Steam [PC – Cancelled]

Developed by Reflection Interactive ( best known for its Driver series ), Steam is a cancelled 3D, third person adventure with a gothic flavour. Scheduled to appear in ’99 on PC the game never reached the stores shelves maybe because their parent company, GT Interactive, was acquired by Infogrames in that same year.

Scans from Next Generation issue 51.

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Jak 3 [Beta – PS2]

Jak 3 is an action game developed by Naughty Dog as the third game in the main Jak and Daxter series, published in 2004 for the PlayStation 2. As we can read on Wikipedia, Jak 3 was first revealed to be in the works by one of Superplay’s writers on January 8, 2004. While browsing the Naughty Dog offices, he saw early work being done with desert environments.

Below you can see a video of a Jak 3 beta dated 24-28 August and about 70% complete, thanks to BamzookiMan130.

  • Most maps lack borders, such as water or walls.
  • Crates are missing from the game.
  • Health bar for vehicles.
  • Different noises for collecting items.
  • Different shooting noises for the desert drones.
  • The Wasteland map is vastly different.
  • NPC’s seem to be missing from Haven City.
  • The KGB Blast Bot seems to rarely take damage.
  • The voicing in the game seems to be unfinished/not started on.
  • The Armor of Mar is unused.
  • The Jak 2 health bar is used, and even though it is used in the trailer, there seems to be no way to check how much Light Eco you have.
  • When Jak changes from the Scatter Gun to the Plasmite RPG, the diagram of the gun doesn’t change.
  • There is no appearance of the Dark Mod for the Blaster in the trailer, hinting that one of more variants of it were unfinished.

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Kinect Sports [Prototype / Concept – Xbox 360]

Kinect Sports (codenamed Natal Sports) was Rare Ltd. first Kinect title. Development started in late 2008 and fully started in early 2009 when the studio was restructured to fully focus on Kinect Software. It was Rare’s second try to produce a sports title on Xbox 360, their first attempt used an unreleased motion controller, similar to the Wii Remote, which remained unpublished.

Thanks to Moren for the contribution!

Storyboards:

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Joe & Mac [MegaDrive Genesis – Beta / Cancelled?]

Joe & Mac is a platform game originally released in 1991 for the arcades by Data East. It was later ported for various consoles, as the SNES and Mega Drive / Genesis. Rod_Wod sent us some screens from a version of Joe & Mac for the Mega Drive / Genesis that seems to be different from the released one (a simple port of the Arcade version).

For example the background of this boss from the magazine scan:

Looks different from the one in the final game:

Could those screens in the magazine be from a beta version, or a different / cancelled Joe & Mac? We have not finished the final game, so we are not sure. If you have finished Joe & Mac and recognize those images, please let us know!

Thanks to Rod_Wod for the contribution!

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Mother (Earthbound) [Beta – NES / Famicom]

Mother (aka Earth Bound) is a RPG developed by Nintendo Tokyo Research and Development Products in cooperation with Ape, published only in Japan for the Famicom in 1989. Thanks to OKeijiDragon and GlitterBerri, we are able to have a look at an old beta video, in wich we can notice many little differences in the beta version of Mother.

Originally found on Nico Nico Douga titled, ファミマガ Video 【 1989年 5月号 (2/2) 】 (literally Famimaga Video May 1989), I stumbled upon this interesting Mother footage while searching for media on Mother 3 for Shat-Canned Legends. Same as the SMB3 footage.

The video shows the various differences of this prerelease version to the final version that my annotations go over. While there isn’t anything hugely major to show, the path from Ninten’s house looks to be mirrored, some game menu details are different, and the O on 0:07 is at the lower right corner of the title!

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