Based on the 1994 comedy film starring Jim Carrey, this cancelled Game Boy Color version of The Mask puts the player in the role of the unlikely hero Stanley Ipkiss, who can use an ancient magical relic to transform from his normal wallflower self into the The Mask, an aggressively charismatic character with comedic super powers. As we can learn from Edge issue 92 the game was developed by english Pocket Studios and was to be published by DreamCatcher Interactive however it was never released for unknown reasons.
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).
Runelords is a cancelled RPG that was in development in 1999 / 2000 by Saffire and it would have been published by Kemco for the GameBoy Color. The game was based on the fantasy book series with the same name, created by David Farland. In the universe of The Runelords, there exists a unique magical system which relies on the existence of distinct bodily attributes, such as brawn, grace, and wit. The game would have been a traditional turn based RPG, but it seems that the gameplay was not much fun. As we can read on IGN:
When we played the game at E3, we weren’t too excited by the sluggish and laborious RPG play. The game has a 3/4 view (like Mission Impossible) for the action, but just lagged in conversations, in movement, in battle, and elsewhere.
It’s possible that the publisher decided to cancel this project for quality reasons.
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.
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