Hybrid Extreme Racing was a vehicular combat game in the vein of titles like Twisted Metal, Vigilante 8, and Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012. Little is known about the game beyond a print ad found in Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, and the fact that it was slated for release around 2001, exclusively for the PS1. The game was being developed by Mattel Interactive, a company more famed for its Barbie games.
What set Hybrid Extreme Racing apart from its competitors was its unique dual gameplay system. In certain segments of the game, your car could transform into an airship, allowing you to either engage enemies or complete some missions. The game also promised extensive vehicle customization, giving players the ability to upgrade their cars into the ultimate destruction machines.
Eventually, the name was changed to Hot Wheels Extreme Racing after Mattei Interactive went bankrupt. THQ ended up releasing the game in 2001 as Mattei Interactive planned from the beginning. A print ad was preserved to show the game’s original name.
Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer is a relatively unknown 3D action-adventure developed by Vis Entertainment and released by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe in 2005. The game was released late into the PS2’s lifespan and couldn’t compete with the many blockbuster hits of yore. Consequently, the game fell into obscurity due to poor marketing, critical acclaim, and sales. Eventually, Vis Entertainment shut down in 2005, laying off all of its employees in the process.
However, before Vis Entertainment’s demise, the company was actually working on a sequel that was 25% complete according to producer Robbie Graham. Not only this but according to assistant director Pete Shea, the sequel was going to be an open-world action adventure with a sophisticated AI wild-life experience akin to what Far Cry 2 managed to achieve. All in all, it was envisioned as a step above its predecessor. Unfortunately, the sequel was never finished and neither any images of it were preserved online. All that remains is a mention of Brave 2 in the archived portfolio blog of artist Mathew Cooling.
Images:
Not only this, but after reaching out to the main writer Brian Gomez, he said Brave was, at one point, planned to receive a TV Series adaptation. Unfortunately, that idea never came to fruition. It seems that Vis Entertainment had good plans for Brave, but they never materialized.
A video exists documenting the history of Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer in full detail, covering how it all began, the main inspiration and other misc tidbits you might find interesting.
Video:
Credit goes to Evan Hanley for finding the archived portfolio blog of Mathew Cooling.
Sphinx & the Cursed Mummy is a great 3D platformer launched on the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube with a Java iteration released shortly after. The game, despite receiving critical acclaim, failed to reach mainstream appeal and sold poorly. A sequel was in the cards for Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, but it never came to fruition.
After years of waiting for a potential comeback of Sphinx, Ex-Eurocom employees formed the Eight Pixels Square to work on a mobile instalment. This instalment, however, differed from its 3D counterpart. From the prototype demo found online, we can see the game was going to be an infinite runner-type of game. The player would be tasked with guiding the mummy through endless corridors by swiping on the mobile screen. Unfortunately, this attempt by Eight Pixels Square to reach a broader audience, and potentially revive the franchise was met with cancellation. All that remains is a short demo gameplay uploaded on Vimeo by Jose Luis Garcia Camara.
Very few information exist about this game as, to this day, no video games magazines featured it on Archive.org, and no reason were given about why it was cancelled. We can speculate that it was the purchase of Malibu Comics by Marvel, of which Malibu Interactive was a subsidiary, that happened in 1994 that caused to shutdown the game company, and thus, cancelling the title in the process.
A first prototype of the game leaked in 2009 containing 5 playable levels and we can read more details about its gameplay here:
As far as gameplay goes, Prime is a pretty standard side-scrolling Beat-‘Em-Up in the mold of Final Fight, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if you were playing video games in 1994.
Malibu Interactive did a pretty good job on that front. Maximum Carnage seems to be the bar they set out to beat, and while you don’t get to whip people around with Spider-Man’s webs, they do give Prime a few neat attacks to keep things interesting — or as interesting as one of video games’ most repetitive genres gets, anyway.
