Unseen News

World Reborn [GBA Version] leaked!

Probably it’s an old news for some of you, but if you still did not know, the Neopong team has shared with the public a ROM of their cancelled GBA / DS game, a shmup named World Reborn. As we can read at the WD Forum “My partners and I have finally completely given up on the ability to get this game out in some form or fashion (DS/Wii remake, Cellphone version, etc…), so rather than let it never see the light of day or be played by anyone, we’ve decided to just make it freely available for download. So here it is, 4 (or 5?) years after completion, World Reborn:

www.neopong.com/download/worldreborn.bin [4MB]

[…] you’ll need the ability to play GBA ROM files. Various ways you can do that… I’d recommend grabbing VisualBoy Advance (just Google search for it), it plays well in there.”

You can read more about the project at the Neopong website, with some interesting informations like the Design Document, Game Spreadsheet and the Stat Balancing Sheet. We are happy to see that some developers have decided to freely share their work that could have been lost, props to them! If you are a fan of the shoot ’em up genre, you should try this cancelled-one. Here’s a video if you want to take a look before the download:

 

Werewolf: the Apocalypse & bad luck with games

Over at Laughing Hyena‘s Live Journal page, we can read a couple of interesting posts about the unreleased Werewolf: The Apocalypse games: “Back at Gencon 1995, White Wolf announced a licensing agreement with Capcom to make a game based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse. The game’s finished date was set for 1996 and would be playable for the Playstation and Sega Saturn consoles at the time.” […] “According to Gamespot, Capcom stopped working on the project when they realized it had too many genre elements and just didn’t seem to fit together. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, as Capcom also created Resident Evil during this time. A game in which Capcom itself had to create a genre name for it. But then again, White Wolf also stopped making RPG books for Street Fighter as well. Either the books didn’t sell well, or there might have been some in-fighting as for the direction the W:tA game was going to take.

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The second Werewolf game was in development for the PC: “The game I did know about and actually waited for, was DreamForge Intertainment’s Werewolf: the Apocalypse – The Heart of Gaia for the PC, which was going to use the Unreal engine from Epic Games.” […] “Because ASC became bankrupt, Dreamforge couldn’t find a proper game publisher after that and had to close up as well. The game was finished close to it’s release date and that means a copy of the unpublished game exists some where.

You can read more about these in here:

The only two Werewolf videogames that were in development never got a release, so we wonder if it’s just a coincidence or there’s some sort of curse around it. If you want to take a look at some screens and a video from the Werewolf: The Apocalypse game by Capcom, you can check our archive page. We still miss a page for the Werewolf PC game, maybe we’ll add it later. 

Unseen Interviews: the Infinity Project

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Affinix Software was a company based in Southern California, that worked on a cancelled game for the Game Boy Color. Infinity was an epic old-school RPG, that promised to be a good choice for lovers of this genre on the Nintendo console. Sadly the team had some problems in finding a publisher for Infinity and Affinix Software had to close down in 2002. We have contacted Eric Hache, former member of Affinix and composer of the score for Infinity (a real “beta-OST” that you can download from his website) for a little interview about their cancelled game and his life as a videogame music artist. Read the rest of this entry » 

Tommy Thunder [N64 – Prototype / Cancelled]

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Tommy Thunder was a third person shooter in development for the Nintendo 64 (and later for the PSX too) from Player 1 studios, but it was never released and we never got many informations about it. In November 2007, herpetic.adventures on the LostLevels forum posted an interesting story about a misterious file: “[…] about 10 years ago I was poking around the Player1 website looking for info on when Robotron 64 was coming out. Just for the hell of it, I clicked the “Press Info” link. Which turned out to be an anonymous FTP. Woo. Poked around a bit, and amongst directories of PSX assets, I found robo64.zip and tommy64.zip.” Inside the zipped file, there was what it looks like an early prototype of Tommy Thunder 64 and so, thanks to herpetic.adventures, we finally have some screens from the game to look at! You can read more  info about his find in the Lost Levels Forum and check this article on NES World, where you can read some quotes from Tommy Thunder’s developers:

What you have is an early N64 Prototype of Tommy Thunder. The game got signed by ASC games and switched to PlayStation. We made it pretty far into production before ASC Games ran out of money and were forced to cancel the project.

Thanks to Vaettur for the logo!

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