In the 90s the SNES produced some of gaming’s finest RPGS. Great classics such as Final Fantasy 4 and 6 kept American audiences entertained, while Japanese gamers had greats such as the original Star Ocean. Entertaining both audiences was the timeless classic Chrono Trigger. Now years later the rise of the internet has put fans together and given those interested the ability to search for in game beta. Notable finds have been made, such as the music from the fabled “Singing Mountain,” and the demo rom. Now thanks to gamers/fans/translators Glitterberri and Gekkahiro we can read in good ole English a translation of this video that has been floating around the web for some time now. >> Read the full translation and watch the video
Faxanadu [NES – Unused Sprites]
Faxanadu is a platform adventure game for the NES, that was developed and released in Japan by Hudson Soft in 1987. In 1989, Nintendo of America released the game as a first-party title in the US and in the European market in 1990. Faxanadu can be considered a side-story of Xanadu, which is the second installment of Falcom’s long-running RPG series, Dragon Slayer. [Infos from Wikipedia]
Thanks to Robert Seddon we found out this page on TheInterweb.com, where we can see some interesting sprites that were never used in the game: “‘The IDs of these enemies are 18, 29, 36, 39, 43, 70 (all decimal). Two defined NPCs also never actually appear in the game. The first one is the lovely blue lady with ID 53, the
other one is the child with ID 54.’
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World Of Warcraft [Beta – Gurubashi Catacombs]
Another WoW article, I know there are not many reading this as all WoW nerds (including me) are busy playing the game, but hey, always fun to read, isn’t it? So anyway, back in the vanilla WoW beta there were ANOTHER battleground apart from Azshara Crater (which you also can read about here…) that was cut from the game. This was the ancestor to arenas (!) that was in TBC. It was a 5v5 battleground that was inspired by FPS deathmatches, simply elimination.
Sadly, it was cancelled due to the following reasons:
– WoW is not a FPS game
– Deathmatches doesn’t work as well as in WoW PvP
– It’s not fun being the single healer in Single Elimination DM
– Objectives are the keys to the main cores of battlegrounds.
– Arena idea was cool, but battlegrounds play differently.
– Arena maps needs to be small which Gurubashi was not.
During World of Warcraft Insider insider #9, Blizzard stated, “We realized that we were just going to have to instance the battlegrounds and turn them into a mini-game of their own. But at the same time, we’ve found that during that process you have to make sure that everything in a battleground goes toward that final objective. We actually tried building a battleground internally once, called the Gurubashi Catacombs (we spoke a little bit about it at BlizzCon), and that battleground didn’t actually have any objectives outside of killing the opponents.”
A preview of how it would look like. What’s funny here is how it says “Wrath of the Lich King” under the logo, and we are talking about the WOW BETA here. Probably this picture was taken during a conferance or something when the battleground’s story was revealed to the public.
RS Links: Shadowgate unused rooms
In this new chapter of our favourites Robert Seddon links, a page on huguesjohnson.com about some unused and misterious rooms that were found in the original Shadowgate: “Some of the rooms taken out of Shadowgate were Trap Room # 1, Trap Room # 3, Several Rooms Holding Death Wraiths, Basilisk Room, Scorpion Room and Prayer Room” – ” What is in the room blocked by the debris by the waterfall? That room was decided to be linked to another room. The other room was taken out because of disc space on the original Mac version.”. You can check the Shadowgate Guide on HJ for more infos!
Cel Damage 2 [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]
Cel Damage was a vehicular combat game developed by Pseudo Interactive and published by Electronic Arts for Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube. It was later updated for the PS2 in the European exclusive, Cel Damage: Overdrive. Prior to Overdrive’s development, Pseudo originally intended to produce a sequel to the first game for PS2, Xbox and GC simply titled ‘Cel Damage 2’. It was pitched to EA, SEGA, Midway, Ubisoft and others, although none of them agreed to fund it; resulting in its cancellation. This was due to a number of different factors, including the poor sales performance of the original and concerns with its marketability, as well as a general lack of faith in viability of the car combat genre among publishers.
Thanks a lot to Roberto Robert, David Wu, Kay Huang, Heidi Klinck, Albert Alejandro, Bronwen Grimes, Frank Trzcinski and all the former Pseudo Interactive artists that helped us to preserve info and media from their lost project!
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