Slashdot Mirror
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.
Not only have I played many games that shouldn't have gone to market, but I've worked on a lot of them that REALLY shouldn't have gone out. Unfortunately, being a lowly game tester, my opinion doesn't seem to matter all that much.
It's a little depressing how little you hear about Duke Nukem Forever these days...
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you google for it you can defintely see hints that it has been released. Nothing definite but then it is an old title and google is infested with crap sites like 1up that push every game title they can find without having any content on their pages. (Wish there was a way to get google to filter its search results but that is another post)
Ah but of course wikipedia comes to the rescue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill seems I played a bootleg version. So anyone else who could have sworn they played a game that was never launched. You ain't hallucinating.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anybody else notice this on the sidebar? X-COM was a great game, but why the fuck would you have played it on the PSX instead on a 486 like it was originally intended?
For info, images, and music: CLICK HERE .
For a torrent of the game's ISO, CLICK HERE
Circumcision is child abuse.
1. Final Fantasy 2(NES JP), 3(NES JP) and 5 (SNES JP). Yes, 2 and 5 were remade for the PS1 and 3 is being remade for the DS, but sans (VERY late) remakes, these games never saw U.S. soil. (Take your pick of reasons for each game ranging from 'too experimental' or 'it was too risky economically'.)
2. The entire Sakura Wars series. Given the sheer number of games and its popularity in Japan, its more or less considered to be a conspiracy as to why the games (or the anime, or the manga or the movies) haven't made it over here.
3. Any musical related game than DDR. (Either guitar, drums, or DJ-styled arcade game systems. Reasons/excuses not to bring it over here galore)
While it wasn't cancelled, Acclaim's The Red Star fell *just* short of making it to market when Acclaim finally closed the doors. It had already been approved by Sony for NTSC and was almost through Microsoft. Acclaim management didn't think the game would come to any notoriety thus nobody in power had any desire to muck about with it in an attempt to attach their name to it, which thankfully left the development team unfettered ability to do as they saw fit. I even have to commend the guys at Archangel for not trying to steer the gameplay design. Though they did throw the occasional fit when a color or shape didn't fit their vision of the license. I'm a rabid shooter fan who worked on it and trust me, rabid shooter fans everywhere were denied a pretty good game.
I heard the comic guys who held the Red Star license were shopping it around, but I never heard of any publisher taking interest in it. I noticed it was conspicuously absent from the list of Acclaim properties up for sale, I guess because of the licensing issues.
There are supposedly some fairly close-to-final ROMS of the XBox build out there, I highly recommend it if you're into shooters or brawlers.
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).
The ______ Agenda