Wii

Mad World [Wii – Beta / Prototype]

Celine linked us to the official Platinum Games Site / Blog, in which they have wrote some interesting posts about the development of their game: originally Jack’s character design was different and they tried various color palettes before choosing the final one.

We worked on our first proposal for two weeks, when a programmer walked by and said, “This is great! It feels fresh! I’ve never seen a game like this!” His words were enough to know that the first proposal, black & white, was what we should go with.

There were times when I thought to myself, “Ahhh… I wish I could use some grey…” I even tried it in a few tests, but it just didn’t look good. […] For instance, even though your human eyes see the two-tone as black and white because of the contrast, we actually put desaturated yellow into the game. We would also up the contrast on the far reaches of the background instead of obscuring them. We used lots of little tricks like this.

Many Bloodbath Challenges were cut from the final game, as the one with an huge slingshot:

One day, the environmental kills team were stressed out trying to think up a new Bloodbath Challenge. Well, actually, we were stressed because the challenge that we wanted to go with had been rejected by Nishikawa-san. It would have been a Bloodbath Challenge where you would have fired at enemies with a giant slingshot. It had great Wii Remote controls, and we were almost done programming it; however, unfortunately it was deemed to be too run-of-the mill, and didn’t get the kind of reaction we were shooting for with the challenges. Thus, we didn’t use it.

Also, a removed / censored kill can be seen in the video below.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Tower of Goo Unlimited [Wii – Concept]

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Tower of Goo Unlimited is the original prototype, made some years ago, of World of Goo, a famous indie game for Pc and Wiiware. Even if you can create only a tower in this concept, the basic gameplay and the graphic style are essentially the same as the released version. There is a level called “Tower of Goo” in the final game, but it is much more  technically refined.

2dboy has a prototype section about the development of World of Goo.

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Red Steel 2 [Wii – Prototype / Beta]

Red Steel 2 is the presumed sequel for the famous FPS that was released for the Wii in 2006, a project that was in development at Ubisoft Paris / Montreuil (this studio was also responsible for Red Steel 1) in 2007. It seems that these screens and documents were taken from an early, different concept of the project, some of which are from a set of “fantasy themed levels” (maybe for bonus missions or multiplayer modes).

Development of this Red Steel 2 prototype was stopped in October 2007 when Ubisoft raised concerns about the game’s quality. Since then, Ubisoft Paris started from scratch and a “new” Red Steel 2 is planned for a release in 2009. Ubisoft Montreuil went on with making Rayman Raving Rabbits 2 and TV Party.

Thanks to Hey Hey & SG for their contributions!

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Jet Set Radio [Wii – Cancelled Concept]

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In 2006 Kuju Entertainment with the help of concept artist  Corey S. Lewis created a pitch for a new Jet Set Radio game that would have been developed for the Wii, and tried to propose the project to SEGA. Unfortunately it seems that SEGA was not interested in Kuju’s concept and so the game was never made. Only few concept arts remain from the JSR Wii pitch and probably not much more was done by the team.

Thanks to Guru Larry for the contribution!

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Winter [Wii – Cancelled?]

Sometime ago IGN wrote an interesting article on a cancelled game from N-Space, a survival horror named “Winter”, that was in development for the Wii in 2007. Sadly it seems that the project was stopped because of “the restrictions imposed upon the Wii market by third-party publishers simply unwilling to take a gamble on a more traditional project”. You can read more about it in here. It’s possible that after all this good promotion, the game could attract some new publishers, so that N-Space would be able to finish the works  on Winter and release it sometime in the future. Maybe.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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