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:
Space Agency is a cancelled action-rpg planned for the Nintendo DS that was being developed by Audio Inc, the same people behind Contact and Sakura Note. A video of the game was uploaded on youtube by the team in 2009 , but sadly the project never found any publisher, probably because the other Audio Inc titles performed very poorly. The player controlled a new member of the Space Agency, an organization created in order to defend planets from the space pirates.
By exploring the planets and by interacting with the local populations we could acquire various new skills.
It seems also that we had to fight in space with our spaceship and answer help calls.
If you have other informations about this game please let us know!
As we can read on Wikipedia, The Simpsons Hit & Run is an action-adventure game based on the animated sitcom The Simpsons. It was released for the GameCube, Xbox, PlayStation 2 on September 2003. The game’s developer, Radical Entertainment, received the rights to create games for The Simpsons franchise when they demonstrated a playable prototype. Radical released its first The Simpsons game in 2001 called The Simpsons Road Rage, a parody of the Crazy Taxi series of video games. After Road Rage was released, the development team for Hit & Run decided not to create a direct sequel to Road Rage. Instead, Radical wanted to steer the franchise’s video game series in a different direction by giving the game engine a complete overhaul.
In the game’s booklet, there are some beta images that shows the character mission mugs were in 3D too rather than animated. One has a display mode in options. In Tips & Tricks No. 105 in 2003, some character’s clothes were identified in the wrong episode. For example, Lisa’s “cool” outfit info says that it’s from the episode Little Girl In the Big Ten, but it’s actually from Summer of 4 ft. 2. Lisa didn’t wear that outfit in Little Girl In the Big Ten. Marge’s inmate outfit from Marge in Chains is originally periwinkle and short-sleeved, but the red-orange color may come from another episode. Facts say that Maggie is a playable character in the game, but for unknown reasons, she was replaced with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in the final game.
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