Microsoft

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows [XBOX/PS2 – Proto / Beta]

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows was the latest game from the Gauntlet hack & slash / RPG series. It was developed by Midway’s San Diego, at the beginning with the help of John Romero and Josh Sawyer, but they were later removed from the project. The original prototype of this new Gauntlet had some big differences from the final version: even the original story mode was cut. The two characters created by Romero and Sawyer,Lancer and Tragedian , were completely dropped from the game.

Part of the original, M-rated storyline would had seen the Flesh-Eater’s leader, Veledia and their struggle against the Aesatae and Morbus, while Madoc (the Wizard), would had to find out that his captured daughter was tied to a stone, raped and then killed.

The initial Gauntlet proto had a random dungeons generator with various modular tile types and a final arena for the bosses, but in the end they decided to scrap it and use linear levels.

Images:

Videos:

 

Earl the Frog [X360 – Cancelled]

Earl the Frog (later called “Max the Frog”) was an Xbox Live Arcade puzzle / action game that was in development in 2007 at Gamesmith. After a few months of thinking the team decided to go for a very easy and user-friendly gameplay.

The scenario came out of thinking about how to get into the female target-group. They thought about a princess.. and what does every princess need? A frog. And what does a frog need to do? Eeat of course. So they created the first concept for the game, in which a frog had to tidy up the place from flies to being able to survive until his princess finds him one day.

Around 1500 working hours of discussion, design & programming went into the project before its cancellation, as Microsoft was not interested to release it on XBLA. If you have access to an XNA Creators club membership, you can donwload a demo of Max The Frog from here, to play Max The Frog on your XBOX 360!

Thanks to Marc Bosch for the contribution!

Images:

Video:

 

Time Splitters 4 [Cancelled – Xbox 360 / PS3]

Time Splitters 4 was the fourth installment of the FPS series developed by Free Radical Design. Sadly Free Radical “shut down” on December 18 2008. It was later confirmed that the company had gone into administration, leaving 40 of the original 185 staff still employed, but the future of Time Splitters 4 has become uncertain and maybe it will never be finished and released. The studio was bought by Crytek, the developers behind the Crysis series and Free Radical have changed their name to Crytek UK. It’s currently unknow if TS4 could ever be finished and released by Crytek. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Images:

Videos: