As we can read on Wikipedia, Super Turrican was developed by Factor 5 and published by Seika for the Super Nintendo. Factor 5’s Super Turrican plays similarly to Mega Turrican and shares a similar visual style, but the game has a different set of levels and features a freeze beam in place of the original lightning whip. DEC noticed some reference about the beta version of Super Turrican on the Factor 5 web site (http://www.factor5.de/secrets
Star Wars: Battlefront [Beta – Xbox / PS2 / PC]
Star Wars: Battlefront is an action game developed by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts, and released on September 2004 for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. Development for Star Wars Battlefront began at Pandemic Studios in 2002. Greg Burrod, executive producer on Battlefront stated “We wanted to create an online shooter title for the Xbox, PS2, and PC which would allow for team strategy and would feature battles and worlds from every one of the six Star Wars films.”
A beta version of Battlefront was released as an extras DVD for one of the trilogy sets. It’s quite interesting and has a lot of ideas that were not in the final version. The build date is February 03 2004, 8 months before the final version was released. Also, the HUD was different and the graphic was still unfinished.
Stranno posted a video and some comparison-screens between the beta and the final version on the Assembler Games Forum!
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Jackal [Wii – Prototype]
In 2009, images about an undisclosed project for Wii appeared on 3d artist Eric Testroete’ site. The pictures resemble very closely a 3d rendition of Konami old military game Jackal released in 1986 in the arcades. In light of Konami revival of its older franchises on Wii under the Rebirth brand-name ( Contra, Castlevania, Gradius ) a new Jackal could have been in the card. Too bad it seems the project never went further than that working prototype.
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Vampire Circus [N64 – Prototype]
Vampire Circus was a Gauntlet-like type of game full of vampires and zombies planned for Nintendo 64 by Zed Two who started working on it in 1996. The game was designed so that you controlled just a single character out of the five in the party, and the others would be under AI control, although you could switch which of the five you were controlling. Each had different skills and abilities, so there was good reason to swap your control between different characters, and it was also possible to lose members of your party to the vampire hoard, so you could only control members of the party that remained alive.
Zed Two got quite far with a playable prototype but when Infogrames took over Ocean, who originally struck a two games deal with the developer (the other one was Wetrix), they forced the team to work with Warner Bros properties they just bought at a great expense. The promising project was thus morphed into the less ambitious Taz Express.
All information and artworks are courtesy of Pickford Bros official website.
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