Slashdot Mirror
Vapor Trails - On Famously Unreleased Videogames
Thanks to GamePro for its article discussing formerly in-development videogames which never actually got released. Some of the more unconventional include Data East's Tattoo Assassins ("2D video-captured fighters, whose tattoos come to life and whack on other players. Characters included a Nancy Kerrigan clone and a giant running hot dog"), Sega's Virtua Hamster ("...[involving] polygonal rodents with rocket packs and skateboards swooshing through a huge hamster habitrail, collecting popcorn kernels to spit at enemies"), and Runandgun!'s partially resurrected Duelin' Firemen! ("...[an FMV] game about singing, dancing firemen [starring Rudy Ray Moore].")
I think anything 3D Realms announces doesn't come out. Duke is an obvious choice but let's not forget Prey either...
But once it comes out, rest assured I will be playing it on my Glaze3D chip. Maybe they'll even port it to the Phantom!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
...is actually available as a MAME ROM now.
I would love to know what they were smoking when they thought of that!
:"uugh I dunno dude" :"Hamsters man, just think about it dude.." :"crazeeee man"
Stoned Developer 1 : "uugh dude, (takes a deep puff..) do you know what there isn't enough of in games to day?"
Stoned Developer 2
Stoned Developer 1
Stoned Developer 2
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
That's such a funny idea. I would have loved to see that.
Reminds me of "Battle Hamster" http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3403
go for the eyes boo, GO FOR THE EYES!
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
DNF!
It is about this dude who kills aliens and is in search for the perfect boobs.
What sick twisted mind came up with this?
Just watch the video...
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Why not list Half-Life for Dreamcast or Macintosh? What about Thrill Kill for PS1?
(Okay, Thrill Kill made it out in various forms - I still have my copy - but it wasn't ever "officially" released.)
Actually those two were mentioned in the print version of this article in their latest issue.
Malice was one of the titles used to show of the power of the XBox before it was released . If you paid attention to the XBox hype, chances are you saw some Malic screenshots.
It was widely expected to be a release title in fact. But here 3+ years latter, no release date ia availibe, the Official webpage no longer exists, and we've heard nothing from Argonaut Games in the last year or so.
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans. It was to be Blizzard's first adventure game, but was cancelled as a nearly complete game. Oh well, at least the story is now available as a novel. And it is part of WarCraft official cannon, as it plays into the setup of WarCraft III.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
Most games were shelved for a good reason. I would consider the terrible lateness of the Mac version and the low US sales of the Dreamcast a good reason to shelve Half-Life. Thrill Kill, while fun for about 5 minutes, was a hollow, repetitive game that despite its legendary status wasn't up to snuff (no pun intended). Plus with only 8 characters, you were guaranteed repeats by the 3rd level. Doing a wu-tang sellout was a good use of the engine.
Most game projects get shelved... The reaches development vs released ratio is something between two to one and four to one. Nearly all of those are for quality reasons. Why would someone shelve a game that is going to be good, disheartening your employees and wasting your investment?
The ______ Agenda
Don't forget about the ill-fated Fallout 3...t ml 6 20.html
http://www.petitiononline.com/fallout3/petition.h
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/fallout3/news_6085
and XCom, I don't know how many times this project has been canned and then resurected again 2 years later...
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~xcom/x6x1.shtml
http://dynamic.gamespy.com/~xcom/x8x1.shtml
These are the two biggies for me...
Half Life for the Dreamcast was released - well, okay, leaked. It is fully playable - but the controls are a bit wonky. It's posted from time to time in alt.binaries.dreamcast
Check out . They are doing something similar to this and finding the people who worked on some of these abandoned projects and finding out what happened from the inside.
Malice did look cool. And being supposedly voice by Gwen Stefani also seemed cool.
Unfortunately, it was delayed one too many times and then thrown into the scrap-heap.
Argonaut Games made I-ninja, so they're still around.
FUNK!
If I had to pick one piece of vaporware I'd want to be able to play, this would be it. It was a bunch of screwed-up mini-games, including this one where you have to drive from somewhere to Las Vegas in a tour bus. I remember reading a preview for it in Video Games (aka the best gaming mag ever); a couple of the staff members actually took turns playing the tour bus game for like eight hours before they accidentally wrecked and ruined all their "progress."
Rob
This month's GamePro has this article with different games including Half-Life and Thrill Kill, who's engine was later used for the Wu-Tang fighter.
