New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Others, PC / MAC

Heroes of Might and Magic 3: The Forge [PC – Beta]

U64 Staff & Contributors
17-01-2010
No Comments

So there is this game, you might’ve heard about it: Heroes of Might and Magic 3. You might have heard of it’s expansion Armaggedon’s Blade. You might also have heard of Conflux, one of the “towns” (town = faction) that was added with the expansion.

Oh yeah, you might say, what’s so special about that town?

Well, here’s the deal: The Conflux was not supposed to be there in the beginning. There was no Conflux. Only Zuul- I mean Forge.

Omgzorz, what is Forge? Why was it removed? Well, Forge was a town that was supposed to be in the expansion but got removed due to poor fan reactions. The Forge was to be a town with a sci-fiction theme (like zombies with razorsaws as hands or humans with flamethrowers).

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PSP, Sony

Painkiller: Hell Wars [PSP – Cancelled]

monokoma
17-01-2010
7 Comments

Painkiller: Hell Wars is a cancelled FPS that was in development in 2006 by czech studio Mindware Studios (which also developed Painkiller: Overdose and a spiritual successor, Dreamkiller), that would have been published by DreamCatcher Interactive for the PSP. The original Painkiller was released in 2004 for PC and in 2006 a port titled “Hell Wars” was published for the Xbox, but the PSP one would have been different from the other versions. As we can read in a Gamespot preview from E3 2006:

The game’s content appears to be mostly new, with new monsters, weapons, and levels, as opposed to Hell Wars for the Xbox, which was mostly a port of existing PC content.

Sadly Painkiller Hell Wars was never released for the PSP: only few images  and a trailer are available, but the ingame scenes dont seem to be from the PSP version. It’s currently unknown how much of the game was completed before its cancellation.

Thanks to Userdante and Jaxx for the contributions!

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Game.com, Others

Metal Gear Solid [Game.com – Cancelled]

monokoma
16-01-2010
3 Comments

Before being cancelled, a version of Metal Gear Solid was in development for the ill-fated Game.com, a portable console released by Tiger Electronics in 1997. It seems that the game was going to be a port of Metal Gear Solid PSX, but there are just few info on the project. At one point, a gameplay video of this game was distributed among group members of the now-defunct America Online account “TigerGcom”, but sadly this footage seems to have been lost forever.

After many researches, Celine was able to find a screenshot of Metal Gear Solid Game.com in Console Plus magazine issue #90! On the 22 January 2010, Parasyte posted some more screens in the Lost Levels Forum.

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD, Playstation, Sony

Rat Attack [N64/PSX – Beta]

monokoma
16-01-2010
No Comments

Rat Attack! is a puzzle / action game developed by Pure Entertainment that was released in 1999 on PlayStation and in 2000 on Nintendo 64. The object of the game is to clear each level of a certain total of rats, without getting hit enough times to lose a life, or ensuring the room wasn’t destroyed, which would also kill you. [Info from Wikipedia]

LavaWave has found some beta Rat Attack screenshot with removed levels , high quality models (instead of the low quality ones in the final game) and a boss stage with the scorpion king totally revamped (probably a target render). Also, the official site of the game surprisingly is still alive since 1998 or so, in which we can read an interesting “the making of rat attack” section.

Thanks a lot to LavaWave for the contribution!

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Nintendo, Wii

New Super Mario Bros. [Wii – Beta]

monokoma
15-01-2010
6 Comments

New Super Mario Bros. Wii is a side-scrolling platform developed by Nintendo EAD and released in November 2009. The game was announced at E3 2009, and from the early videos and screens, Kirby64 was able to notice various beta differences:

  • The propeller power-up was different from the final game.
  • At the Nintendo Press Conference they said at the end of every stage a result screen will pop-up and show you how many enemies you stomp and how many coins you collected, but this only appear in the coin battle and free-for-all.
  • The checkpoint flag was changed to bowser’s head at the final game and the background color of the flag was black. In the beta it had a skull.
  • A music note / melody can be seen in the HUD.  That note is not in there in the final game.
  • The blue arrow in the screen with the lava had changed its color in the final game (it’s red and the board is yellow).
  • The world 5-3 background looks different from the final game.
  • Some stages were removed or hevily changed in the final game.

In the screen with Mario in the pinguin-suit we can see an area that was originally going to be world 3-1, but it was later removed. The ice structure has a different design in the final version, with a more blue color and snow on top of the ice.

Some more info on the beta differences can be found at Mario Wiki:

In the E3 2009 demo, after players go through the boss door, they all fall from the top of the screen and into the boss room, as the initial Larry and Morton videos showed. This was just like in the original New Super Mario Bros., where the player also enters the Bowser Jr. battles the same way. In the final version, the players are already on the ground when the boss room loads up.

Kab-ombs, Mr. Blizzards, Stretches and Bowser Statues were meant to appear but they were cut out as soon as the game was released.

Also, LucaPM noticed a unused file in the NSMB Wii code, called “test_lift.arc”. As we can read at Rusted Logic, it is a graphic file, a stretched grey block.

Thanks to Kirby64 and LucaPM for the contributions!

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