New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

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!

Images:

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!

Images:

Videos:

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Street Dunk [SNES – Cancelled]

monokoma
15-01-2010
1 Comment

Street Dunk is a cancelled baskteball game that was in development by Nippon Bussan (aka Nichibutsu) for the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom. It was going to have an arcade play mode with 1 VS 1, 2 VS 2 and 3 VS 3 players matches, supported by a multiplayer mode compatible with the multitap. There are not many more info available on Street Dunk and it’s unknown why it was never released. Celine was able to find some screenshots of the game in Joypad #24 and Super Power #14 magazines.

Images:

Others, PC / MAC

Alliance: The Silent War [PC – Unreleased]

U64 Staff & Contributors
14-01-2010
2 Comments

Alliance: The Silent War was a game in development by company Windward Mark Interactive. It’s important to note that Alliance has not been cancelled definitely: Windward Mark Interactive would love to continue work, if the game recieves proper interest and publishing / funding.

The five founders Asi Lang, Chris Colosi, Brad Kittenbrink, Palmer Truelson, and Eric Tulla all knew each other while they were undergraduates at Harvard from 1999-2003. Several of them had been working on advanced graphics research, and eventually teamed up and decided to come up with something  new and unique in gaming. Work was stopped on Alliance when the game was approximately 30% complete. (You can read more about the story of Windward Mark Interactive in Asi Lang’s article + U64 interview)

The WarStudio

One of Alliances’ most unique and original features was called the WarStudio, the WarStudio would serve as your menu for online matches and “what if” scenarios. The WarStudio has a 100 year span of weapon options, and equipment, spanning over 200 small arms, and dozens of countries, and armys. Players would be able to search for weapons by a multitude of search parameters, including date of production, country of origin, ballistic profile, caliber, and so on and so forth. On the server-side, players would be able to set up custom searches or configurations within the WarStudio, or, alternately, pick from a number of pre-configured settings (say, “WWI Western front” against “British spec-ops, 1983”) and jump right into combat.

Read more

GameCube, Microsoft, Nintendo, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Knights [XBOX/PS2/GC – Cancelled]

monokoma
14-01-2010
No Comments

Knights is a cancelled car combat game that was in development by Eden Games for the Xbox, Playstation 2 and GameCube. The project would have been published by Atari but in May 2002 the company was sold to the Infogrames Group and Knights vanished without any traces. In 2003, Eden Games released V-Rally 3 and Kya: Dark Lineage. Only some artworks remain to preserve the existance this car combat project.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

Images: