New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Red Dead Revolver [Beta – PS2, XBOX]

Red Dead Revolver is a western third-person shooter published by Rockstar Games and developed by Angel Studios, a team that is now known as Rockstar San Diego. The game was released in May 2004, for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, but its development begun 3 years before (2001 / 2002) and the project was originally meant to be published by Capcom.

In 2002, Angel Studios were acquired by Take Two Interactive and Rockstar Games purchased the rights of the title and expanded on it. The original version of Red Dead Revolver had a more arcadish and fast gameplay, while the final one had a more “open world realistic” approach. The “Angel Studios Version” was played more like an “on rails” shooter (but with free movements), instead the “Rockastar San Diego Version” is more like an action adventure.

Chek the trailers below for a comparison. If you played the game and can help us to notice more differences, it would be appreciated!

Thanks to BemaniAK for the contribution!

Images:

Beta Videos:

Here’s the final version of the game for comparison:

RS Links: the unreleased Burnout Paradise’s content

Over at the official Burnout / Criterion blog, they wrote a post about planned Download Content that was meant to be released for Burnout Paradise, as new tracks, modes and vehicles, but for some reasons they never finish them.

We were very interested in the whole concept of downloadable content, and we knew that we wanted to approach it very differently and push it as far as we could. A downloadable Island was started almost immediately after the main game was built.

[…]

We did have ambitious plans for a series of Islands. One was going to be purely off-road based. Hence we created the ‘Dust Storm’ dune buggy in anticipation for that. Our original dreams for Paradise were to create a series of Islands, all connected to Paradise City and each would focus on a different style of racing game. One Island was going to be completely circuit based – and be all marked up like a modern Formula One circuit!

[…]

Planes. A lot of Burnout fans already know about this – as we showed flying around in a live podcast. It was really cool to be able to see Paradise City from the air. It did not happen because of the way the game world was built. The city was never meant to be seen from such viewpoints. Think of it like a film set, a very big film set – meant to be seen from certain camera angles and not others.

[…]

The Moon! Again, completely true. Someone on the team said that ‘players want the moon on a stick when it comes to DLC’ We thought that was funny and thought we’d do it. The actual surface of the real Moon was modelled and it was drive-able. Lunar Challenges would have been totally unexpected – as would have been zero gravity Takedowns and Challenges.

[…]

Time Travel – Not many know about this, but it was discussed. On a certain day, a time portal would have opened on the Island. When you jumped through, you would have found yourself on Big Surf, at another point in history. Maybe the Wild West…you could have done some Challenges and then jumped back.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!

Sticky Balls [PSP – Cancelled]

Sticky Balls is a cancelled puzzle game that was in development for the PSP.  As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was developed by Zed Two initially for Pocket PCs. After Zed Two was bought out by Warthog, a new version was in development for the PSP, until Warthog was bought out by Tiger Telematics and development was switched to the Gizmondo. The game was finally published for the Gizmondo, but it was different from the PSP one (that before being cancelled became more similar to Monkey Balls / Kororinpa).

At the Pickford Bros website (that worked on Sticky Balls) we can read some more info on its development:

Designed with the Pocket PC’s touch screen in mind, the game was prototyped on the PC in Blitz Basic and given to friends and people in the office to play, and even made available for free download from zedtwo.com, but not neccessarily intended as commercial product. The demo ended up being passed around the UK video game industry, and in response to the surprising popularity we developed the game a little further, and opened a website to keep track of hi-score tables.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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Videos:

Road Riot 4WD [MD/G – Cancelled]

A Genesis / Mega Drive version of Road Riot 4WD was in development at Tengen in 1993, but it was later cancelled. The game is an arcade racing game somehow similar to Mario Kart. A SNES (1992) and an Arcade (1991) versions do exist, but while the SNES version doesnt look that good, the Genesis one seems to have been graphically more similar to the Arcade game. It’s currently unknown if the canned game would have had new tracks. Some images were found in Joypad magazine #7, EGM # 40 and # 41!

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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