The Ace of Spade is a cancelled action game that was in development by Ubisoft in 2004, for the Playstation 2. The team created an early playable prototype that was probably used for an internal pitch, but in the end the project was never finished for unknown reasons. The game had a cover/fire system similar to the one used in Namco’s Kill Switch and later in Gear of Wars.
WWF War Zone was the first 3D WWF title to be released, developed by Acclaim Studios Salt Lake and published by Acclaim Entertainment in 1998 for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. As Andrew has noticed, there were some beta screenshots in an issue of Game Informer (?) with Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi on the cover. At the time, the game was simply referred to as WWF ’98. This beta version has no health bars yet, the ropes are red, white, and blue instead of just red, and the arena has American flags. There was a beta video on Youtube but it seems to have disappeared.
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time is a platform / shooter game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Sony in october / november 2009. As in other R&C games, to learn more about A Crack in Time’s development and its beta differences the team added a nice bonus to unlock in the form of the “Insomniac Moon” (unlocked after collecting all the Zoni and fighting a secret boss). As we can read from an article at Press the Buttons:
[…] a 3D recreation of the Insomniac offices in the form of a museum that serves as a tribute to and exhibit of all kinds of interesting objects, enemies, levels, and basic design features that did not actually make it into the main game.
[…] From the moment players guide Ratchet into the museum, it’s apparent that something special is going on here. While the area sports a minimalistic design, the real stars are the deleted and unfinished materials. Wander around the place and it’s not long before you’ll stumble on a guided missile weapon that uses flaming birds as ammo. Then there’s a set of crates that pay out special bonuses depending on how Ratchet whacks them with his Omniwrench. Want to have a look at a flying space monster that involved animation too complex to work into the environment in which he was meant to patrol? The museum can offer that.
[…] The best surprise inside the museum is that several of the cut level elements are playable. There’s a hoverboot race that was originally planned for the Agorian Battleplex, and checking out its exhibit space leads to being able to race through the semi-completed environment. There’s also an additional Great Clock platforming puzzle originally meant for Clank and another dropped Battleplex element that involved a procedurally generated obstacle course.
Huge props to Insomniac! If more studios could share this kind of bonus in their games, it would be easier to preserve the cuts and the changes in the development.
A couple of videos of the Insomniac Moon can be found on Youtube, but if someone could be able to record more footage of the area and take some direct-feed screens of all that beta-stuff, it would be nice!
Thanks to Robert Seddon and Bowserenemy for the contributions!
Sidhe is a cancelled Real Time Strategy game that was in development at Kalisto Entertainment from 1998 to 2001. Initially it was meant to be released only for the Playstation 2, but while the development was still in progress it seems that they decided to port the game on the “newly released” Xbox and GameCube too. Sidhe took place in a middle east athmosphere, in which the player was a god fighting other gods incarnating into heroes.
A video of the game was shown at ECTS 2001, but it’s currently unavailable: if you still have a copy of this trailer, please let us know! In the end Sidhe was never finished, maybe because Kalisto did not find a publisher interested in the project.
Thanks a lot to Pierre Mony for the help in preserving some of the artworks that he created for the project and to Gael for the screens with his engine work!
After Charlie Brown‘s team loses their first game of the season (123-0), his team throws down their caps in disgust and quits. Frustrated and depressed, Charlie Brown wanders around aimlessly until Linus meets him with good news: Mr. Hennessey, operator of a local hardware store, is offering to sponsor Charlie Brown’s team, place them in an organized league, and even buy them new uniforms.
We can read more details in Namco Bandai’s official press release:
The cast of Peanuts has come together in an entertaining and fun pick-up-and-play baseball game, Charlie Brown’s All-Stars. Players can help Charlie Brown end his 900 game losing streak as they play baseball with an incredible cast of more than 30 Peanuts characters. Players can also take part in any of four Party Games, including batting, fielding and pitching contests, as well as a good ol’ fashioned game of “Lucy Says.” As players progress through the game they will have the chance to enjoy classic Peanuts storylines, artwork and unlock tons of bonus content including every baseball-related Peanuts comic strip. Charlie Brown’s All-Stars steps up to the plate in Spring 2007. This title has not yet been concept approved by Sony Computer Entertainment America.
Years later, contributor Matthew Culley managed to get in touch with developer Christopher Kline:
M.C.: How far into development did the game get?
C.K.: This is a guess since it’s been so long but apparently we had 6 different playfield environments, a number of characters, a few special effects, the start of a basic original soundtrack, and playable game mechanics. I believe you could play a very basic game of baseball in our demo.
