A few months before the release of the original Wonderswan (March 4, 1999) french magazine PlayerOne issue 92 had a small article about the new platform in which it was shown an image about a mysterious vertical shooter. Overall Wonderswan (and future revision) only had an handful of shmups (Space Invader, SD Gundam Operation U.C., Project E-Force, Judgement Silversword, Cardinal Sins and Run=Dim) and none of them looks like the game shown before the launch.
If you have more info about this project please let us know!
Shin’en Multimedia was founded in 1999 by coders from the Amiga demoscene. Manfred Linzner, one of the founders, always had the desire to develop an horizontal shoot-em-up for the beloved Amiga computer but after just programming one stage the project was abandoned. When the Munich based developer decided to focus to the Game Boy Color the idea of creating a shooter was still alive and they started work on it. According to developer, Iridion was a horizontally scrolling shooter that pushed the Game Boy Color’s hardware to the maximum with never-before-seen (on the Game Boy) graphical effects. With the help of its proprietary graphics, coding and music tools, Shin’en was promising some impressive technical feats, like 128 colors simultaneously on screen, smooth two-way parallax scrolling, multi-color overlay-sprites, 3D-rendered animation sequences and more elaborate music pieces than most other Game Boy titles. The game was planned to have 8 stages, 9 bosses and 12 weapons to dispose the enemies with. Anyway, after just an excellent one level demo, Shin’en, recognizing that original GBC games were almost impossible to market, dropped this project as well.
When Shin’en shifted their focus to the Game Boy Advance, Iridion was their first game to appear on the “new” system. Iridion 3D was then released in 2001 for the GBA with commercial success and thus began Shin’en technical excellency on Nintendo platforms that continues to this days with the recently released Nano Assault for Nintendo 3DS.
Aeon-Metal Fighters is an unreleased shoot ’em up that was in development by Dune team for the Gameboy Color. The project was started around 2001, all the graphics and musics are done, the code is about 70 percent finished, the main big task Dune left unfinished was the level design. The game has been frozen because of the lack of interest of publishers and the programmer had to left the project because of that. Aeon-Metal Fighters could be finished at some point if Dune ever manage to find the ressources (mainly coding) to complete it.
Aeon-Metal Fighters has 6 worlds of shooting madness packed with action and baddies, 3 unique characters with their own storyline, evil bosses and great musics from a chiptune legend (dma-sc).
In 2001 legendary programmer Manfred Trenz (idea, design, program, graphics), Andreas Escher (design, graphics) and Tufan Uysal (sound effects & music) completed a sequel to the old Katakis C64 shooter for Game Boy Color. Contrary to the original game (an horizontal scrolling shooter) Katakis 3D adopted a forward-scrolling perspective akin to Star Fox or Iridion 3D thus the “3D” suffix.
Development took 5 months that sadly were unfruitful because the completed project couldn’t find a publisher interested to shipping it so from 2001 the game gather dust in a safe. Quite unfortunate cause it would have been very interesting to witness what Manfred Trenz amazing low level programming skills could have produced on the weak Game Boy Color hardware.
Zzyorxx II is a cancelled shoot ’em up that was in development by Virtual Xperience for Jaguar. The game run at 60 fps and had planned 5 different ages to go through from Prehistory to Star Wars ( passing through Middle Ages and First World War ). As Rodolphe Czuba , programmer at Virtual Xperience, recalled over at MyAtari.net
Two more games were in development:
Zzyorxx, a great shoot-’em-up!
Indy Jag, a platform game.
The first was stopped two months before the end of the development by my managing associate at VX! A real shame. Only some graphics were done for Indy Jag, a concept like a humorous Indiana Jones with a jaguar figure.
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