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Nintendo

Aero the Acro-Bat is a platform game developed by Iguana Entertainment and published by Sunsoft in 1993. Super for the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive / Genesis. At Kombo we can read an interesting article about the game, in which they even shared the original design doc, created by David Siller in 1992. Some of the major differences that we can notice from looking at the design doc are:

in-level missions such as hopping over quicksand and landing in a lion’s mouth that did not make it to the final version of the game.
Not all of these items are in the final version either. The barrel, for instance, appears in a single stage and is presented as a mode of transportation instead of an item worth points.
Unused enemies
The original mission objective screen showed Aero in action as an example on what the player needs to do. While this idea was not included in the original 1993 release, the 2002 Game Boy Advance re-release added a variation of this concept back into the game.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Mega Drive / Genesis, Nintendo, Sega, SNES + Super Famicom

The Mask [SNES – Beta]

monokoma

10-10-2010

No Comments

The Mask is a platform game (based on the film with the same name) developed by Black Pearl Software and published in 1995 by THQ for the Super Nintendo. Early in its development, the game was much different from the final version, as noticed by Mister Syd on the Lost Levels Forum:

Health meter is a series of facial expressions, while the health meter is numerical in actual game.
The Mask’s sprite is completely different in shape, color and design, almost as if this build was completely dismissed and recreated from the ground up.
Visually, I find this the most interesting because it looked like it was going to play more like a brawler than the platformer it turned out to be.
All of the screenshots’ backgrounds are not used anywhere in the final version of the game.
Unused abilities; The Mask has no low-kick, or a (strange-looking) gun that fires projectiles in the game and the mallet is a different color (and pose) but the tornado’s design might of been used in the game.
Some of the enemies in the screen shots I think are actually still in the game, but could be edited a bit in the release; the man with the gun by the bank vault is likely not in the final release though.

The Mask was also planned for the Genesis / Mega Drive, but this version was never released.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution! (scan from EGM #61)

Images:

Game Boy (+ Color), Nintendo

Gremlins 2: The New Batch [GameBoy – Beta]

monokoma

08-10-2010

No Comments

Gremlins 2: The New Batch is a Game Boy side scrolling platform game based on the film with the same name and released in 1990 by Sunsoft. TheActionGameMaster noticed a small beta difference in an old screenshot, found in a magazine. You can see that the life counter is at 5 lives. This is not possible in the final version, because there are only two chances at extra men in the game, and Gizmo begins each continue with 2 men.

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GameCube, Microsoft, Nintendo, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Pterosaur – Dawn of Destruction [GC/XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

monokoma

06-10-2010

1 Comment

Pterosaur: Dawn of Destruction is a cancelled platform / action game that was in development at Atomic Planet in 2002, for the GameCube, Playstation 2 and Xbox. In the game the player would had used a Pterosaur (a flying reptile) to lead your fellow dinosaurs to safety, or see them condemned to extinction, while the world was coming to an end.

To do that, you had to learn to recognise the most vulnerable dinosaurs and how they behave, to be able to save them. While bigger dino-predators were searching for the weaker dinos to eat, they could have been lured away or defeated in an open battle. The scenario could have been explored to find hidden paths, with the help of friendly dinosaurs that cleared the way.

The Pterosaur project was never released for unknow reasons, but we can speculate that the gameplay was not that much fun and Atomic Planet was not able to find any publisher interested in the game. On the 25th of February 2009 Atomic Planet went into administration after a number of redundancies and the offices were closed: maybe a playable demo of Pterosaur: Dawn of Destruction could be leaked sooner or later.

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Video:

Leaked, Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Sunman [NES – Cancelled]

yota

04-10-2010

6 Comments

Sunman is an cancelled NES action game made by Sunsoft which was supposed to be released in 1992. The most interesting aspect about this game is that originally Sunman was going to be a Superman game, and playing it is not hard to spot the resemblances: both heroes have a similar costume and the same powers. We don’t know why in the end Sunsoft didn’t get the official license from DC comics but probably the software house thought that it was a bad idea to spend a remarkable amount of money for a game planned for a rapidly aging console.

Other than that, Sunman was just an anonymous side-scroller game with below-average controls and only five stages, not exactly an appealing new entry for the NES market of the time. Nothing too strange, then, that Sunsoft decided to shelf it for good.

Update:

However, Sunsoft’s Superman survives as a Genesis game, as reported on Wikipedia. The game was published in the same year of Sunman’s prototype, 1992. While the graphic is better so that it can fit a 16bit console like Genesis , the game concept is still quite the same as the NES version. In fact, Superman/Sunman’s moves are the same (except that in the Genesis version he can also fire beams from his eyes) and some maps’ design is very close to the NES version. We can actually say that Genesis’ Superman is what we could’ve seen on NES.

John Doom is trying to make a complete Superman NES game using Sunman, creating and replacing Sunman’s sprites with Superman. You can try the game on John Doom’s space. It runs on vnes, an applet nes emulator (You need Java in order to play the game).

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