New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo, Sega

Golden Sun [GBA – Beta / Unused Weapon / Debug]

U64 Staff & Contributors
26-09-2008
5 Comments

Golden Sun is the first installment of a series of RPG games developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo. It was released in November 2001 for the GBA, with a sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, in 2003.

Golden Sun underwent a development cycle of between twelve and eighteen months by Camelot, which is considered quite a long period of time for the development of a handheld video game, and was described as a “testament” to the positive results a long development cycle can bring to a game. It was shown in early, playable form at the Nintendo Spaceworld Expo in Japan on August 2000. North American previewers received the game a few weeks before the release, and IGN noted that the experience of developing Shining Force for Sega helped Camelot develop a gripping RPG for the handheld.

Originally, Camelot planned to create a single title instead of a series, and in the extremely early stages of their project they had created a game design document for the one Golden Sun game to be on the Nintendo 64 console. When it became apparent the N64 was on its way out because the Nintendo Gamecube was coming in, Camelot shifted their focus to making a game on the handheld Game Boy Advance. [Info from Wikipedia]

In these old screens we can see a beta version of Golden Sun, with differences in the graphic style, in the characters design and in some weird places. The Kusanagi is a Light Blade that is found in the Debug Menu of the original Golden Sun. This weapon is impossible to access during normal play and can only be seen using a hacking device. Ironically, this weapon’s graphic is officially used in Golden Sun: The Lost Age for the Light Blade artifact Masamune. If it had been in the original game it would have been the most powerful Light Blade surpassing even the Kikuichimonji. You can find more info at The Adepts of Weyard website and at GoldenSun Wikia!

Thanks to Robert Seddon for these links!

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Unseen News

Fire Emblem 64: ported to the GBA?

U64 Staff & Contributors
26-09-2008
2 Comments

fireebmlemxavios.jpg

Fire Emblem is known to most Nintendo fans after the release of Super Smash Bros. Melee. Before that, lots of people didn’t know about the characters from the game or from where they came from. Of course they were from a Nintendo game, but which one? Myself, I believed that they were anime characters (how should I’ve known? I was only 7 by then) … but soon we have figured out the truth, a-ha! So they are from a strategy game called Fire Emblem! How silly for us not to know that! Mmh, what i was saying? Oh right, I’m hungry. Me too, let’s get something to eat.

Eherm… I should stop with the nonsense… anyway, Fire Emblem 64 was supposed to be released on the 64DD, but no screenshots were ever released. In fact, almost no information came out before it got cancelled. But hey, I am not writing about this just for the sake of it, I got some other information. No, really.

Miyamoto said in an interview about the 64DD software that they were gonna produce Fire Emblem 64 after they were done with Super Mario RPG 2, both which were made by Intelligent Systems. This info was written on IGN on 29th July 1997, taken from a japanese N64 magazine. Miyamoto said that Fire Emblem 64 would have come out “the later half of next year” meaning somewhere around autumn 1998, or maybe around winter 1999, just because we know that Nintendo loves to delay games. Of course, we must remember that Nintendo delayed the 64DD itself to December 1 1999, but we don’t know if this affected Super Mario RPG 2’s development. Now let’s say it did, maybe ’round the middle of 2000.

What more can i say? As with Earthbound 64 / Mother 3, the game wasn’t REALLY cancelled. Maybe. In early screenshots of Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi for the GBA, there seems to be some changes in the graphics and some characters were unused. Also, Fire Emblem 64’s original title “Maiden in the Darkness” is a title given to a character in Fuuin no Tsurugi, and speculation has begun: the storyline of FE64 could have been transferred to the GBA version of the game.

Game Boy Advance (GBA), Nintendo

Fire Emblem 6: Fuuin no Tsurugi [Beta – GBA]

U64 Staff & Contributors
25-09-2008
1 Comment

Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi (The Sealed Sword) early beta screens from the game show different characters and graphic style. Different HUD and graphics are present, as well as Roy’s very different portrait. The weapon and item icons seem to be placeholders, as they’re all what look to be Iron Swords, but their names are different.

Thanks to Iven Allen for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Xbox 360

HALO MMO (Titan) [X360 PC – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors
23-09-2008
4 Comments

Our nice friends Robert Seddon and Batzarro have linked us to an intersting news that was spotted on Game Set Watch and Gamasutra, that talks about the find of some screenshots from “Titan Project”, an HALO inspired Massive Multiplayer Online game that was in development at Ensemble Studios, but was cancelled in 2007.

Ensemble Studios has recently closed (for financial problems?) after they had finished to work on Halo Wars and a supposed former employer of the team has started to share screens and some infos about the cancelled games that he worked on. On his Flickr Account we can see a wonderfull collection of images from Titan, and on his blog we can read that: “In 2005 Ensemble Studios completed Age of Empires III. Following that, several game prototypes (a major one was ‘Wrench’, more at a later point) were developed. One of them was a Halo inspired MMO codenamed Titan; cancelled after around two years in June 2007.” Read more

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Super Mario Kart [Beta – SNES]

monokoma
23-09-2008
No Comments

At the Digital Press Forum, van_halen has posted some photos from a prototype version of Super Mario Kart, a “beta” with some interesting differences, like early version of some of the sprites, different layout and music in some levels, different title screen, select screen and “choose-your-driver” screen, missing “black X” from the Lakitu’s flag (when you drive in the opposite direction), a flying Super Koopa and missing reward cups in the ending scene. Check the original topic for more infos. Huge props to van_halen for sharing these images!

In an old magazine, MathUser has even found a couple of screens that show a different design for one of the tracks, maybe an early version of the Mushroom Cup Round 2, as Madou has wrote in the HPZ Forum

In an episode of Iwata Asks, we can read that:

Konno: Originally, the development of Super Mario Kart began with the idea of creating a two-player racing game in contrast to the single-person gameplay of F-Zero.

Miyamoto: Just so there’s no confusion, however, I should point out that we didn’t set out to create a two-player version of F-Zero. We set out to make a game where we could display the game screen for two players at the same time.

Konno: With more than one player, it would have been impossible to illustrate the high speeds of F-Zero.

Iwata: Why did you decide on using Mario?

Konno: Well, in the very first prototype, there was a guy in overalls sitting in the kart.

Iwata: Wait just a minute! I can’t let that slip by. Did you just say a guy in overalls?

Konno: Sounds like Mario, doesn’t it? It wasn’t like I forgot to put Mario’s beard on him or something, though… (laughs)

Miyamoto: For F-Zero the characters were seven heads tall, but for Super Mario Kart, we decided on three heads tall characters in order to suit the design of the karts.

Iwata: How long was it before Mario himself actually appeared in the karts?

Konno: It was about three to four months after we started development, when we had created a prototype involving two karts racing simultaneously.

Miyamoto: At first, no racing was involved. It was just two karts moving around freely. Then we noticed that it looked neat if you stopped one car and looked at the other car flying by. We decided to see what it would look like with Mario in one of the karts, and everyone thought that looked even better. Who knows, maybe the designer who drew the overalls on the earlier guy intended that it be changed to Mario all along! (laughs)

Konno: Back then, instead of a banana peel as an item, there were little oil cans. If you threw one out, the oil would spill, sending the karts spinning.

Iwata: How did you come to make the race and battle modes?

Konno: We had decided from the start that there would be races, but we thought that it would be good if the game served as a communication tool in which one-on-one battles were possible via some other kind of gameplay rather than simply competing for rank, and someone had the idea of popping each other’s balloons.

Thanks to Youloute for the contribution!

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