New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Tales of Phantasia [Beta – SNES]

yota
26-02-2012
No Comments

Tales of Phantasia is a Jrpg developed by Wolfteam and published, only in Japan, by Namco for SNES in 1995. The game was originally based on an unpublished novel, Tale Fantasia, but, as we can read from Aselia wikia, the programming team encountered many difficulties in dealing with the publisher:

Several changes exist between the initial concept of Tale Phantasia and the published game, due to Namco’s interference with Wolfteam’s efforts, eventually cutting them out of the process and removing them from the credits towards the end of development. This includes changing the character artist from Yoshiaki Inagaki to the now-familiar Kousuke Fujishima, resulting in entirely redesigned and renamed characters with in-game sprites that are based on original artwork and not Fujishima’s revisions, which are shown in the status art, along with several alterations to key chars and plot points. A grand majority of the story was cut from the game, and no attempt was made to close the plot holes that were created by Namco’s actions.

In the beta pics below we can see the original character design of Inagaki and a scan of a pre-release version of Tales of Phantasia. I played the game ten years ago, so i don’t remember it too well, and the scan is low quality, but i don’t see any major changes. If you have more informations please make a comment and we’ll update the post.

Thanks to Youloute of the Assembler forum for the scan.

Below is a few sprites that are ripped from the final version of Tales of Phantasia, but these sprites go completely unused. They’re ‘angel’ sprites for when Raise Dead is used. Some of them are completely unknown, but clearly Brambert, Rhea and Morrison are in the list. Brambert was in the beta of Tales of Phantasia, as seen in the image below. Not much is known about Rhea but it appears NPC’s may have been usable in battle. There’s also a ‘Tactics’ icon for both Brambart and Rhea as well. Not too mention both of their names are stored in the same area as Cress and Co.’s.

Thanks to Justin3009 for the contribution!

Images:

Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Tamiya Racing [Cancelled – N64]

U64 Staff & Contributors
23-02-2012
6 Comments

Tamiya Racing is a cancelled racing game that was in development for the Nintendo 64. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely ZERO information on the game out there anywhere. According to an auction for the prototype, the game is from Intermetrics, associated with Looking Glass Studios. The label has No Gamma written on on. The seller also thinks it is very similar to the unreleased Mini Racers.

This is from the same seller who sold the also unreleased N64 Wildwaters Extreme Kayak recently for $1,600.00. From what I understand they also have a third such proto, so we may see that at some point too. The auction finished at $1,358.33 and we hope that the winner could be able to share more videos or screens from this lost game!

Original Auction page on Ebay

Post by Arshes91

Original source: www.gamesniped.com

Images:

Videos:

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Turok (2008) [Unused Stuff – Xbox 360 PS3 PC]

U64 Staff & Contributors
21-02-2012
No Comments

Turok 2008 is a FPS for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with very stunning and exciting cutscenes. The player takes part in the military operation which occurs on a planet populated with dinosaurs. While it’s a first person shooter, Turok features a lot of third person moments, creating original and unique gameplay experience. It uses Unreal Engine 3. It was developed by Propaganda Games.

PC version of the game’s folders TurokGame\Baked and TurokGame\Live contain beta / unused maps. It’s possible to get the maps to load in game by copying these folders to TurokGame\Content\Maps folder. After that it’s required to remove the .u files from the Baked folder, otherwise the game will not launch.

The beta / unused maps can be loaded from the game console with the open command. Most of them contain only few brushes or a black room, or crash the game. But there are exceptions: developers’ test maps and prototypes of the game content.

L02_06 map contains early version of the jungle. There’s some of the game’s early content.

Lv02_htest and Lv02_c seem to be terrain testmaps.

First three maps shown in the second video are testmaps from TurokGame\Content\TurokDLC1 folder, other two are from Baked. The last one, LV_15_WB, contains very early prototypes of the game content.

RaptorTest map is an early prototype of the jungle.

Third video shows bunch of testmaps from Live folder. One of them contains unused tyrannosaur.

It’s possible to view Turok’s packages with the viewer which you can get here.
Thanks to this program, we can see beta / unused models from the game.

It is also worth mentionning that Nathan Cheever, who was Assistant Lead Level Designer until January 2007 on the game, wrote on his personal website that Turok 2008 had some cut contents during its development:

(…) As you can guess, Turok went through the typical growing pains a new company, team, and title goes through. It was originally a longer, more diverse action game. When I arrived, it was titled Turok: Rebirth. The subtitle was eventually dropped to mark it as a true relaunch of the franchise.

Other changes included reducing most of the vehicle levels, as well as an ongoing companion. Lil was a young survivor Turok had to protect throughout the story, much in the same way Ripley protected Newt in Aliens. Companion AI and gameplay diversity were the reasons she was removed from the final game. You can still dig through the game assets and find her model, however.

The project was a valiant effort for a new, robust FPS experience with a long-standing franchise. The young team, company, and scope of the game was too much at the time to find the right mix to make Turok a high-ranking game. Licensing the Unreal Engine 3 at the time had its own share of woes as well. Disney needed the game released and the team had to make things work within the allotted time.

Images:

Videos: