New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

PSP, Sony

Ushiro [PSP – Cancelled]

Andy Moore
25-12-2012
1 Comment

Ushiro is a cancelled horror-themed, turn-based rpg that was being developed for PSP by Level 5. The game was officially announced and showed in 2008. Nothing much is known about this game apart from brief informations that appeared on 1up:

Ushiro (PSP) is a first for Level-5 — a horror RPG. You play Reiichiro Ushiro, a newly-minted shinigami spirit who has the power to give people near the brink of death a single wish in exchange for their lives. Whether listening in on conversations in spirit mode, possessing the living to do your bidding, or fighting personifications of the evil in man’s heart, you can be sure that being a not-so-friendly ghost is nothing if not hectic.

The game went dark shortly after the initial reveal, with no new developments on the title up until mid-late 2009, when Level-5 removed the game from their corporate website. It’s not clear why the game was eventually cancelled, but it’s possible that Level-5 decided to focus on their new ROID service, a smartphone app that launched exclusively in Japan in 2009 to help the studio break into the lucrative mobile market.

From the assets that did get released, we can see that the game appears to be in a working and playable state, though it’s not quite clear what percentage of the game was fully developed before Level-5 axed the project.

News of the game’s potential return began to circulate after Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu reported that Level-5 were considering bringing the project back from the dead, although this has yet to see any tangible results as yet. It’s possible that they were not referring to bringing the game back, but instead hinting towards the manga released in 2015, which is currently still active.

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Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Jeff’s Shoot’Em Up [SNES – Tech Demo]

Celine
21-12-2012
1 Comment

This “Jeff’s Shoot’Em Up” is a tech demo for a top-down shooter in the same vein as Smash TV or Alien Breed, that was developed by Iguana Entertainment (Aero the Acrobat and Turok) to test the SNES capabilities. The demo was titled “Jeff’s shoot’em up” probably after Jeff Spangenberg, Iguana (and later Retro Studios) founder. In this prototype enemies can’t harm the main character,every path lead to a dead end and sound is absent. Also in the introduction the spaceship that is zoomed in/out and rotated don’t appear correctly.

This demo was made available by the nice guys at Nintendoplayer. For a more detailed description please read their article: www.nintendoplayer.com/prototype/jeffs-shootem-up-super-nintendo-game-demo/

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Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

AionGuard [X360 PS3 – Cancelled]

monokoma
17-12-2012
No Comments

AionGuard is a cancelled action / strategy game that was in development from 2008 to 2010 by Avalanche Studios and it would have been published by EIDOS for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. In AionGuard players would have followed an army of elite soldiers, tasked with capturing fixed areas of land which are occupied by numerous mythical and magical creatures.

Originally the gameplay was supposed to take place during the World War I era, however, the theme did not fit the publishers’ line up and was changed to that of a science fiction setting, and subsequently to a fantasy setting when the science fiction theme conflicted with another game in Eidos‘ portfolio. In february 2010, Avalanche Studios announced that the game was officially cancelled, as we can read at Scrowl. The team was then able to move their time and resources to finish Just Cause 2.

Avalanche Studios later bought the rights to AionGuard back from Eidos and they hope to work on it again in the future.

Some more info on the game can be found at Edge Magazine website:

“We’ve had it with this standardisation of fantasy – it’s not exciting any more, it’s deteriorated into trivial re-hashings of the same old things.” But ‘fantasy’ doesn’t tell the whole story of AionGuard. This world is a melting-pot of science-fiction, steampunk, technology, fascism, mystery and games from the excellent Panzer Dragoon Orta to the failed experiment of Lair. If this is fantasy, it’s a gloriously broad strata. […]

“Let’s say you fly in over a new region – the commander of the army might contact you and give you a number of recon missions,” offers Nedfors. “That’s what the military is interested in in a new area. Then it’s all about exploration for the player. You can travel with different attitudes – flying in on a big beast will probably see you getting attacked, but you can be a bit quieter about it.” What if you’ve already seen that area on your travels without being contacted? “You’ve still done that piece of the game, so you get all the benefits from it,” says Nedfors. […]

The scale of the game changes seamlessly – the same size of figure on the screen is now looking over a world that stretches endlessly, populated by an advancing army of 4,000 tiny soldiers. These 4,000 warriors are running on a 360 debug unit, not a PC, thanks to AI scaling. The larger groups of enemies have a group AI that becomes individual once you begin interacting with it.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribute!

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

Safari Joe [PC PS2 XBOX – Cancelled]

Celine
13-12-2012
2 Comments

Safari Joe is a cancelled action-adventure game that was in development by Titus Software around 2003. Key figures in the development team were Rob Stevens (project leader), Jean-Luc Martinez (programming lead) and Eric Marradi (art lead). The game was set in Africa – central Africa around the turn of the last century to be more precise.

The hero, ‘Safari’ Joe, is hired by an aging anthropologist, professor Livingwood, to take him into the jungle in search of a lost civilization his research has led him to believe is there. An expedition is formed comprising of Joe, the professor, the professor’s assistant, Myra, Joe’s partner, Mohammed, and a female journalist, Kate. Obviously they find the lost civilization and a little something extra; an evil witch doctor called Mobaj Mojumbo.

While Professor Livingwood is examining a mummy-like corpse laid out on an altar he accidentally resuscitates the malefic priest, who had been defeated during a combat with the priests of the lost civilization thousands of years ago. To stop the evil witch Safari Joe need to find four temples and explore their interiors to find each piece of the weapon, in the form of talismans. In order to find the temples, however, Joe and his friends must explore the jungle to unearth the traces of the ancient civilization. During their travels they encounter various different tribes, some friendly, some not, some human, some not, which lead them into various little side adventures to supplement their quest.

The game was never released, probably because Titus was living serious financial strains at the time that would end up bringing the company to bankruptcy in 2005.

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Maximillian and the Rise of the Mutant Mudds [Cancelled – DS]

yota
09-12-2012
2 Comments

Mutant Mudds is a 2d platformer developed by Renegade Kid and released for 3DS and PC in 2012.  Originally, as you can see from the video and the screenshots below, the game was going to be a 3D third-person shooter. A  short demo made in two weeks  that used a modified version of Moon engine was in fact shown to IGN at e3 2009.

However, Renegade Kid didn’t succeed in finding a publisher, and so they tried to release it on DSiWare in 2010. That failed too, but in 2011 the developers transformed Mutant Mudds in a 2D side-scroller and decided to publish it themselves on the 3DS eshop.

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