Car Battle

Worms Battle Rally [PS2 XBOX GC – Cancelled]

Worms Battle Rally is a cancelled racing / battle game similar to Mario Kart, that was in development by Team 17 in 2003 / 2004, probably planned for the Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube. We can speculate that the gameplay was going to be similar to MK’s battle mode, at least from what we can see from the few screenshots preserved below, thanks to www.dream17.info.

Production on WBR was halted as part of the developer/publisher deal which resulted in Worms Forts: Under Siege.

Thanks to whitestrider for the contribution!

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Twisted Metal Black [PS2 – Unused Stuff]

As Cyrax151 has made us to notice and as we can see in the Youtube Channel of Gutmanship, if you pop the Twisted Metal Black PAL disc in your PC and try to check the “MOV” folder, you can find some small video-files (less than 1 second) that when converted to .wmv format show a series of unused character intros. These are similar to the ones that are used for the playable characters in the game, but we can even find one for Warhawk, the final boss that is not usable by the player: is it possible that Warhack was meant to be playable originally?

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Retro Studios Football [GameCube – Tech Demo / Cancelled]

NFL Retro Football, also known as ‘Retro Studios Football’ was a cancelled sports game by Retro Studios, the developers responsible for the Metroid Prime series. It was being developed for Nintendo Gamecube from 1998-2000.

Retro Studios struggled in its early years, dealing with several cancelled projects and lay-offs. In 2000, Nintendo offered the company the license to the long-dormant Metroid franchise which proved to be a turning point for the company. One of the GameCube games that were cancelled to concentrate  the team on the development of Metroid Prime, was this NFL Retro Football, that was basically a traditional football game with impressive graphic and animations for its time (and a rumored create-a-player mode).

mario football retro studios gamecube

Initially, this project was meant to be a Mario Football game,  but Nintendo wanted Retro to create more “mature” titles (that’s why they created the team) so it soon became a realistic / real world sport game. The concept above was not created by Retro Studios, it was just a drawing done by OptimalProtocol for an N-Sider article, to show what the game could have looked like.

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Raven Blade [GC – Cancelled]

Raven Blade was a game in development by Retro Studios for the Nintendo GameCube. It was due to be released world-wide but was later cancelled during development to free up resources for Metroid Prime. Slow development and the offer of developing the next Metroid game were the main reasons of cancellation. The models of Raven Blade backgrounds and creatures were good, but the textures were incomplete. Nintendo noticed their (tentative title) “Action-Adventure” project with a female main character and took the opportunity to ask Retro Studios to make Metroid Prime. Raven Blade, Action-Adventure, NFL Retro Football and Car Combat were all cancelled to work on the new game. – [info from Wikipedia]

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Some screenshots & artwork are from www.n-sider.com

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Thunder Rally Car Battle [GC Retrostudios – Cancelled]

Thunder Rally, aslo know as “Car Battle” or “Car Combat”, was going to be a.. car combat game, similar to Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8. This was one of the first Retro Studios projects, from when the GameCube was still know as “Dolphin”. Retro Studios was probably the first software house to start to work on GameCube games, as Nintendo “assembled” the Retro team in 1998 just for this purpose. Initially Retro had various projects in development, as this one, Raven Blade (Runeblade), Retro Football and an action adventure game that later was changed to Metroid Prime. Sadly the team was badly organized and there were no real progesses on any of those games. Nintendo then decided to take on the situation, lay off some of the developers and cancell most of the Retro Studios projects, to let them to concentrate only on Metroid Prime. Noone ever seen Thunder Rally again after Nintendo’s wrath.

italian_flag.jpg [spoiler /Clicca qui per la versione in Italiano/ /Nascondi la versione in Italiano/]Questo progetto appartiene al periodo buio dei Retro Studios, un periodo composto da licenziamenti, rumor poco confortanti, giochi cancellati, e tante altre pessime notizie che se sommate tra loro fornivano una panoramica piuttosto desolante, tanto che i dubbi sulla futura qualità di Metroid Prime erano tanti e legittimi. Fortunatamente Retro è riuscita a zittire tutti, fatto sta che questo TRC, assieme a Football 2002 e Raven Blade, rimane emblematico della pessima situazione in cui si trovava questa talentuosa società prima di mettersi a lavorare duramente. Il gioco doveva essere una specie di Twisted Metal / Vigilante 8, modalità multiplayer compresa. [/spoiler]

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