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Three Games That Didn't Make It
1up.com has a feature about three games with potential that never made it onto store shelves. From the article: "We look back at three games that died so young they never even made it out: They were cancelled before they could land on store shelves. Did gamers lose out on a great experience, or was it a lucky break for their unsuspecting wallets?" I played Thrill Kill for about five minutes at the 1998 GenCon, because I was working a booth two booths down. It was umm... bad. Games that don't make it to market, probably shouldn't.
anyone who says Thrill Kill was a bad game needs to dig up a copy of Criticom for the Saturn. Now _there_ was a terrible game. But as for the first 4 player fighter? Sorry Yuu Yuu Hakusho: Makyo Toitsusen did it years ago on the Sega Genesis (and did a damn fine job, pitty we never got it, damn licensing *grumble*grumble*). And Street Racer ripped off Mario Kart long before mega man did.
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Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm pretty sure that the engine for Thrill Kill was actually used later to make the first Wu Tang Clan fighting game. Yep, as this link puts it so well, "With a different fighting engine behind it, this could have been a much, much better game."
As far as I was ever concerned, this was one of the worst games to be squashed. There was this mythos that surrounded it as the most violent, bloody game ever, but not only was the gore way over-hyped, but the game itself was absolutely horrible. I'm sure this is why the blood and violence was added in the first place, to distract from the atrocity that was the rest of the game.
Final Fantasy 2 was 100% translated (though unedited) when the plug was pulled on a US release.
Back in the day the Thrill Kill ISO was pretty widely available... one of the testers leaked the ISO onto FTP sites and the nanocent P2P networks. You can still find it if you are interested, though it has become a bit more rare. It isn't bootleg, it's a leak.
Thrill Kill had a few interesting things about it. For one, you didn't have a health meter that went down. You had a carnage meter that went up. When you were fully carnaged, you could do a move that would kill off one of the other players. This lead to interesting situations where everyone is huddled in a corner trying to avoid the inevitable. It's the only fighting game I've ever played that had a special move of "put the other guy in front of you." There were also some unique moves... not having contortionists or midgets on stilts as staples in games, the developers could afford to get a little creative with character attacks. And being pre-GTAIII, it bled of a style that was lacking at the time. After the Night Trap debackle, nobody else seemed willing to reach out and make a game that pushed the boundaries of taste.
Unfortunately, it also pushed the playstation farther than it was capable of going. The fighting felt very, very loose, and the entire thing ran at about 20 FPS at best. Also, fighting with 4 people got quite "dirty," as you might be attacking someone while someone attacks you who is getting attacked by someone else. As the game was combo-centric, and this ended combos, making the experience quite frustrating. Further wearing down the gameplay was the repetition of enemies in the single player mode. With three other characters in every battle, you ran through the full roster of the game in about two and a half fights. The developers didn't throw in any variants like 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v1, etc, so the fighting was all vanilla. The arenas didn't help reduce the sense of repetition, as while they had some degree of variability in set pieces, they were all perfectly square of exactly the same dimensions and they all played identically.
I have to say: I was into the whole "let's make the least tasteful game possible" thing. The playstation wasn't the right platform for it, and there needed to be a second generation of gameplay, but it had potential and opened the door for later multiplayer fighters who could avoid all of Thrill Kill's mistakes.
BTW, Thrill Kill is probably the only properly dead game on the list. Earthbound 0 and Mega Man B&C both saw overseas releases, and both have retro-pack releases coming up in the US. It's too bad they didn't list out more interesting titles that were actively canned before production was up, such as Secret of Mana for the SNES CD and Sonic the Hedgehog 32X (and about a million other games... 3/4ths of all games never get released).
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