Beta + Cancelled Nintendo 64 & 64DD Video Games - Page 13 of 36

Mortal Kombat 4 is considered the 4th intallment of the Mortal Kombat series, 6th if you count MK3U and MKT. Released in 1997, it was the first MK game to use 3D graphics. It was first released in the arcade version and it would be the last arcade MK made. It was released on the N64, Playstation and PC in 1998, ported by Eurocom. An updated version was released on Dreamcast in 1999 called Mortal Kombat Gold, which was identical with the exception of better graphics, added players and a few more stages.

A new character named Belokk was intended to appear in Mortal Kombat Gold, but was cut from the released game. The developer of the game, Eurocom, sent information about the game with Belokk to Game Informer, and as a result, six screenshots of him were published. According to Ed Boon, Belokk was cut due to time constraints during development. Despite the mention of Belokk’s scrap, he was still rumored to appear as a secret character. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Actual secret characters can be accessed via rotating a specific box for a normal character, however when a player do this to Tanya’s box a question mark that was rumored to unlock Belokk appears, but it unlock nothing.

Since it was the first Midway 3D fighting game, the staff had many difficulties while in development, partly due to the fact the staff had doubled in size. Which means many changes were made and many interesting aspects were taken out.

Differences from the arcade version to the N64 version would include: Lower pixel rate and additions such as Goro being a playable character, extra costumes, and another arena called Ice Pit.

Pre-release trailers show Reptile and Fujin with God-O-Mite as their name in the lifebars. More then likely this was before they got to the name detail.

Kitana, Noob Saibot and Kano were orignally going to be in MK4. Kitana was then changed to Tanya. Noob saibot was taken in and out many times and replaced with Reiko. Jarek replaced Kano and for some reason was left with Kano’s moves, which caused many fans to complain because Jarek was hardly original. Noob Saibot can be accessed in the N64 version by a cheat, but was never in the Arcade. These characters were taken out mainly because Midway wanted more new characters in the game.

The hidden character Meat was originaly intended for testing.

Thanks to Pachuka and Sir_Brando for the contributions!

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Dreamcast, Leaked, Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD, Playstation, Sony

Glover 2 [N64/PSX/DC – Cancelled]

Liam Robertson

30-11-2008

18 Comments

Glover was a 3D platformer game developed by Interactive Studios Ltd and released for the Nintendo 64 and Playstation in 1998. A sequel was announced for Nintendo 64, Playstation and Dreamcast with a launch originally slated for mid 1999, but was later cancelled.

In 2010, NESworld recovered a playable beta of the Nintendo 64 version of Glover 2 and by October 2011, the ROM was leaked online.

Thanks to Nesworld and Goomther for the contributions!

The Bizarre Story Behind Its Cancellation

On February 25, 2015, James Steele, a programmer formerly of Interactive Studios, released a blog entry detailing the unusual circumstances which led to the cancellation of the game. According to the developer, a huge misstep at Hasbro involving one worker severely over-estimating the amount of cartridges required for the game blemished the Glover name at the company, ultimately resulting in the discontinuation of its sequel:

“…as far as we were told, Glover 2 had been canned because of Glover 1. Now this seems strange, because the first Glover has sold fairly well for a non-Nintendo N64 title. And it was on the back of those sales that Glover 2 had been given the go-ahead at Hasbro in the first place.
But Hasbro had messed up. They had screwed the pooch big time. You see, when ordering the carts for the first game, the standard production run was something like 150,000 units. And this is what the management at ISL had advised Hasbro to order – because the N64 wasn’t really fairing that well compared to the PS1 at the time and non Nintendo titles tended to sell poorly. They thought that Glover was a good game in its own right, and a moderate 3rd party success would sell around 150,000 units. And that is exactly what happened. Hence the go ahead for the sequel.
So Glover was a money maker for Hasbro, right? Right? Nuh-uh. As it happened, Nintendo had a special on N64 carts at the time the game was being schedule for production. Some bright spark at Hasbro thought it would just be absolutely SUPER to order double the normal amount – so they put in an order 300,000 units at a slightly reduced cost.
The problem was that none of the retailers wanted to take that stock off Hasbro’s hands. The game had been moderately successful, but the demand just wasn’t there. And thus Hasbro was left with 150,000 or so copies of Glover for the N64 that nobody wanted. That’s something like half-a-million dollars worth of stock that they can’t shift. And with Hasbro Interactive not being in the best of financial shape Glover became a dirty word around the company, as it became apparent over the course of Glover 2 development that they were stuck with all those carts.
Of course, the blame was put on the game and brand itself rather than the idiot who ordered the extra 150,000 carts from Nintendo. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Glover 2 had been cancelled.”

According to Steele, who we later caught up with, the game was around 80-85% complete at the time development ceased.

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD, Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Mortal Kombat Trilogy [Beta]

U64 Staff & Contributors

20-11-2008

4 Comments

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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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Bomberman Hero (Ultra Genjin) [N64 – Test Map]

U64 Staff & Contributors

05-11-2008

4 Comments

In the Youtube Channel of runehero124 there’s a video from a nice Bomberman Hero test-map. From the description we read that: “This code was originally discovered by Icy Guy from the RareWitchProject forums. So give him full credit. I rediscovered it a couple years later, but noticed that it had been found before.”

From an interview at GDRI we found out the design of Bomberman Hero is an adaption of the concepts for the cancelled Ultra Genjin:

GDRI: What happened with Ultra Genjin [N64]?
Ultra Genjin was being planned during the game industry’s transition from 2D to 3D games. I studied the practical aspects of this quite a bit, but I think that nobody really knew what should be done with games at the time. As a result of trial and error, we were able to adapt the design for Ultra Genjin to Bomberman Hero.

A little more information about Ultra PC Genjin directly from Shouichi Yoshikawa site:

ULTRA PRIMITIVE MAN (UNFINISHED)
PLATFORM N64/ 32M ROM (HUDSON/ Project stop )
MY TERM JUNE 1995. to DEC. 1995.
MY CHARGE Planning & 3D Graphic tool mastering
CONTENT After the project stop, this planning was transfered to “BOMBERMAN HERO”

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Jungle Bots [N64 – Cancelled]

monokoma

25-10-2008

4 Comments

A cancelled FPS game for the Nintendo 64, with animal-robots. Jungle Bots was meant to be published by Titus and developed by Conceptual Realities / Navigator Entertainment. It seems that the game was never completed and was canceled in mid-development by Titus. The development was pretty tricky, the polygon and texture budgets were extremely limited due to the cartridge format and the target ROM size was only 32 MB. The company that was working on the game had never made a game before and previously they had only designed and built theme park attractions. The staff wasn’t really prepared for the game making process and some wrong decisions by management ultimately caused the company to have to shut down and the entire staff was laid off.

Thanks a lot to gilgamesh for these screens and informations and to Vaettur for the logo!

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