Spider [PSX – Beta]

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Spider: The Video Game (or just simply Spider in Europe) is a game developed by Boss Game Studios and available on the PlayStation platform. The game was published by Eidos Interactive, publishers perhaps most famous for the Tomb Raider series. Upon its release the game seemed to fly under the radar, and received limited critical response. The game is now particularly difficult to attain, and has become somewhat of a rarity. [Info from Wikipedia] In an old preview for the game, we can see that Spider was referred as 

Amped 4 [X360/PS3 – Cancelled]

Amped was once a highly successful snowboarding series. After releasing Amped 3 in late 2005, developer Indie Built was busily working on Amped 4 and Links 2007. Both games were cancelled when the studio was closed in April 2006.

While the Amped series was formerly exclusive to Microsoft consoles, Amped 4 was going to be published on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Major additions included a resort community and technical improvements.

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Shadowrun: the Awakening [X360 – Cancelled]

Shadowrun: the Awakening is a cancelled game in the Shadowrun series of RPGs, that was in development by FASA Studios for the Xbox 360 and PC, before the released Shadowrun 2007. This unreleased version had a full single player mode and FASA worked on their own 3D engine for the project. Sometime later, the art director was changed for unknown reasons and they scrapped “The Awakening” project to work on the new Shadowrun, that became a multiplayer only title. It’s currently unknown why this version was completely canned with the change of director or why the single player mode was removed from Shadowrun 2007. We can speculate that some problems in the development and management of the original Shadowrun: The Awakening project lead to the decision to create a “simpler” FPS, based around the online multiplayer.

It’s interesting to notice that initial gameplay prototyping of the new multiplayer-only Shadowrun was done using the HALO engine. Check the Shadowrun-Halo prototype page for some screens.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Mortal Kombat Trilogy [Beta]

Wikipedia has some information about the beta version of MKT:

Top left: An UMK3-style menu.

Top right: An early version of the character selection screen. The screen used the UMK3 character selection screen as base, and Rain’s and Noob Saibot’s portraits are replaced by a pallete swapped version of Sub-Zero’s MKII portrait (Rain), and Reptile’s MKII portrait (Noob). Johnny Cage is not present.

Bottom left: Scorpion beats Smoke in the Portal arena. Note that Scorpion’s life bar text is different to Smoke’s life bar text (UMK3 Saturn, and later, MKT N64 didn’t remove this.) Also, the lightning all the way in the back of the Portal is viewed, but the PSX, PC, and Saturn version scrapped that. Only the N64 used it. And, the floor of the stage is crooked.

Bottom right: Baraka beats Raiden.

Originally there was another Logo they used but then replaced it with the current one. It had pieces of all the mortal kombat games before MKT.

More on Johnny Cage: He was the only character that wasn’t going to appear in MKT. The actor that did his MOCAP in MK2 was fired for advertising with another company, using his role as Johnny Cage. Midway then decided to use another actor for Johnny Cage, which would make him the only character in MKT to use new sprites.

At first there were only to be 29 characters and 26 backgrounds. In the end there were 30 characters and 29 backgrounds for the N64. More for the other systems, however.

Also, Rain was originally supposed to be a character called Tremor. In earlier versions of the game, Tremors bio would show from some sort of glitch only with Rains name.

His bio was:

Rain is an assassin working freelance. He was once a member of the Lin Kuei along with Sub-Zero, but left the clan under mysterious circumstances. Years later, Rain is found working for Shao Kahn as an assassin in the Outworld. Born a human, he finds himself questioning his loyalty towards Kahn after watching the invasion of Earth.

Thanks to Zero7 and Sir_Brando for the contributions!

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