third person shooter

Playstation, Sony

Big Guns (Exodus) [Playstation – Cancelled]

monokoma
27-04-2010
4 Comments

Big Guns (Exodus) is a cancelled shooter / action game that was in development by Neversoft Entertainment in 1996 / 1997. They were able to create a good-looking playable tech demo for this project that was shown to Shiny Entertainment on June 1996 to demonstrate their 3D engine in hopes that Shiny would hire them to develop the MDK Playstation port.

As we can read at the Playstation Museum, a coop mode was also available:

Exodus features a fast and furious two player cooperative play. Two player mode does not suffer from any slowdown as a result of the superior 3D engine. What makes Exodus stand out is that both players can combine their mechs into one larger mech. In transformation mode, player one would control the bottom half of the mech including walking and firing at enemies while player two would control the upper half which allows for 360 degree swivel as well as firing upon enemies.

Shiny was impressed with their technology and Neversoft started to work on the MDK conversion (that used the Big Guns engine), while the Big Guns concept was sold to Sony Computer Entertainment America.

Big Gus was meant to be published by SCEA in 1998, but 1997 was a tumultuous year for Neversoft. The MDK conversion took far longer than expected, and Big Guns, renamed Exodus, went through numerous design changes at the behest of Sony. Somehow Exodus was changed from a mech shooter to an action adventure featuring a cat-girl (sadly, we don’t have any image from this version of the game). The project was doomed and it was eventually cancelled in November 1997.

Neversoft shrunk to just twelve employees. The company then spent the next few months shopping around their technology, meeting with numerous companies and looking for work.

In January 1998, just as Neversoft was about to run out of money, they had a fortunate meeting with Activision who were looking for someone to re-develop Apocalypse, a failed internal project featuring the voice of Bruce Willis. The technology developed for Big Guns turned out to be ideal for the project, Activision wase impressed and Neversoft began work on Apocalypse.

In the end Big Guns / Exodus was never released, but at least its 3D engine was used for 2 other games: MDK and Apocalypse.

Thanks to Userdante and Father PSX for the contributions! Some info are from Wikipedia and The Playstation Museum.

Thanks to Jason for the english corrections!

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Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Star Fox (Starwing) [SNES – Beta]

monokoma
26-04-2010
1 Comment

Star Fox (Starwing in Europe) is a on-rail shooter developed by Argonaut Software and Nintendo EAD, published in 1993 for the Super Nintendo. Argonaut worked closely with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES. They developed a Star Fox prototype on the NES, initially codenamed “NesGlider”, which was inspired by their earlier 8-bit game Starglider, and then ported this prototype to the SNES.

Programmer Jez San told Nintendo that this was as good as it could get unless they were allowed to design custom hardware to make the SNES better at 3D. Nintendo assented to this, and San hired chip designers to make the Super FX chip, the first 3D graphics accelerator in a consumer product. [Info from Wikipedia]

Megalol found some Star Fox beta screens in Nintendo Power magazine from Jan 1993, in which we can notice a completely different (and awesome) beta title screen!

Beta Title:


Final Title:

Originally a sequel titled Star Fox 2 was in the works for the Super Nintendo, but it was never released, though a handful of ROM dumps at various stages of its development were leaked onto the internet.

Thanks to Jason for the english corrections!

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Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Xbox

Untitled Shooter [XBOX/PC – Prototype]

monokoma
09-04-2010
No Comments

This cell-shaded shooter is a prototype that should have been  in development in 2004/2005  by 2015 Inc (?) for PC and Xbox. After working on Men of Valor, it seems that the studio tried to create this new shooter with a less realistic graphic style, but the project was later cancelled for unknown reasons.

Thanks to Han for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Xbox

Crimson Skies [XBOX – Beta]

monokoma
04-04-2010
No Comments

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge is a flight-shooter game developed from 2001 to 2003 by FASA Studio (part of Microsoft Game Studios) for the original Xbox. Series creator Jordan Weisman noted that the game had a “difficult development,” and went through many different creative directions.

When development of Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge was first assumed by FASA Studio, it was conceived that the game be made into an “interactive movie,” a concept that would have involved an elaborate storyline and a large number of cutscenes. This process would have needed a linear mission design, potentially restricting gameplay.

Consequently, developers pushed back the game’s release date by a year in favor of increased development time. At this point, both playtest feedback and inspiration from games that offered more gameplay options helped shape the game’s development. The game’s “interactive movie” concept was scrapped, the storyline simplified, and the original linear mission design was reworked to promote more choice-driven gameplay.

When the game was first announced in 2002, features for the game included destructible environments which could be used to eliminate enemies, hidden areas containing bonus weapons, and “danger zones” similar in function to those featured in the previous Crimson Skies for the PC. Sadly many of these features were scrapped from the final version of the game. [Info from Wikipedia]

As noticed by Xenomrph on the Something Awful Forum, in the original Crimson Skies trailer (embedded below) we can see some removed levels:

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge on the Xbox was going to have a bunch of other levels, and a completely different tutorial level that centered around robbing a flying casino over the ocean off the coast of Louisiana. You can see remnants of it (and other content) in the early trailer. It would have included destructible terrain, different cutscenes, and a bunch of other stuff…. but no online multiplayer.

Crimson Skies became a launch title for Xbox Live, and that involved totally overhauling the game to include Xbox Live multiplayer and cutting a lot of content to make room on the disc.

There’s still some remnants of the old content, though – the game’s dialogue includes references to the casino heist, the music from the above trailer was included on the game’s soundtrack CD (although the music never plays in the game itself), and the game’s tie-in novel ends at the casino heist (which, at the time of the book’s writing, wasn’t cut from the game yet).

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Microsoft, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Project Dagger [PS2 XBOX – Prototype]

U64 Staff & Contributors
26-03-2010
2 Comments

Project Dagger was an internal prototype for a new cooperative action game developed at Digital Illusions (DICE) during 2004/2005. When EA bought the studio, they did not greenlight the title for full production. From the look of the few videos preserved (that are probably target renders), the game was going to be about robbing bank and other criminal affairs, using 4 characters with different abilities. It seems that they wanted to have an online coop mode too.

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