Chalice is a cancelled shoot ’em up that was in development in 2008 for the Nintendo DS by Santa Cruz Games. The team created a playable prototype, but it seems that they were not able to find a publisher interested in this project, so it had to be canned. Chalice had a graphic style that could somehow remind of REZ for the Dreamcast, but it was played as a 2D side-scroller shooter.
Thanks to SCI for the contribution!
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Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler´s Green is a FPS create by brainbox and published by groove games, its a prequel to the movie Land of the Dead, the game was announced shortly after City of the Dead was cancelled. Few differences can be seen in these beta screenshots:
Jack was originally using gloves
A removed objective “find another gun in the barn” and beta zombie
beta zombies
final zombies
I don´t remember this level
Dot turns red when you aim at the zombie
possibly early police department level
in the trailer you can see jack gloves, and instead of the “stranger” model zombie take the hammer and break the wall, the human model of doctor breaks, rather than using the zombie version.
Thanks to Vicente for the contribution!
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Cry.Sys is a cancelled action game that was in development in 1995 by Sierra, not related in any way with Crysis by Crytek. In Cry.Sys we would have took the role of a virtual reality robot, to fight against other mechs to save the last girl on the planet, trapped in this weird cyberspace. Sierra planned to have an editing feature to create our own robot and an online multiplayer mode. For some reasons the project was never finished and only a short preview from NextGeneration magazine issue 12 and a CG trailer remain to preserve its existence.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
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God of War 3 is an action adventure developed by Sony Santa Monica and released in March 2010 for the Playstation 3. As we can read on wikipedia, God of War III was first discussed by Cory Barlog at a God of War II launch event: Barlog expressed an interest in adding a cooperative mode, but sadly this was not implemented in the final game. An ending was also removed, as we can read on Kotaku:
Senior Producer Steve Caterson says in response to questions of whether any content from the game had been cut, “Probably the hardest cut was we had a whole kind of epilogue at the end planned that we just never got…just didn’t get…maybe later!”
And the original trilogy’s story was meant to be a little different:
“What David Jaffe talked about doing was — and I’m not sure how it would happen — basically, you destroy Greek mythology and then Norse mythology is right around the corner”, Asmussen told GamePro. “That’s the next thing that Kratos would go after. It becomes clear at the end that he’s going to become this harbinger of death across different mythologies in the world and maybe carry the series on from there.”
Nutty. For what it’s worth, God of War II’s Cory Barlog has something else in mind entirely. “Cory Barlog talked about Kratos becoming Death”, says Asmussen. “He pretty much becomes the Grim Reaper at the end of the game and his blades become sickles. They’re both incredibly good ideas, but you need a director to be passionate about the story and understand it intimately. If I had used Dave or Cory’s idea, I wouldn’t have been as passionate about it.”
1UP shared a video in which Sony Santa Monica’s Stig Asmussen and Steve Caterson talk about features cut from the final version of God of War 3, with the first footage of the three-way Kratos / Zeus / Gaia battle originally planned for the game’s ending. Also, an old article on CGSociety website revealed that the developers though about making God of War 3 a first person shooter.
If you can notice some beta-differences in the early GoW3 screenshots, please let us know!
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
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Before Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver were released, there were beta pictures from CoroCoro magazine that showed Silver’s, Chikorita’s, Pikachu’s and Pikachu-colored Pichu’s beta sprites. These were changed later on. There is also a beta back sprite of Ethan. His hair is slightly different and there is a symbol on his hat.
Beta screenshots also exist, one of the Slowpoke Well that instead shows a Team Rocket grunt standing where Proton is in the final version, as was the case in the original games, and another of the Mystri Stage in Sinjoh Ruins that shows the three circles being identical instead of three different colors in the final version.
Also, Cyndaquil’s sprite in the intro is different from its front sprite in the main games. Read more