The ROMs are out there, it's just a matter of getting them leaked.
Journal
Wheres Duke Nukem Forever?
...and we've heard nothing from Argonaut Games in the last year or so.
:D)
I am not so sure about that...
(The new screenshots show off the game looking much better than it has otherwise recently looked. I make no claims whether the game will actually not suck, though.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Yeah well, I'm gonna make my own video game.....
with blackjack, and hookers! In fact, forget the video game.
music lover since 1969
It was dropped by the orignal publisher, but was picked up earlier this year. Todays Eurogamer says March.
Damn Rush fans always getting into everything!
Polybius is one game that I've always wanted to see surface some day... any game that was written by the military/CIA/(insert conspiracy theory here) and can give people amnesia and horrible nightmares has got to be one hell of a game!!
Sadly, I think it's actually been proven to be a hoax.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
I seem to remember reading about this great game for the NES called Doki Doki Panic... Man I wonder whatever happend to that game?
Too bad the world will never see Full Throttle 2. Lucasarts axed it because it did not meet their high quality standards. Also, the actor who voiced the protagonist Ben passed away a year or two ago. Shame. The original was a cool, cool game.
Thrill Kill was not waporware proper. It was finished modulo some touch-up, but it seems it was a bit too much for Virgin (IIRC), who buried it rather than release it. Some copies had gotten to journalists, however, and I got to play it with my friends.
It was a S&M-themed fighter for the Playstation, with funny characters like a madman in a straitjacket, a midget on stilts, a surgeon with scalpels and a nurse with a stungun. The fighting bodies locked quite nicely, and fatalities usually involved beheading. Nothing too bad, really, maybe 18-rated but more funny than disturbing.
Of course, funny is in the eye of the beholder.
http://barrapunto.com/ - News for nerds, en español
Relativly new vaporware. Square Enix had trademark registration for the title, but that registration has recently expired. I read an article at RPGamer that stated Square Enix staff said that the company is no longer persuing the title.
l
They probably never started development. Too bad, I'd have liked to see it.
http://www.rpgamer.com/news/Q1-2004/011304a.htm
When Squaresoft trademarked the name Chrono Break in December of 2001, many Chrono Trigger fans became hopeful for the release of a third game in the beloved series. For the past two years, rumors and speculation have run rampant across the internet, raising hopes and creating dreams. This optimism persisted in spite of the fact that Unlimited SaGa, a name that was trademarked at the same time, became an actual game, while Chrono Break remained nothing more than a mysterious moniker.
That has come to an end. Various sources report that Square Enix abandoned its trademark on the Chrono Break name as early as last November. Furthermore, sources at Square Enix assert that the company has never begun work on a third installment of the Chrono series.
Now wait a minute. I live in the US, I own this game (cart, box, and manual), and I certainly didn't import it from Columbia. It most definitely did get some form of release. Too bad I forget where I got it. Hmm...rental release sold by Blockbuster perhaps?
This space flight combat sim set in the B5-universe was cancelled by Sierra. The company (once again) chickened out, fearing that both the genre and the franchise would be catering to too limited an audience.
Reportedly, the game was in very advanced stages of development when it was axed.
Fortunately, fans of both Babylon 5 and the space flight combat sim genre have received quite a treat last Christmas, when an indepedent group released the prequel campaign of the B5 space flight combat sim "I've Found Her" as freeware (as in Beer) for everyone to download.
A bittorrent link can be found somewhere on the official site:
http://ifh.firstones.org
I don't know about the others here, but everything about the game (gameplay, atmosphere, graphics, sound, music, detailed trueness to the B5-universe) blows me away. What particularly amazes me is the fact that the game seems so polished that it is hard to believe that this game was the fruit of an (initially) grass-roots effort. Even if Sierra had released ITF, it would be highly doubtful if the quality would be even equal to IFH.
Therefore, it might even be somewhat comforting that Sierra's game was never released: after all, its cancellation was apparently the driving force behind this IFH project initiative.
However, I can't stand the fact that the filming of the cutscenes for Sierra's ITF (involving quite a few actors from the original B5 cast) was all wrapped up when Sierra axed the official game, meaning that unused B5 footage must still be gathering dust somewhere within Sierra's archives unused, and that it will probably never be seen by anyone outside Sierra.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
It should be:
;)
http://ifh.firstones.com
Sorry.
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"