Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer is a lesser-known 3D platformer on the PS2. Much like its brethren from the genre, Brave received minimal attention, which led to the game slipping under the radar for many players. Seeing as how the game didn’t fare well critically, the game ended up selling poorly. Such poor performance was the last straw for Vis Entertainment’s business operation.
It wasn’t until a few years later that SouthPeak Games purchased the rights of Brave from Evolved Games, and attempted to do something with the IP. On August 20, 2007, SouthPeak Games unveiled four of its games at the GC Developers Conference in Leipzig, Germany. That game turned out to be, Brave: Shaman’s Challenge, a spin-off of Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer that played similarly to Tetris.
The game was supposedly planned to be released in 2009 alongside Brave: A Warrior’s Tale, but it was quietly cancelled without any official announcement. Whether a ROM of this game exist online or not remains unknown.
Future Zone is a cancelled action/adventure platformer game, developed for the Super Nintendo and the Genesis/MegaDrive, from 1993 until 1995, by Visual Concepts and published by Electro Brain.
The game was set in a distant future where players took the role of Jason Baker Kane, a soldier sent in an alien world named future zone, which serves as a prison. The player allied himself with a rebel group, trying to escape this fortress.
The game was briefly mentionned, for the first time, in March 1993 by the issue#46 of Nintendo Power after apparently being shown at the Winter CES. In the same period, GameProissue #45 said that the game showcased:
(…) an unbelievably huge environment, close to the size of Super Mario World.
It was then planned for the end of the year, also on the Genesis/MegaDrive. Then in August 1993, with the issue#51 from Nintendo Power again, the title has apparently been shown again, this time for the Summer CES. By the time, the project was re-scheduled for a release in mid-1994.
It wasn’t until May 1994 that Future Zone came back in the press. Still with Nintendo Power, issue#60, we learned that, apparently, the project changed in its direction, alongside the developer, without additional details. The Genesis/MegaDrive version was, from this point on, never mentionned again. More was shared in December 1994, with the issue#71 from Video Games Magazine, where we learned that the title was developed by Visual Concepts and was going to feature side-scrolling platform action, first-person 3d mazes and Mode 7 flying levels.
In February 1995, it was the issue#39 of french magazine Joypad which said that Future Zone was scheduled for June 1995, according to them, it was of the same caliber as Super Metroid. The Mexican version of Club Nintendo wrote a short preview, the same month, on the game, showing a screenshot of a Mode 7 level. Here is what we can read:
In a prison in the future, a soldier who should not be there has to escape in order to save a planet, this is the plot of the game Future Zone by Electro Brain; This title has 16 megabytes of memory and is basically developed in two types of game modes: Contra-style action and in a ship that flies over a surface with rotation and scale. This game is still very preliminary, we just hope that they are not going to leave it in mobility as we saw.
Unfortunately, it was the last time that Future Zone was covered in magazines. The game vanished with no trace, and to this day, it is still unclear why it was ultimately cancelled, although, by reading about it on various magazine issues, it looks like the development didn’t always go as planned, with numerous changes. To this day, no ROM leaked onto the internet, but a short trailer is available to remember its existence.
If you know someone who worked on Future Zone and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!
Very few information exist about this game as, to this day, no video games magazines featured it on Archive.org, and no reason were given about why it was cancelled. We can speculate that it was the purchase of Malibu Comics by Marvel, of which Malibu Interactive was a subsidiary, that happened in 1994 that caused to shutdown the game company, and thus, cancelling the title in the process.
A first prototype of the game leaked in 2009 containing 5 playable levels and we can read more details about its gameplay here:
As far as gameplay goes, Prime is a pretty standard side-scrolling Beat-‘Em-Up in the mold of Final Fight, which shouldn’t come as a surprise if you were playing video games in 1994.
Malibu Interactive did a pretty good job on that front. Maximum Carnage seems to be the bar they set out to beat, and while you don’t get to whip people around with Spider-Man’s webs, they do give Prime a few neat attacks to keep things interesting — or as interesting as one of video games’ most repetitive genres gets, anyway.
One button makes Prime punch, often with a combo that’s a dead ringer for Cody’s in Final Fight, but powered by ridiculously huge arms instead of ultra-tight acid wash jeans. And while you don’t get to actually fly during any of the fighting levels, you do get a double jump that’s useful in exactly one area. Another button gives you an alternate kick attack that begins with the most awkward wind-up ever and ending with a stiff-leg kick square in the junk, complete with an impact burst exploding out of the bad guy’s crotch.
In addition to the standard chuck-an-enemy-across-the-screen, Prime also gives you the ability to throw them towards the background or foreground. It’s a trick lifted from the later-era TMNT games, but they pull it off pretty well here by adding something that the comics of the era specialized in: explosions.
Explosions are a recurring theme in the game, and you get to most of them by throwing enemies at everything possible just to see what happens. The car in the foreground, the fire hydrant in the background and the windows on the building can all be broken when you toss an enemy at them, usually resulting in an explosion even when it’s a fire hydrant. It’s also pretty nice that the backgrounds have areas (like the windows and the occasional boarded-up door) that are destructible, although owing to the game’s unfinished status, the destruction will occasionally result in a glowing purple square of nothingness.
So at this point, we’ve got guys in tank tops, crotch-kicks and exploding cars, and for the Streets of Rage aficionado, that’s all pretty standard stuff. Prime is also equipped with two special abilities that allow him to deal with these horrors. For one, as seen above, he walks just like WWE chairman Vince McMahon. And for the second, his super attack, which allows him to blow up like a balloon until he explodes.
An almost finished version leaked later on the internet.
The game was eventually released on the Sega CD under the name Ultraverse Prime in 1995.
ShadowHawk is a cancelled action/platformer game developed by Studio E exclusively for the Super Nintendo around 1994. It was based on the comic-book of the same name.
The game was cancelled due to a lack of publishers interested in the project and the source code leaked on the internet in 2016. SNESCentral wrote:
The game is split into two modes. It featured one or two platforming stages, followed by a Mortal Kombat-style boss fight. After beating each level, you get a cut scene with the story, and usually a hint at who the next boss is. You can throw a boomerang, but I found that most enemies with shooting attacks will hit you before you even get a chance to throw it. A neat aspect is the grappling hook, which can allow you to quickly swing through a level.
The boss fights are an almost exact Mortal Kombat clone. The controls are set up the same (high and low punches and kicks on the face, block with the shoulder buttons). I wasn’t able to consistently do special moves, but they appear to be standard fighting game motions. After beating the boss, they stand there dizzy, which may mean you can pull off a fatality style move. Without a move guide, there is no way I can figure out if that is true.
ShadowHawk wasn’t the only cancelled game made by Studio E. Years after, the company also had two cancelled Playstation titles with the action game Pariah and the mysterious Zulu. Their only released game was VMX Racing in 1997, still on the Playstation.
On the forum The Ocean Experience, which was a forum founded by former Ocean Software’s developers, former artist Brian Flanagan wrote that the game was “99% done” but was cancelled because “the film bombed“.
The Super Nintendo whole source code leaked onto the internet years ago. The gameplay is similar to other Beat ’em up games such as Final Fight or Double Dragon. The player has two bars; one for the life and the other allowing the player to perform special attacks (invisibility, speed running, a dome shield that knocks out everyone who hits it). The regular beat ’em up levels also include a section for gun play, where the player is able to shoot enemies and a driving stage.
Despite being cancelled at the last minute, the SNES version got mixed reviews by many video games magazines back then. The Genesis version has still yet to be found.
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