My Super Mario World: beta Hack Project is going well, here is some new stuff I had just put together. Based off of old screenshots, I have made a Ghost Castle level to show you what it may have looked like in the actual beta game. The ground was made by a person named Someguy. By the way, the SMB3 breakable bricks are not beta, they are inserted into the game with hacking, though they were seen in screenshots of the beta. It is only assumable a spin junp could break them. Here’s a screen comparison (at the top the beta hack, below the original beta screen): Read more
Mr.Do for the GameBoy? A released “beta”
In the infinite web of the internet, sometimes we can find interesting memorial about lost gaming stuff, like this page from the developer of the GB version of Mr.Do, where we can read some fun facts about the game: “Mr.Do! was given a very limited release in Europe – in its unfinished form! [..] The game was meant to have a link-up cable option, where two players had to battle it out on a much bigger map. This was never completed due to problems with the development kit I was using (this ‘menu option’ has been removed). Also the baddie intelligence was never finished – they don’t ‘search’ the playfield correctly or ‘stumble’ beneath falling apples as they should. There was also supposed to be two modes of display – an authentic ‘full-screen’ version (with tiny graphics – see the pause mode below) and the scrolling, high detailed one that appears in the ‘end product.”
Team Fortress 2: second prototype
At the Team GabeN wiki website we can read some interesting informations about the development of Team Fortress 2: “Valve’s second concept for TF2 featured a Sci-Fi theme with none of the characters or even places being related to the Half-Life story. Following the Half-Life 2 leak, CS and HL1 ports were released by Anon. The Counter-Strike port included two out-of-place player models under the names “temp_player.mdl” and “alien_commando.mdl”. Those are a Human and the Alien Commando and they’re the only known/available TF2 models we have from Valve. Any other asset made for that game simply doesn’t exist or is not available to the general public.”
You can read more about this @ Team Fortress 2 (GabeN) or you can see more TF2 beta stuff in our archive page for the game
Shining Force [MD/G – Beta/Concept]
A map from an old preview of Shining Force, show us a concept map, that looks different from the one in the final version of the game. Below, you can even see what it looks like an old intro screen with a different font for the title of the game. Read more
Three Tribes [GBA / DS – Cancelled]
Three Tribes was announced in November of 2004 in a press release by its Dutch developer Two Tribes as an action puzzle game in an overhead perspective designed for all ages. I could only retrieve the Dutch version of the announcement, archive.org unfortunately didn’t cache a page of the English version. The game was designed for the Gameboy Advance and possibly the Nintendo DS; no release date is given for the game and the company had no publishing partner for the game at the moment of the announcement.
Three Tribes sets the player in control of a shaman whose purpose is to help out the natives he meets with their problems. Interaction between the characters, animals, objects and tools found in the game and with the environment itself would be a central part of solving the various puzzles. The game would be set in the same visual perspective as the 2D Zelda games but with a lot more freedom allowing the player to climb, swim and fly anywhere they wanted to. The game also promised a wide variety of mission objectives. The NDS version would differ from the GBA version in having a multiplayer game editor. The editor would allow players to design their own multiplayer levels and create their own objectives and later share them with friends.
Unfortunately Three Tribes was quietly cancelled; the company never found a publisher for the game. The main cause could have been the declining GBA market but I also cannot retrieve how far development of both versions was. I could find only a couple of GBA screenshots and two promotional videos (see below) and absolutely no information on the Nintendo DS version. On the current site of Two Tribes the game is briefly mentioned:
„In the meantime, we’d spent two years developing a physics puzzle adventure game called Three Tribes for Game Boy Advance, though it turned out to be impossible to find a publisher for such an ambitious concept.
The game was stated way into 2010 on the Two Tribes website as a Gameboy Advance title “In development”. After a refreshment of the website later that year the game vanished of the radar and was no longer mentioned. The game still hasn’t vanished completely as its promotional website is still (partly) online. But I think we can consider it cancelled.
Images:
Two Tribes teaser trailer – 2004 – GBA:
Three Tribes – GBA video: