Robert Seddon has made us to notice about a page on jathys.zophar.net in which there is a collection of images that were found in the Harvest Moon (SNES) code thanks to the HM Editor, but that were never used in the game. As Jathys wrote in that page, those images could have been used with the credits in the beta version of the game.
The Phantom was an action game that was in development in 2003 at 7th Sense studios: even if the game was finished, the original publisher went bankrupt and there were some problems with the copyrights so it was never released.
Thanks to Maciej for the contribution!
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Celine linked us to the official Platinum Games Site / Blog, in which they have wrote some interesting posts about the development of their game: originally Jack’s character design was different and they tried various color palettes before choosing the final one.
We worked on our first proposal for two weeks, when a programmer walked by and said, “This is great! It feels fresh! I’ve never seen a game like this!” His words were enough to know that the first proposal, black & white, was what we should go with.
There were times when I thought to myself, “Ahhh… I wish I could use some grey…” I even tried it in a few tests, but it just didn’t look good. […] For instance, even though your human eyes see the two-tone as black and white because of the contrast, we actually put desaturated yellow into the game. We would also up the contrast on the far reaches of the background instead of obscuring them. We used lots of little tricks like this.
Many Bloodbath Challenges were cut from the final game, as the one with an huge slingshot:
One day, the environmental kills team were stressed out trying to think up a new Bloodbath Challenge. Well, actually, we were stressed because the challenge that we wanted to go with had been rejected by Nishikawa-san. It would have been a Bloodbath Challenge where you would have fired at enemies with a giant slingshot. It had great Wii Remote controls, and we were almost done programming it; however, unfortunately it was deemed to be too run-of-the mill, and didn’t get the kind of reaction we were shooting for with the challenges. Thus, we didn’t use it.
Also, a removed / censored kill can be seen in the video below.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
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LukA_YJK has posted a message in our forum to find more people interested in the release of the Rogue Squadron 3D Level Editor, to try to collect enough signatures to impress LucasArts and Factor 5 for a chance that they could share the Level Editor with the fans. We dont know it this could be useful, but we’d like to help: you can check and sign the petition in here. Good luck!
Dear LucasArts and Factor 5,
We are a group of enthusiastic fans of your great PC platform computer game, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D. For more than ten years this game, which became a Star Wars arcade game classics, was a source of inspiration for many and many Star Wars fans. But unlike some other Star Wars games there is not any tool available which would let fan community to expand the game by developing additional levels and modifications.
As it is known Factor5 used its in-house level editor L3D to design game levels for Rogue Squadron and Rogue Leader. In fact this tool is not used anymore for any other games because it is out-of-date by now.
Therefore we ask you to release freely the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D level editor. It would allow us to use our creativity to revive the game and expand it with fantastic add-ons. The editor would also serve as a new item in the arsenal of all those enthusiastic fans of Star Wars games.
We are very much looking forward for your kind and helpful decision
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
Batman: The Dark Knight was an open world action stealth video game loosely based on the 2008 film, The Dark Knight. The game was unofficially revealed in the summer of 2007 as being in the works at Pandemic Studios’ Australian branch in Brisbane.
This cancellation makes The Dark Knight the first Batman film made by Warner Bros. not to receive a video game translation.
As we can read on Kotaku (thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!), the development of Dark Knights had too many problems and it was probably the main reason why the studio was closed:
“Pandemic worked out a deal with Warner/DC and EA to make a Batman game. So Pandemic spent six months on pre-production of a Batman game. Then EA came in and said it had to be a Dark Knight game, so most of that six months’ work was thrown out. EA were forced to rush the project, as their ownership of the Batman rights would expire in December 2008. […] Pandemic thought an open-world game would suit the property best. But few, if any staff at Pandemic Brisbane had experience making open-world games. The decision was made to use the same engine being used for Pandemic’s upcoming WWII action title Saboteur. It’s a pretty engine, but was never built for the kind of open-world game Batman was supposed to be, and this caused a ton of serious technical issues.
Some leaked screenshots were found by Superior Version in January 2009.
Thanks to Borman and Dan for the contribution!
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