New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Fantasy Life [DS – Cancelled / Beta]

Fantasy Life is a quest-based RPG / adventure game that was developed by Level-5 and Brownie Brown. It was released on Nintendo 3DS in Japan on December 27, 2012, and then later in 2014 in Western territories. However, the game was was first planned to be released on the Nintendo DS; a version, which was later cancelled.

Fantasy Life DS Beta Cancelled Concept Art

When it began life on DS, the game had a 2D visual style, similar to the one seen in Mother 3. It was first announced at Level-5 Vision 2009 on August 25, 2009, during which time it was being targeted for a 2010 release. The developers presented the first early screenshots of the game at the event, as well as a selection of concept art assets:

Level-5, however, made the call put the project on hold, before resuming development for the 3DS, due to sales forecasts. When it resurfaced on its new platform in October 2010, it was revealed that the game had underwent a big change in art direction. The 2D art of the DS version was done away with, and it had been rebuilt in a 3D engine.

Fantasy Life DS:


Fantasy Life 3DS:


[Project] The Axel Project: Half Life 2 beta restoration

Founded in 2009, The Axel Project aims to recreate the original Half Life 2 beta leak story line as envisioned by VALVe circa 2003. Their upcoming binary patch features numerous fixes to engine stability as well as the addition of retail engine features (such as background maps, bloom). For a full list of features and fixes, see The Axel Project blog!

Some key highlights:

* Updated water shader

– Fixed blackness

– Improved refraction

* Fixed several engine exploits

* Improved rendering performance

* Updated VGUI (transition effects and improved stability)

* Added FP16 HDR

– With luminance-based bloom

– Controllable via ConVars

* Fixed terrain morphing

* Added background map support

* Updated post processing shaders

* Fixed all reproducible bug reports from Alpha 1

* Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm

* Improved overall security of engine and closed several exploits

Dinosaurs for Hire [MD GEN – Beta]

As we can read in Wikipedia, Dinosaurs For Hire is a run and gun / beat ’em up game published by Sega and developed by Malibu Interactive for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. The game is based on an american comic and features Archie, Lorenzo and Reese as the main playable characters while Cyrano (a pterodactyl) shows up from time to time to give mission briefings but is not playable. In the beta version Cyrano was available as a playable character, as seen in old preview screenshots, but for some reasons they decided to remove this option.

Thanks to Rod_Wod for the scan!

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Like Thunder ‘Go’ [N64 – Cancelled]

Known in japanese as IKAZUCHI NO GO TOKU (or Kaminari no Gotoku: Choukousoku Igo) this was a simulation based on the ancient board game “Go” for Nintendo 64. Developed by specialist Toyogo Inc, that despite the name was an american company based in Lexington Massachusetts, the game title appeared in Edge magazine issue 41‘s japanese N64 release list with a planned release date for January ’97.

Seta Corporation, Like Thunder ‘Go’ publisher, never released it for unknown reasons thus negating to japanese N64 players the only Go simulation for the system.

Image taken from EGM issue 90, article written by Celine!

Images:

Gekido [GameBoy Color – Cancelled?]

Gekido is a series of beat ’em up created by Naps Team, released on the Playstation and GameBoy Advance. A GameBoy Color version of Gekido was developed too, but the only proof of its existence is an old page on the official Naps team website and some lines in wikipedia. There are no cartdidges on Ebay, no ROM floating around the web, no review available, almost no screenshots… we can speculate that Gekido GBC was never published for some reasons.

Gekido for the PSP was also in development but never released.

Thanks to whitestrider for the contribution!

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