Stunt Race is a racing game for the Super Nintendo that used the Super FX chip to create 3D polygons for the cars and tracks. FX Trax is the original name of the project (aka Wild Trax in japan), from when it was still in early development by Nintendo EAD and Argonaut Software. In the gallery below you can see various images from the beta version, with different HUD and WIP graphic! If you can notice more differences (removed tracks?) please let us known!
Scans from Banzzai #14, Super Power #12, australian Nintendo Magazine System from October ’93 (very early screens!) and April ’94 (showing a game much closer to the finished product but still with many differences).
As we can read on Wikipedia, Spider-Man is an action game based upon the Marvel Comics character of the same name. It is loosely based on the 1990s Spider-Man and Spider-Man Unlimited cartoon series. The game was developed by Neversoft and published by Activision for the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in 2000. In the videos below we can see some beta differences, as the Web Counter (different textures), some beta levels were bigger than the final, some monsters looks different and they were in other areas than the final ones.
Thanks to solidsnake11 for the contribution and Megaroxas12 for the videos!
Kunio-kun is a famous series developed by Technos Japan and it was their mascot in Japan. Despite the first game was a beat’em up, soon Technos used the characters for games in other kind of genres, even puzzle games. The most well known Kunio-kun spin off were those concerning sport games ( dodge ball, beach volley, football, basket, hockey, baseball ), always presented through Kunio-kun crazy and not-so-serious atmosphere the series is known for.
Yoshihisa Kishimoto, one of the main men behind Kunio-kun, revealed on his site how a go-kart racing game starring Kunio for Super famicom was in a preliminary phase in early ’90. The idea probably sprung after witnessing Super Mario Kart huge success on the platform. Unfortunately it seems the game never went into production and soon after ( 1996 to be exact ) the japanese developer declared bankruptcy.
Blues Brothers 2000 was a platformer developed by Player 1 and released on November 17th 2000 for the Nintendo 64. Titus Interactive acquired the license to a Blues Brothers 2000 video game at around the time of the BB2K movie release. They began their search for a developer to take on the project and had an estimated release date Q2 1999. The game ended up suffering many delays being pushed back to December 1999 and then again to early 2000. These delays may have been due to the poor reception at the time of Carmageddon 64 and Superman. It was in August 2000 that Blues Brothers 2000 got a rental release at Blockbuster. Gamers had to wait till November 2000 before they could finally purchase Blues Brothers 2000 at a retail store.
Shin’en Multimedia is a development team that was known on Game Boy Advance for the amazing proprietary sound engine and the beautiful 2D graphics of its games (Iridion II, Maya The Bee Sweet Gold etc.). However it is little known that as early as 2001 they were testing polygonal graphics on the little Nintendo handheld with a top down futuristic racing game that resembles F-Zero.
Manfred Linzner, Shin’en co-founder, shared with us the following insights on their 3D engine and the GBA development in general:
We had at this time [2001] a pretty fast 3d engine for flat and textured polygons on GBA running. We used it in some menu parts in Iridion2 and for intros of our games. It featured 16 colors, 60fps, 1×1 resolution. The major performance trick for all of our games and this 3d engine was to use the GBAs 16kb ram-scratchpad area to locate as much data and code there because it was much faster then the rest of the ram. I remember that almost everything in Iridion2 was running in only this 16kb to get the speed we needed. The rest of the RAM was used to store the background images.
Although the project was never completed because Shin’en had too much retail work to do at that time, a decade later the company released on Wiiware the jaw-dropping F.A.S.T. Racing League, a futuristic racing game with a Wipeout aesthetic but with a very personal twist on the gameplay department based on changing phase.
Manfred was so kind to dig out a 11 year old prototype to preserve its existence to the public. You can watch the video below, just keep in mind that being a “work in progress” build it has some glitches (most notably the sound). Also remember that the game target was the tiny GBA screen (240 x 160), so the graphics result stretched out on youtube.
Racer Prototype Credits:
Graphics: Florian Freisleder
Code+Audio: Manfred Linzner
This image from Iridion II show the icons composed by textured 3d polygons:
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