M.C.: The ad mentions over 70 playable characters, this seems like a lot for a Peanuts game. Was a list ever made?
C.K.: I managed to dig up a player roster that confirms the high character count. Some of them were just made up characters with names taken from different employees kids. Chandler was named after my first born son, for instance.(…) Every character had at least a first pass done, so I would assume all were playable. I did a few basic character models we used in the early stages (mainly Charlie Brown) and we hired Christopher Pavia to be the lead character artist on that game. I know he was pumping out a lot of characters (…). Tom Green was the Art Director at the time (…).
M.C.: How many fields were planned, and how many were actually made before development ended?
C.K.: We apparently had 6 environments fairly polished with 12 planned in total.
M.C.: Where did the inspiration come from? Did someone go through all the old Charlie Brown comic strips and movies looking for content that could be adapted into the game?
C.K.: Bobby King might be able to answer this one better from the perspective of how the game idea ever came to be. Once we knew we were working on it, we traveled to the Charles M Schulz museum and got access to an online archive of all the old Peanuts strips. We also looked at the holiday movies. Then we studied all the nuances we could find with both the baseball related references and just Peanuts in general to try to mimic as much as possible to give the game that special Peanuts vibe.
M.C.: Are there any more renders/screenshots/videos that you are willing/able to share?
C.K.: I happened to have a couple screenshots that I had saved for my portfolio. That’s what you already found online. There is always more random stuff but I don’t really know what we could share at this point. Screenshots would be tough since it would require pulling up the actual game on a PS2 dev kit. No idea if the studio still has any of those. You would have to talk to Bobby to see if he could / would want to do that. I doubt he would want to show off things that weren’t very polished.
M.C.: I understand the game was shown off at E3 2006. Have any trailers or videos or builds from this event survived?
C.K.: I would assume a video was made for E3. That plus the original build might still exist on FarSights internal servers. There were 2 Peanuts games that were originally supposed to premier. The other was Snoopy vs The Red Baron. Snoopy was much further along and premiered at E3 but Baseball didn’t get shown for some reason. I remember attending and walking up to the booth disappointed to not see our game on display. This might have been right around when it was cancelled.Bobby may have more answers there.
M.C.: How much did this game’s development influence the later Backyard Baseball games that were developed by FarSight Studios?
C.K.: Technology wise, quite a bit. I think a lot of the games core framework was used and/or modified.
Further details were shared by him about the project development:
For the music side, as Audio Director I was searching for people who could pull off an authentic Vince Guaraldi style soundtrack. We had a local pianist/musician, named William Morosi, who we were working with at the time that did a fantastic job. That addition behind all of the menu screens and during game play really made a big difference, giving it a really authentic Peanuts feel.
We were attempting to add in all kinds of fun nuances to gameplay as well. As I recall, if you hit the ball near Charlie Brown while he was pitching, he would do his infamous POW spin where his hat, gloves, socks, and shoes all came off before he could scramble for the ball. I think I was also looking to add in the infamous “waa waa waa” adult speak sound as the announcer for the player at bat, which was supplemented with on screen text so you could understand them. One of the big challenges with special effects as I recall was getting them to look right with that 2d comic feel while being in a 3d environment. I think the 3D Peanuts movie by Blue Sky Studios did captured that style really well. We could never pull that off back then. Our internal game engine at the time was very basic, so we did the best we could with what we had to work with.
The title was canned because FarSight was over booked with too many games and not enough staff. Charlie Brown’s All-Stars was supposed to be developed in tandem with the game Snoopy vs. the Red Baron and was going to share some assets from that:
Peanuts was one of my favorite games we were working on during that time in the studio, and as far as I can recall, we were stretched really thin to get it all done in time. I can’t remember how many other games we had going at the same time, but it was always multiple. We also were constantly at a disadvantage with our engine tech so making a game look higher end to compete with the rest of the market was extremely challenging. Ultimately it’s my understanding that Namco decided to pull the plug because Snoopy vs The Red Baron wasn’t performing as well as they had hoped. I was very sad to see it get cancelled, and would love to see a studio take on a Peanuts baseball game now using Unreal engine tech. I think that could do really well and be distinct from other baseball games if they do their homework, keeping it full of fun Peanuts nuances, and don’t try to make it a serious baseball game.
Red Baron turned out to be a good game, so it’s a shame Charlie Browns All Stars didn’t follow in its footsteps.
Thanks a lot to Chris Kline for the contribution, and to Matthew Culley for the interview!
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