Nintendo

Kitty’s Catch [NES – Cancelled]

Kitty’s Catch is a cancelled NES game that was discovered and purchased by Matt (aka BeaglePuss) from a lot on the Digital Press forums. The game is a two player fishing game where both players play as cats: Pitter vs Patter. It seems that Kitty’s Catch was an independent project by a GameTek developer that was pitched around to different production companies to find a publisher. You collect fish while avoiding jelly fish and electric eels, the first person to fill their bucket then receives a shell. The player with the most shells at the end of the time limit is declared the winner. There are also several power ups obtained by collecting tin cans. You can obtain a larger treble hook, or even summon a shark that can greatly weigh down your bucket. The game is currently owned by BeaglePuss and MrMark0673.

Thanks a lot to Mr Mark for the contribution!

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Metroid Prime 3: Corruption [Wii – Beta]

Retro Studios intended to give Metroid Prime 3: Corruption larger environments than Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and enable the game to run at 60 frames per second. The developers were also interested in using the WiiConnect24 feature to provide additional content for the game that would be accessible from the Internet. A small Metroid Prime 3 Tech Demo was shown at E3 2005, created with the MP2 3D Engine. Nintendo then demonstrated how Metroid Prime 3 would take advantage of the controller’s special abilities with a version of Echoes modified for the Wii and shown at the Tokyo Game Show in 2005. The title Corruption and some of the first gameplay footage were revealed at Nintendo’s Media Release at the E3 2006 trade show.

From early screenshots we can notice that the Ridley fight in the beta did not have Meta-Ridley as in the final, different HUD, graphic details and thanks to some concept arts we can see various early character designs that were created before the final ones.

Also, thanks to a model viewer created by Interdpth and Revel8n, it is possible to find various unused models hidden in the game’s data. You can download the Metroid Prime model viewer (mpxviewer) in here. If you are able to find more unused models, please do let us know.

In January 2012, thanks to fundraising organized by user over on Assembler Games, a 2006 demo, which documented a beta version of the second planet of Metroid Prime 3, was dumped and released to the community. The proto was developed to run on Gamecube hardware with 128 mb of ram, so it’s playable only on a custom version of the Wii emulator Dolphin. Using the debug menu it is possible to active/deactivate the various power-up and to try the third-person  camera.  The map is still incomplete, so only a few areas are accessible. Apart from minor differences, the general layout of the location is remarkably similar to the final version. Cutscenes are unfinished, and of course  the interface is still based on the gamecube controller.

Thanks to Dark_ViVi for the contribution!

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Mario Golf: Advance Tour [GBA – Beta / Unused Rooms]

Mario Golf: Advance Tour is an RPG-styled sport game developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance in 2004. The game is the sequel to the Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf. [Info from Wikipedia]

Robert Seddon has recorded an interesting video about some of the debug rooms and unused areas that can be found in the Mario Golf: Advance Tour game code thanks to the Atrius’s Golden Sun: The Lost Age editor (as both games use the same engine). We can even notice some GBC-alike sprites, probably used as placeholders. The beta” foyer had some different details as you can notice from this comparison:

Beta:

mario-golf-advance-tour-marion-club-debug

Final:

mario-golf-advance-tour-marion-club-final

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Wreck’n Krew [XBOX / GC / PS2 – Cancelled]

Wreck’n Krew was an action game that was in development at DarkBlack for the GameCube, Playstation 2 and XBOX. As we can read from the original press release the game was a highly explosive arcade blast fest, that mixed Blast Corps, Power Stone and Bomber Man. The player would had take the role of a team of demolition experts hired to take on dangerous and dirty jobs, to destroy everything in the level but have to complete certain mission-based tasks within a time limit in order to unlock hidden areas, special characters, and the next location waiting to be ripped apart.

It seems that the developers had to closed down, maybe because they did not find a publisher interested in their projects (this game and Asylum) and so Wreck’n Krew was cancelled. (And no, i dont know why one of the characters looks like Gary Coleman.)

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