Arcade

Melty Blood: Actress Again [Arcade PS2 – Beta / Unused]

Melty Blood is a visual novel and fighting game, co-developed by dōjin circles Type-Moon and French-Bread, originally released at Comiket on December 2002. Melty Blood: Actress Again, is the third game in the Melty Blood series, released in 2008 on Sega Naomi hardware and the year later on the Playstation 2. Megalol found a removed playable character in the PS2 version and some beta differences, as he wrote in our forum:

It’s interesting, I found this character by using “ArtMoney” and “PCSX2 emulator”. Her name is Powered Ciel, unfortunately the game does not start after selecting her (i think that the developers planned to use Powered Ciel as a playable character, but she was removed at the last moment)

also in the characters-select screen, one of the portraits is the icon of Powered Ciel

In the final screen of “nero chaos arcade mode” you can see Powered Ciel

in an old picture from a magazine, we can see the beta “character select screen” from the arcade version, but “akiha” has a different icon, the icon that will be used in “school form akiha” only a year later in the PS2 version.

Powerd Ciel has been confirmed to be a fully-playable character in the newest Melty Blood revision, dubbed Melty Blood Actress Again: Current Code. The video below shows her in action:

If you have more info about this lost character, please let us know!

Thanks to Megalol for the contribution

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Rip Squad [Arcade – Cancelled]

Rip Squad is a cancelled driving shooter / action game that was in development from 1999 to 2001 by Midway for the Arcades. It was going to be a war-themed game, inspired by Call of Duty and a TV show called “Rat Patrol”. The gameplay featured 360° of on-screen movement, a mounted .50 cal rifle inside the cabinet and a seat with a shaker beneath it, to simulate the motion of the jeep driving over different types of terrain.

As we can read on Arcade Heroes:

Back in 2001, Midway made a decision to dump their long standing coin-op division in favor of focusing developments on console gaming.  When that decision came down, there were still some arcade games floating around in the development cycle, which were subsequently canceled and were lost to the knowledge of the public.

Thanks to kieranmay for the contribution!

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American Idol [Arcade – Cancelled]

In 2009 an arcade developer, Raw Thrills (best known for big buck hunter, fast and the furious and H2overdrive), were developing an arcade music game based on the popular show American Idol, but it got cancelled after some time, probably because of licencing issues.

The game was expensive to play, but you were able to record your own video. After you’d finished playing the machine would either send the video of you playing the game via e-mail or it would burn it to dvd for you.

You can read more about this unreleased game at Arcade Heroes.

Thanks to Kieranmay for the contribution!

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Neo Geo Battle Coliseum [ARC PS2 – Beta]

Neo Geo Battle Coliseum is a 2 on 2 tag team fighting game developed by SNK Plyamore and released in 2005 for the Atomiswave arcade board, with a Playstation 2 port in the same year. Mikel noticed some beta differences in a trailer from the JAMMA/TGS 2004:

At 0:20, you’ll see Mai do her trademark Super Deadly Ninja Bees move, you may notice that when she starts the move, you will see that the Desperation Move Sparks are The King of Fighters XI, the Desperation Move sparks in the final version of Neo Geo Battle Coliseum are different, and the Desperation Move sparks you see later made it to The King of Fighters XI.

At 0:24, you’ll see Asura (From Samurai Shodown 64-2 (The 64 doesn’t mean that it’s for Nintendo 64, it’s for an old, abandoned Arcade Board by SNK named the “Hyper Neo Geo 64”)) preform a Double Assault, the Double Assault spark was later reused for the Leader Despeation move spark in The King of Fighters XI, and the Double Assault background is somewhat absent.

At 0:31, you’ll see Yuki doing a strange pose while K’ does some Light Kicks then K’ later taunts, the sprites for the pose Yuki was doing were absent in the final game.

At 0:33, you’ll see Fuuma doing a weird taunt that has him spinning his head around holding a folding fan, then he opens the folding fan (i.e. Mai Shiranui) at the end, I am not too sure if that taunt is in the final.

At 0:41, you’ll see that Hanzo’s stance is different, that stance was replaced with a new stance in the final game.

At 0:42, you’ll see that when Ai walks backwards, only one sprite shows up, she gets sprites when she walks backwards in the final game, and Ai’s taunt is also different.

At 0:47, you’ll see K’ preform his double assault with Tung Fu Rue, you’ll see that the background is black.

At 1:21, you’ll see Asura preform one of his moves, you will also see that the background doesn’t fade to black when he does the move (I forgot the name of the move, if you know the name, tell me right away).

Thanks to Mikel for the contribution!

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Psy-Phi [Arcade – Unreleased]

Psy-Phi is an unreleased arcade action-shooting game based on Sega’s Lindbergh hardware, that was designed by Yu Suzuki and incorporated a 29″ touch-screen display for gameplay. In Psy-Phi players hovered in the air and competed against the CPU or another human with attacks by trailing a path or inputting special symbols on the touch screen.

The original release was planned for spring 2006, but the arcade units were called back in March 06 (the units were still in shipping and had yet to reach arcades) and so Psy-Phi vanished forever.  Some units were previewed at trade shows, as well as some arcades receiving units for beta tests (most notably Gameworks). It’s currently unknown why Sega decided to not release this project. [Info from Wikipedia]

Thanks to Kieranmay for the contribution!

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