New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Arcade, Others

Panic Museum [Beta – Arcade]

U64 Staff & Contributors
31-01-2012
1 Comment

Panic Museum is a on-rail shooter developed by Taito and GameWax, released in arcades in 2010. The game is a bit like a cross between the House of the Dead and the film Night at the Museum. Kieran played a beta version of Panid Museum at blackpool in the UK, and he noticed some differences:

The original name of the game was to be called haunted museum but was changed possibly due to copyright reasons (not sure why)
In the final version of the game the crosshairs was left out but was in the beta version.
Another difference is that you were set to go in a certain order starting with the mummy Egyptian level and then the library etc but in the final version you now have 3 stages to choose from in any order you like apart from the ones that need unlocking going upwards.
The aquarium level is the last level to be unlocked in the final version but wasn’t in the beta version
In the library level the deck of card monsters ran at you too quickly but now their speed have been reduced in the final version thus making the animation more in line with everything else.

Thanks to Kieran for the contribution!

Video from the final version:

Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo

Odema and the magic book [GBA – Cancelled]

monokoma
28-01-2012
2 Comments

“Odema and the magic book” is a cancelled 2D sidescrolling action / platform game that was in development by french team Namdoo for the Gameboy Advance. From the video below we can see that Odema was going to be somehow similar to a “kiddy Metal Slug”, with 7 huge worlds with multiple pathes, more than 30 different enemies and 14 Bosses. Namdoo managed to create a playable beta version in 4 MegaBytes only, everything was packed on the cartridge and unpacked on the fly, at 60 frames per second, but there was still no sound or sfx. The game was about 75% complete when they had to cancel it.

Thanks a lot to Collect-Thor for the contribution!

Images:

Videos:

Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo

Xtreme-G 3 (Extreme-G) [GBA – Cancelled / Proto / Tech Demo]

monokoma
24-01-2012
1 Comment

The original Extreme-G is a futuristic motorcycle racing game developed by Probe Entertainment and published by Acclaim Entertainment for the Nintendo 64. In 2001 Acclaim released Extreme-G 3 for the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2, while Similis were working on a Gameboy Advance version too. Sadly the GBA version of Extreme-G 3 / Xtreme-G 3 was cancelled very early in development.

Below you can see a very early prototype / tech demo of “Xtreme-G 3/XG3” for the Game Boy Advance. It was only about four weeks in development and more meant as a proof of concept. It ran at constant 60 FPS on the GBA using a special graphics mode (not real 3D as this would have been to slow).

Thanks a lot to Collect-Thor for the contribution!

Images:

Videos:

Arcade, Others

Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wave Net [Unreleased – Arcade]

monokoma
24-01-2012
2 Comments

As we can read on Wikipedia, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 Wave Net was a rare network version of the game. It was tested only in the Chicago and San Francisco areas that used a dedicated T1 line, connected directly to Midway’s Chicago headquarters; many people outside the test area were not aware of its existence during its release. One store kept the T1 line installed after the test concluded, but eventually removed the Wave Net game in favor of a Golden Tee game that uses a dial-up connection.

It is highly unlikely that any Wave Net test games were ever released to the public after the infrastructure was dismantled, and so there are no known dumps of the ROMs used by the games designed for it.

One of the reasons this version was not widely adopted was the rarity and cost of T1 lines at the time. The game was released before alternative broadband access was available. At the time, a T1 was the only guaranteed way to get broadband into an arcade, but the game didn’t utilize the full bandwidth of the T1. Midway subsidized the cost of the line during the tests to make it more attractive to the arcade owners.

Thanks to kieranmay for the contribution!