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New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Zoiks! (aka Pandemonium) is a cancelled point and click adventure that was in development by Ocean Software’s Tribe team, featuring a cast of classic Hanna Barbera cartoon characters, including Scooby Doo, Shaggy, Fred Flintstone, Penelope Pitstop, Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss.

As we can read from the ECTS 1997 press release, in the game’s story Dick Dastardly used a sound machine to rob the Hanna Barbera world of the sounds that bring it alive. Through cunning detection techniques, Fred Flintstone had to trace the devilish Dastardly and put a stop to his mischief.

Tribe, Ocean’s in-house development team, have successfully combined traditional animation techniques with the latest video and graphic technology to bring the world of Hanna Barbera to life. The beautiful animations in Zoiks! allow for maximum interaction and are works of art in themselves. Add to this a stunning ‘surround sound’ soundtrack and speech recorded by the original cartoon cast and the result is a cartoon experience that you can truly interact with.
Zoiks! uses sound in a way no other game has before. Players learn by trial and error how certain sounds affect certain objects and characters, giving them clues to help them track down Dastardly. This format allows younger players to learn intuitively as they play without patronising more experienced gamers.

The game was meant to be published by Infogrames in 1997, but something went wrong during the development and Zoiks! was never released in the end. A little article on the game was published in Edge issue 32.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: the removed Face Mapping

As many of you may already know, RARE planned to insert an interesting feature into Perfect Dark: thanks to the Gameboy Camera, you would have been able to photograph your face and your friend’s faces to use them as the face of PD characters in the single player campaign (as enemies) or in the multiplayer mode.

Unfortunately, due to the numerous acts of gun-shooting in American schools, RARE decided to remove this option from the game, to don’t create controversy. A game in which you could have been able to kill a character that had the face of your real friend, would probably have been too much for its time. Here are some screenshots of the removed Face-Mapping mode, perfectly working in the beta version.

Beta Face Mapping

Using the N64 Transfer Pack with the Gameboy Camera attached onto the back of the N64 controller, this message would have appeared on the screen.

Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: Beta Multiplayer

And now we can move on to the beta multiplayer of Perfect Dark.

Beta Multiplayer

One of the most interesting rumors for the Multiplayer mode of Perfect Dark N64 is the one about plans for the game to have an online mode too. During the initial planning there were some ideas to develope Perfect Dark for the 64DD and to use the built-in modem of the add-on for the Multiplayer mode. However, due to many problems the 64 DD was delayed for months and years, and eventually this peripheral was never released outside of Japan. It seems that Rare even though about a special cartridge with an internal modem (as used already by another game, released in japan. See the picture above), but as you can imagine the online structure would have been difficult to develope and soon the idea was scrapped.

Unseen Articles, Unseen Features

Perfect Dark Beta Analysis: Beta Weapons

A journey in the evolution of the various weapons in Perfect Dark!

Beta Weapons

In this screenshot you can see that Joanna is holding a very raw / early version of the Falcon 2 / Magsec. The way the weapon is raised is very interesting as it’s not possible to see it like that in the final.

Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Sony

Deathtrap Dungeon [PSX PC – Beta]

monokoma

22-03-2010

1 Comment

Deathtrap Dungeon is an action game developed by Eidos in 1998 and released for the PlayStation and PC. Although originally previewed for the gaming press alongside Eidos’ own original Tomb Raider game, Deathtrap Dungeon sat through several years of delays before finally seeing release. [Info from Wikipedia]

Derboo found some early images of the game in a Korean gaming magazine (Gamepia 8/96): in these screens we can notice a character model in red armor which could be an early version of the female player character, an unknown character model and a still from a FMV described as a machine for making humans into monsters, which seems to have been removed from final game.

The female character was changed with a thong leather bikini in the beta, but due to ratings concerns, Eidos gave her some “proper” armor before the game went gold. In some other beta screens, we can see that the game still looked incomplete, with placeholder models and different rooms layout. If someone could find more info about these or more beta shots, please let us know!

Thanks to Derboo for the contribution!

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