One button makes Prime punch, often with a combo that’s a dead ringer for Cody’s in Final Fight, but powered by ridiculously huge arms instead of ultra-tight acid wash jeans. And while you don’t get to actually fly during any of the fighting levels, you do get a double jump that’s useful in exactly one area. Another button gives you an alternate kick attack that begins with the most awkward wind-up ever and ending with a stiff-leg kick square in the junk, complete with an impact burst exploding out of the bad guy’s crotch.
In addition to the standard chuck-an-enemy-across-the-screen, Prime also gives you the ability to throw them towards the background or foreground. It’s a trick lifted from the later-era TMNT games, but they pull it off pretty well here by adding something that the comics of the era specialized in: explosions.
Explosions are a recurring theme in the game, and you get to most of them by throwing enemies at everything possible just to see what happens. The car in the foreground, the fire hydrant in the background and the windows on the building can all be broken when you toss an enemy at them, usually resulting in an explosion even when it’s a fire hydrant. It’s also pretty nice that the backgrounds have areas (like the windows and the occasional boarded-up door) that are destructible, although owing to the game’s unfinished status, the destruction will occasionally result in a glowing purple square of nothingness.
So at this point, we’ve got guys in tank tops, crotch-kicks and exploding cars, and for the Streets of Rage aficionado, that’s all pretty standard stuff. Prime is also equipped with two special abilities that allow him to deal with these horrors. For one, as seen above, he walks just like WWE chairman Vince McMahon. And for the second, his super attack, which allows him to blow up like a balloon until he explodes.
An almost finished version leaked later on the internet.
The game was eventually released on the Sega CD under the name Ultraverse Prime in 1995.
The game used pre-rendered sprites for characters and background created with Silicon Graphics, similar to games such as Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country, and was mentionned in numerous previews from video game magazines, most of them were less than enthusiastic regarding the quality of the title. For instance, in issue #083 of Gamepro from June 1996, journalist Scary Larry wrote for the Genesis/MegaDrive version this:
As if we needed a reason to bury the Genesis, along comes Lobo, one of the most god-awful fighting games since Time Killers. Unless you’re a fan who has to own every single piece of Lobo merchandise available, steer clear of this game. You choose from six poorly illustrated warriors that fight with jerky, unpredictable special moves. Since Lobo is based on some of the best comic-book art of all time, this is a major disappointment. The sound isn’t bad, but it gets lost in the dismal gameplay. The battles resounds with smacks and groans aplenty but no trademark Lobo wisecracks. This badly executed game doesn’t deserve a place on the shelf with other comic-book games. Rent it, play it, return it. This one’s a LoBlow.
To this day, it was never made clear why Lobo was cancelled. Some could speculate that for a very late release for the now-dying 16-bits era, and with poor review like this one, Ocean deemed it wasn’t worth to release it, and decided to pull the plug. But it also seems that the project went through development hell: as we can read on SNESCentral, John Lomax, former artist at Ocean Software, indicated that the game initially began development in the main office of Ocean, based in Manchester, and not in the american office that was established in San José, California:
I worked on it for about a month before moving projects. It was originally going to be a Street Fighter-style beat ’em up, and I did work on background art for it, but the powers that be decided it would be better to give it to Ocean America to work on, so I don’t know if it ever came out, (…)
Another story, this time from Alexander Ehrath, who was High Performance Games’ sole programmer for the SNES version, explained in January 2022 that the game was initially coded by Park Place Productions before Ocean America took over the project internally as all the money given to Park Place was spent without finishing the game. This anecdote can be found here.
In 2009, a prototype of the Genesis/MegaDrive version was found by the SegaSaturno community and they released it with the help of Hidden Palace. The SNES one was found in 2014 with the source code available since 2016.
Games based on DC Comics‘ franchises seems to have a lot of trouble back in the 90’s. Alongside this title, another SNES game based on Green Lantern was in development at Ocean Software and was cancelled after numerous setbacks by DC higher-ups. We can also mentionned that around 2003, another Lobo game, this time made by Kemco USA for the Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube systems was planned before being canceled with, to this day, still no information about how far the game went into development.
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