As we read in his Unseen Interview, Mr. Mark has recently acquired a copy (the last and only one?) of Kartoon Kombat, a cancelled fighting game that was in development for the Genesis. Sadly the ROM was damaged in such a way that it will most likely never be playable, but a friend of Mark (known as ZZap! on most forums) was able to extract some interesting text. This is what he was able to uncover: Read more
Black Isle’s Torn is a computer role-playing game developed for Windows by Black Isle Studios, announced on March 2001 and cancelled in July of that year. The game was to use a modified version of the SPECIAL role-playing system, which had been implemented in the Fallout series.
Developed on various editions of the Lithtech engine, Torn possessed features unseen in previous Black Isle Studios games, such as 3D graphics and real-time camera movement.
In July 2001, after circulation of rumors, Torn was officially cancelled.Following the incident, fifty-six members of Black Isle Studios’ staff were laid off. The ultimate reason for Torn’s cancellation was eventually revealed by Feargus Urquhart:
“I don’t know if we ever released an official reason on why [Torn] was canceled, but in a nutshell, the game was canceled because it was not going to be done in time to get Interplay the revenue the company needed to continue operations. That sounds like it was all Interplay’s fault, but that’s really not the case. The project was not going well and continued to be an ongoing challenge.”
The delays were caused by numerous engine upgrades and large problems with pathfinding, due to the team’s inexperience with 3D engines. [Infos from Wikipedia]
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
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Stormbirds was a flight combat game that was in development at Juice Games for the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3, but it was later cancelled by THQ because the project had “too high risk”. The FMV video was done by Real time UK.
Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution
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IMPORTANT NOTICE: The offsets that are in this article work only with Pokémon Ruby v 1.0 (USA). If you want to know which version is your game, you can use the Rom Header Editor Advance (RHEA). You can find RHEA at any Pokémon hacking website. The text can be seen with Advance-Text (A-Text) but you have to convert the offsets from HEX to DEC (for doing this you can use Windows Calculator). For the unused rooms, you can use Advance Map (A-Map).
I have found some unused dialogs and rooms in Pokémon Ruby. None of them are used in the final version of the game but they are still hidden in the game code!
It seems like the game’s early project name was POKéMON AGB (AGB is the official product code for the GBA).
Unused Text n° 1 (offset 1A0712) Read more
The original Syndicate was a real-time tactical game from Bullfrog Productions created in 1993 by Sean Cooper and released for various platforms: PC, Amiga, SNES and Mega Drive / Genesis. A sequel was going to be developed for the Playstation 2, but it was later cancelled for unknow reasons. As we can read on Kotaku, it seems that it “was worked on for around a year. This would have featured a ‘free-roaming multi-tiered city’, and would have been home to three factions: the Syndicates, a rebel group called the Freemen and the mysterious Hybrid”. Only few concept arts remain from this project.
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