Wizard was a RPG in development for the Wii, which was started at SuperVillain Studios (Crash of the Titans, Order Up!) in 2007. The story revolved around heroes who were trying to pursue a mysterious little girl trapped in the mist ravines. Sadly Wizard was cancelled due to a lack of funding in early 2009, but some screens and videos are archived in the gallery below, to preserve its existence.
Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!
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Darkwatch 2 is the cancelled sequel of the 2005 FPS that was developed by High Moon Studios and published for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. Few months after the release of the first game, High Moon started to work on Darkwatch 2, following the same gameplay and scenario of the original title but now with the graphic power of the PS3 and Xbox 360. The project was shown at the GDC 2006 with a beta build as the studio was trying to pitch the game to a new publisher, but it seems that they did not have any luck and Darkwatch 2 was never finished.
Thanks a lot to Dave Wilkins for his artworks!
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Crude Awakening (aka The Crib) is a cancelled action / driving game that was in development by Pseudo Interactive in 2007 / 2008, planned to be released for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The project was meant to be a “next gen” Carmageddon with a different graphic approach: the idea behind it was to make it stylized, like Team Fortress 2, with a crazy cast of characters and a weird city to explore.
As in the original Carmageddon, the player had to race a vehicle against a number of other competitors with a certain amount of time to complete each mission. More time may be gained by collecting bonuses, damaging the competitors’ cars or by running over pedestrians.
The Crude Awakening concept was quite funny (in a gruesome way), there would be different objectives and sometimes the objective was to hit only one type of pedestrian and avoid others. Crude awakening was basically Carmagedon HD including some reworks of old characters.
The game was going to be published and funded by SCI / Eidos (the original Carmageddon publisher, now known as Square Enix Europe), but later they changed their mind and canned the development. As Crude Awakening was a major project for Pseudo Interactive, its cancellation became one of the causes for the studio’s economic problems and the following closure. In april 2008, Pseudo was officially shut down and all their WIP projects vanished with them.
As we can read in an old article at Gamespot:
However, whatever plans SCi had were subject to change once investors called for a change in upper management. Longtime CEO Jane Cavanagh resigned shortly thereafter, and the following month the new regime announced some drastic changes, including layoffs of 200 workers and the cancellation of more than a dozen games.
Only some artworks, concepts and few screens remain from Crude Awakening, preserved in the gallery below.
Thanks a lot to Roberto Robert, David Wu, Kay Huang, Heidi Klinck, Albert Alejandro, Bronwen Grimes and all the former Pseudo Interactive artists that helped us to preserve info and media from their lost project!
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Sands of Destruction is a RPG for the DS that was developed by Imageepoch and published by Sega on September 2008 in Japan (planned to be released in America in January 2010). Robert Seddon has linked us to an interview that Game Set Watch had with Image Epoch president Ryoei Mikage, and Sands of Destruction Sega producer Yoichi Shimosato, in which they talks about some changes that were made to the game, because of the CERO ratings:
This may be a difficult question, but the high concept of the game, where you are a character who is being compelled to end the world, is very interesting. But why take that and add some very, very traditional RPG fetch quests and anime characters and things like that?
RM: So this is probably the same in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., but the ratings boards — for Japan, it would be CERO — have been cracking down on the game industry. It’s been becoming more and more difficult to make games that are kind of out-there.
So, for this game in particular, Kato’s original scenario actually came back saying… In the final game, humanoids are ruled by the ferals, the beast men. The humans were food for the beast men in the original scenario, and there were scenes in there where the beast men would actually eat the humans.
Obviously, that would be rated Z in Japan. But for an RPG on the DS, the board felt that it would be more appropriate for the actual gameplay content to be something that even kids can pick up and play.
That’s unfortunate — if you had U.S. or Europe as the target market, you would not have had to change that. You would have gotten a Teen rating, maybe, but it certainly would not have been for mature audiences only.
YS: I agree. In my opinion, because this game was made specifically more for the Japanese market, it was appropriate the way we made it. But if it was more geared toward the Western audience, then, as you said, the original idea would have been more fun and compelling.
Interplanetary Lizards is an action game that was in development by Tengen for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive. In may 2009, Rod_Wod from the Assembler Forum shared various scans from old gaming magazines, and in one of these images we can see a screenshot from IL. The game was cancelled for unknown reasons.
Second screenshot from GameFan 2-3. Thanks to RetroGameFan9000 for the contribution!
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