Nintendo

Forever Dragonz [N64 – Cancelled]

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Forever Dragonz is a cancelled one-on-one fighting game that was in development by Software Creations for the Nintendo 64, produced & designed by Haydn Dalton. The game had many original ideas (at the time). Characters could be knocked through elements of the enviroment (like a stunt scene in a movie, later to be done by Dead or Alive).

Software Creations were also attempting to have larger, multi-levelled arenas rather than the small “ring” based fighters seen in the arcades and the PSX. They also wanted the ability to tailor characters and update elements of their fighting abilities, betting on fights and swapping fighter characters with friends. Technically it was a challenging title. Software Creations motion captured a set of moves and spent months just getting it to work without crazy rotations affecting the character model’s limbs, but sadly in the end  Forever Dragonz never saw the light of day.

Thanks a lot to Haydn Dalton for the great contribution!

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Jest [N64 – Cancelled]

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Jest is a cancelled 96-megabit Nintendo 64 platform / action game that was in development by Curved Logic in 1997 and it would have been published by Ocean / Infogrames. In the game we would have played as a joker named Jax, who has to work his way up to full jesterhood. There would have been many crazy levels set in the land of Humourous, from hellish underground caverns to misty docksides, with a gameplay probably similar to Mario 64 or Rayman 2. Jest had a beautiful graphic for its time and its own style, but sadly something went wrong during the development and Curved Logic had to cancel the game, before closing down and to vanish forever.

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War: Final Assault [N64 Proto / Cancelled]

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War: Final Assault is a first person shooter that was developed by Atari Games and released in 1999 for arcades. In the game the player needs to fight through 8 levels, each one with its own final boss, with a fun coop multiplayer mode up to 4 players. A Nintendo 64 port was planned to be released the same year, published by Midway, but something went wrong during the development and the project was soon cancelled. We are not sure about how much work went into the Nintendo 64 version: some screenshots from the presumed N64 port were found in an old magazine (but they could just have been from the original Arcade game). It’s a shame that this game was never released on the N64, as it could have been a fun multiplayer game to play with friends at home, between Perfect Dark and Mario Kart 64.

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Chanbara Fighter – Master of Puppets [N64 – Cancelled]

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Originally announced in 1999, this promising fighting game developed by Bottom Up, unfortunately, was never released. It appears that the software house was closed down a few months later, leaving some incomplete projects for the Nintendo 64, including this Chanbara Fighter. The game should have been a classic fighting game 1 VS 1, but with an interesting super deformed cartoon style. It was possible to chose between a chef, a warrior, a crazy old man and many more. In Chanbara Fighter we would have been able to play in arenas with the background built to resemble a sheet of paper, hand-drawn by a child.

Each character used its own weapon to combat, for example, the chef used a frying pan while the old man had a stick. Chanbara was practically a mix of Super Smash Bros and Soul Calibur! The controls of the game were just as bizarre as its characters:  we would have moved our avatar with the D-Pad, while fighting by moving the analog stick (or the yellow C buttons). There were few good fighting game on the N64 and it’s a shame that this project was cancelled. Chanbara Fighter could have been a very interesting game and maybe even a lot of fun.

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Dezaemon DD [64 DD – Cancelled]

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Dezaemon 3D is a shoot ’em up game creator developed by  Athena and released for the Nintendo 64 only in Japan in 1998. The game was one in which one could design their own shooting game levels similar to the levels shown in Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth. The game had nearly limitless options, from creating the stage boss or adding a custom soundtrack for each level. A 64DD add-on was planned but they never released it: only some messages from the editor mode reveale this unused connection, as you can see from the screenshots below.

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