Beta + Cancelled Action Adventure Video Games - Page 74 of 75

ShadowMan is an action adventure game developed by Acclaim Studios Teesside and published by Acclaim Entertainment. It was designed by Guy Miller and Simon Phipps. It is loosely based on the Shadowman comic book series published by Valiant Comics and was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64, Sony PlayStation, Sega Dreamcast and PC. [Info from Wikipedia]

In the gallery below you can see a series of beta screenshots from a very early version of the game: the 3D model of the main character was still incomplete and different from its final one, the tree looked nothing like the final ones and even the scenario shown in these images seems to have been removed or changed in the released game. Probably Acclaim worked a lot on the game, to create a title that was really good for its time.

Below you can also see a video from a leaked early beta demo of ShadowMan:

For anyone interested here’s a very early shadowman demo from 1997, its really basic, has differerent models/ sounds to the game. If you burn it to a disc and run it you get to here the ingame audio,
* To start press space on title page
* space to jump cursers to move
* W – wireframe on/off
* H – get lighter
* Y – get darker
* R – respawn
* F6 – free cam on
* F5 – Free cam off
* esc – to quit
for best results burn it to a CD and run it from there

Credit to the following pages:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/15818496890/
There you can find some of the original developers of the pc game, as Tim Haywood (composer of the awesome music of the game) and Trevor Storey (game designer)

http://shadowman.freeforums.org/index.php
It´s a forum create by Tim Haywood, good things in there.

As BO3000B wrote as a comment to the beta video on Youtube:

I just recently played through it and don’t really recognize anything in this video. Louisiana is the only part that looks vaguely like the final game. This must’ve been really early in development.

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Dead Ahead [N64 – Cancelled]

monokoma

04-04-2008

2 Comments

“The Dead Ahead project was a very unsual one. The game was being funded by Tomei, but there was also a middle company; Optical Entertainment who was also involved. Optical were designing the game for Tomei and Software Creations were chosen by Tomei (Tomy) to develop it. It was a very ambitious design which included free roaming in large environments, fighting, vehicle use and puzzle solving. One of the intentions of the game was to, at some point, create Toys based on the main characters. I was responsible for managing the team developing the game. Even before production started, this was already known as the “hot-potatoe” project that nobody wanted to do. Myself and the team made a good account of ourselves, but the game was never finished.” – Haydn

Thanks to Haydn Dalton for the great contribution!

Thanks a lot to Gilgalegrouik for some of these images!

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD, Others, PC / MAC

Attack! (DMA Design) [PC, N64 – Cancelled]

monokoma

04-04-2008

2 Comments

Attack! was an action game developed by DMA Design (the same software house responsible for Body Harvest and Silicon Valley) that was officially announced in april 1999. It was described as a Spiritual successor to Lemmings and gaming magazine at the time wrote that it was planned for PC, Playstation and N64. Edge saw design sketches littering walls of DMA HQ during a visit. Game was described as “Millwall supporters let loose in Jurassic Park’ and set to feature a range of diminutive dino’s.” It seems, however, that the game was going to be released only for the pc.

Mike Dailly that worked at DMA, wrote:

“Well, Attack was never for the N64, it was a PC only (at the time) title and was canned well before other ports were started or even considered.”

There is virtually no information about it, and the only images that we have are some artworks. Judging from these few pics that we managed to recover, Attack was set in the prehistory, and the protagonist was going to be a caveman. According to some rumors, the main character was able to tame the various creatures and use them to advance in the game. The project was potentially very interesting: the titles that DMA developed for the nintendo 64 had many innovative features that were later used as the foundations for some successiful titles. In the autumn of 1999, DMA Design was acquired by Rockstar and renamed Rockstar North, the team that two years later created GTA III.

[English translation by yota]

Thanks a lot to Gilgalegrouik for some of these images and to Ross Sillifant for the contribution!

Some images from www.flickr.com/photos/mikedailly/sets/

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Spooky [N64 – Cancelled]

yota

04-04-2008

1 Comment

Spooky is a cancelled action game that was in development by ICE (International Computer Entertainment), shown for the first time in October 1997, but later vanished without any official statement. The gameplay was going to be somehow similar to Freak Boy, another unreleased Nintendo 64 game. The player would had to save a bizarre alien world, from the menace of the “ArchMorph”, an evil alien race survived after a major disaster. The screenshots in the gallery below seem to be taken from a target render, as the graphic looked a bit too much nice for a N64 title.

As in Freak Boy, the protagonist would have been able to mutate into three different forms, to resolve puzzles and to fight better. In the game’s levels we had to collect 30 pieces of a mirror, to be able to “absorb” the evil Arch-Morph, transform into it and be able to win the fight. Sadly Spooky was never finished, probably because ICE never found a publisher interested in the project and the N64 software market was in serious decline at the time.

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Hybrid Heaven [N64 – Beta / Tech Demo]

monokoma

03-04-2008

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Konami was one of the first software houses to announce full support for the Nintendo 64, after the happy and profitable experience with the SNES. In addition to Castlevania 64, one of the first games announced for the console was Hybrid Heaven, a strange cross-game between Turn-based RPG, action, adventure and fighting, that promised an open ended gameplay.

In the early images and videos released, the project had an incredible graphic for its time, much more definited than the one in the final version. When Hybrid Heaven was finally released after many delays, players found themselves in front of a very different game, graphically poor and with a linear gameplay.

Probably the early media released were just Concept Renders and when Konami started to create the game on the real N64 hardware, they found out that it was impossible to reach such level of details. We dont know exactly how many parts were removed (some places and characters seen in the concept renders were not in the final game), but we can speculate that the developers had to heavily cut the project, because their original concept was too ambitious for its time.

[spoiler /Clicca qui per la versione in Italiano/ /Nascondi la versione in Italiano/]La Konami fu una delle primissime Software House ad annunciare il pieno supporto alla nuova macchina a 64 Bit di casa Nintendo, dopo le felici e redditizie esperienze con lo SNES. Oltre al precedente Castlevania 64, uno dei primi giochi annunciati fu questo Hybrid Heaven, strano incrocio fra RPG a turni, azione, esplorazione e picchiaduro. Dalle primissime immagini il titolo faceva graficamente paura e sembrava avere tutte le potenzialità per divenire l’ennesima Killer Application per l’N64. Eppure, quando il gioco finalmente venne completato dopo anni di ritardi, i giocatori si trovarono davanti un prodotto molto diverso, graficamente povero e dalla giocabilità fin troppo lineare. Del progetto originale probabilmente si era salvato ben poco.[/spoiler]

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