Nintendo DS

Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Gauntlet [DS – Cancelled]

monokoma
27-09-2011
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Gauntlet DS is the cancelled chapter of the popular hack and slash series, that was in development at Backbone Entertainment and it would have been published by Eidos Interactive / Midway Games. The game should have been released in October 2008, but after its initial announcement, the project vanished from their release list. There’s not any official statement, but it’s possible that Gauntlet DS was canned for economic reasons.

The bankruptcy of Midway Games, owners of the Gauntlet license, could be one of the reasons behind the game’s death. The game would have had local wireless and online four-player mode, 40 maps, and voice chat capabilities. We really hope that in the future a playable version of this game could be leaked and preserved, it looked like an awesome coop-game!

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Kirby Squeak Squad [DS – Beta / Unused]

U64 Staff & Contributors
08-08-2011
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Kirby: Squeak Squad, known in Europe as Kirby: Mouse Attack and in Japan as Kirby of the Stars: Calling on the Dorotche Gang is a platform game developed by Flagship and Natsume and published in 2006 / 2007 by Nintendo and HAL Laboratory for the Nintendo DS. Mariosegafreak noticed a page of unused sprites on the Spriter’s Resource archive. Apparently the unused “Block Kirby” ability is a three-star Kirby wearing a hat from the beam ability. Not enough proof? Check the ability icons sprite sheet and you will find ‘block’. When trying to use a cheat code to activate it, Kirby just spits it out as if you pressed select/X.

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Nintendo DS Debug Cartridge

monokoma
06-07-2011
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Sometime ago a Nintendo DS debug cartridge was sold on eBay and a couple of weeks ago the rom of that cart was shared and preserved online (NINTENDO DS NTR DEBUG) thanks to NintendyFan from the GBAtemp Form. There is some interesting stuff that we can see in this DS debug cart, such as weird icons, models of Nintendo characters and music from Mario Kart 64 (?!?). We are not sure why they chose such kind of strange images and sounds to test the Nintendo DS hardware, but it could be possible that hidden in the rom’s code there could be even more unusual / beta files, just like in that old SNES debug / hardware test cart. Does anyone want to try to find them?

In order to get to the menu, you have to hold Start + Select when launching the ROM.

Here’s the description from the eBay auction:

Up for grabs is a Debug Mode / Dev cartridge for the Original Nintendo DS and DS Lite Models of handhelds. I have never seen anything quite like this before on the market. We received a few of these, totally smashed and broken up, however we were able to recover this cart and get it to load up. It was tested on each model of DSi including the 3DS, but would error out. This is because the cart is specific to testing on the original DS software on the older handhelds. This is an official Nintendo cart that was apparently supposed to be decommissioned before being tossed out, but whoever attempted to break this one didn’t do a thorough enough job.

As you can see from the photos and video, the date on the program is August 18th, 2004; which is 3 months before the handheld was released anywhere in the world! The Product ID on the back of the cart reads: NTR-005

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Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney [DS – Beta / Unused Sprites]

U64 Staff & Contributors
25-03-2011
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Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is a Capcom adventure game following the story of new defense attorney Phoenix Wright, who takes on many murder trials and proves his clients to be not guilty.

Found on the official Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney site, Capcom posted beta screenshots before the game was released. Two of those screenshots contain content not seen in the game. One of those was the “Cross Examination” screenshot. In the game, Phoenix Wright and the prosecutor will lock eyes, and there will be a close up of them. In the screenshot, the sprites for Phoenix Wright and the prosecutor, in this case Miles Edgeworth, shows. The other screenshot was when the witness is pressed. Instead of the bottom screen still showing the “forward” sprite, the screen shows Phoenix Wright extending his arm at the witness.

Additionally, there are three sets of sprites not seen in the game, but found in the coding, posted by fan site courtrecords.net. One is Phoenix Wright with hearts over his eyes, which presumably is when the defendant “April May” shows. The probable reason this was removed was because the two meet before the trial. The other is a forward facing Miles Edgeworth showing his surprised face, which only is seen from the side in the game. The last is Larry Butz creating a weird face where he sticks out of tongue.  

Nintendo, Nintendo DS

Ni no Kuni [DS – Beta]

monokoma
11-01-2011
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Ni no Kuni​ is a RPG developed by Level-5 in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, released for the DS in december 2010. As we can read in Wikipedia, Ni no Kuni was first announced in the Japanese publication Famitsu in September 2008, while the development on the animation aspects of the game had begun in July 2008. In those 2 years,the game evolved a lot and Megalol was able to notice various differences between the beta (screens on the left)  and the final version (screens on the right). Check the gallery below for a comparison! Can you find all the differences? The beta world map is especially interesting.

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