New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Arcade, Others

NBA Hangtime [Arcade – Beta]

U64 Staff & Contributors
27-05-2009
No Comments

NBA Hangtime is a basketball video game developed by Midway and released in arcades in 1996. Home versions followed for Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Sega Genesis, Super NES, and Windows. Hangtime was the third basketball game by the original development team behind the NBA Jam series. [Infos from Wikipedia]

My friend Sabin found a site with a few bits of beta stuff for NBA Hangtime. In these early screens we can notice no basketballs behind the team logos, backboard was breakable, a few players pics are different and maybe more…

Images:

Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony

Turrican: Cyclone (Factor 5) [PS3 – Cancelled]

monokoma
27-05-2009
6 Comments

After finishing Lair, Factor 5 was working on a new Turrican game for the PS3, but as the partnership with SONY was later terminated when Lair was a critical as well as a commercial failure, the development of this new game was stopped. We dont have an official name for this game, and it’s labeled simply as “Turrican” or  “Project Cyclone” just because of the name of its artworks. Project Cyclone was put on hold still in early development and probably we’ll never see it again.

From the few artworks that remain, we can notice a character that looks a bit like an evolution of the one in Turrican and we can only wonder if this project was going to be a resurrection of the unreleased Thornado for the GameCube.

Thanks to Gone is Gone and Hey Hey for the contributions!

Images:

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Super Punch-Out!! [SNES – Beta]

monokoma
26-05-2009
4 Comments

Super Punch-Out!! was released in North America on 1994, in Europe in 1995 and finally in Japan as part of the Nintendo Power flash RAM cartridge series in March 1998. Super Punch-Out!! is the fourth game in the Punch-Out!! series and Nintendo IRD was developing this game simultaneously with Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II. The game is based on Takeda’s original arcade versions of Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!!. Before the game was finished and released, some screenshots of the beta seen in gaming magazines showed the protagonist of the game with a different look compared to his final version seen today. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Thanks to Celine for the scans!

Beta version:

super-punch-out-beta

Final version:

super-punch-out-final

Images:

Video:

Unseen News

N+ and the removed content-sharing feature

monokoma
26-05-2009
No Comments

nplus

N+ is an awesome hardcore platform game developed by Metanet Software, released for Xbox Live Arcade, DS and PSP. Robert Seddon linked us to an interview that Game Developer magazine had with the developers of the Xbox Live Arcade version and the problems that they had to include the level editor in the final game.

“Microsoft supported the idea but expressed a very reasonable need to limit users from creating offensive content such as hate speech, representations of male genitalia, offensive language, and so on. The problem was that severe limitations would cripple the user’s ability to create interesting content, negating the editor’s reason for being. […]

Because of limitations of the leaderboard system, Microsoft was unable to delete the specific offensive content uploaded by a user of Forza, which could also not be flagged by other users, and was resolvable only by the deletion of the entire user account.

Near the end of N+ development, we were told to disable the content-sharing features for launch, with the suggestion that they could be re-enabled when and if the leaderboard back-end was altered to allow effective user-created-content control.

We complied, regretting the backlash that would surely occur, but were optimistic for the future when we could re-enable. Unfortunately, this last-minute change caused a certification failure, and a lengthy launch delay for N+, but we worked to get through the new issues.

We pushed to keep developing content creation and sharing in because we knew it would benefit everyone: the game would be more popular because players would appreciate the creative possibilities, and it would add a lot of value to N+ as available levels would become essentially infinite.

Perhaps, though, we should have just cut it when Microsoft initially started expressing reservations. It was a lot of work for everyone, and since there was a chance that it would be cut, it’s possible this was a case of poor risk management on our part. As it stands, this feature is not likely to be allowed any time soon, if ever.”

You can read the full interview at Game Set Watch and check an interesting presentation about the development of the game from the official Slick Entertainment site!