus had to be canned.

The few screenshots preserved in the gallery below show a great graphic engine for its time, that used NURBS / voxel-like system, as we can read in an article from Gamasutra (wrote by a former Scavenger developer):

[…] Soon thereafter we were asked to develop our own game. That provided me with the incentive to figure out how to represent characters in a game better. We knew we wanted at least ten or more characters on the screen simultaneously, but all the low-resolution polygonal characters we had seen just didn’t cut it. So I decided to keep pursuing a solution based on what I had been working on for X-Men (32X), hoping that I’d come up with something that would eventually yield better results.

At first I flirted with a voxel-like solution, and developed a character system which was shown at E3 in 1996 in a game called Terminus. This system allowed a player to see characters from any angle rotating around one axis, which solved a basic problem inherent to sprite-based systems. Still, you couldn’t see the character from any angle, and while everybody liked the look of the “sprite from any angle” solution, many people wanted to get a closer look at the characters’ faces. This caused the whole voxel idea to fall apart.

In 1997 / 1998, Scavenger went bankrupt and all their unfinished projects vanished with them. The team behind Terminus (internally known as Team Fetus) was then hired at Shiny Entertainment and their game was resurrected somehow, evolving into Messiah.

Thanks a lot to Mike Damien for its help in preserving some info and concept arts from this lost project!

Thanks to Celine for the contributions! Scans from GameFan 4-2 and EDGE 34

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Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Hell’s Deep [PS2 PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
30-07-2010
No Comments

Hell’s Deep is a cancelled action adventure that was in development in 2002 by Qube Software for the Playstation 2 and PC. The project was meant to be an ambitious sandbox game, similar to GTA3, but set in a big medieval city, during a dark and menacing time. As the main focus of Qube has always been the development of 3D software for 3D middleware and not games,  they probably found some problems during the development and Hell’s Deep was soon cancelled. Only few artworks and some 3D models are archived in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.

Thanks to Sewia for the contribution!

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