Others

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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South Park [N64 PSX PC – Beta]

South Park (originally titled South Park: Deeply Impacted during development) is a FPS based on the first few seasons of the popular TV series of the same name. The game is powered by the Turok 2 game engine and was released in 1998 by Acclaim for the PC, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. Acclaim had announced a sequel to be released sometime in 2000, however this project never surfaced. [Info from Wikipedia]

As noticed by BattleBattleBattle, the game’s plot was initially different from what we got in the final version:

The close proximity of the blasted piece of space debris causes the local turkeys to revolt. It’s now up to you to stop those gobbling overgrown chickens who paint half of their faces blue, trying desparately to infringe on American lifestyle by refusing to get eaten. Oh, and Cartman’s mom was kidnapped by aliens, too. To add insult to injury, Skuzzlebutt’s also out of control, making it imperative that Kyle, Cartman, Stan, and Kenny step in, armed with a host of gadgets ranging from cow launchers to fart dolls.

We never see Skuzzlebutt out of control.

The beta multiplayer had 5 different modes to play with, as “Capture the Flag”, a “Grudge Match” and “Kick the Baby”, but in the end only the classic deathmatch mode was finished. The radar in multiplayer was different too (there was only 1 radar for everyone) and in an early screen we notice a level that could have been removed.

Also, Acclaim originally had planned two different styles of games, with the PlayStation version theoretically appearing in a Lost Viking-style of gameplay instead to be a FPS like the N64 and PC versions. A South Park game for the GameBoy Color was also in development, but never released.

If you can notice more differences in the beta screens, please let us know!

Thanks to BattleBattleBattle, MamaLuigiBarrelRoll and Nat for the contributions!

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Fallout Tactics 2 [PC – Cancelled]

Fallout Tactics 2 is a cancelled action RPG developed by Micro Forté in 2001, that was meant to be the sequel to Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel.  Pre-production started shortly before the release of the first game, but FT2 was soon canned by Interplay when Fallout Tactics started selling rather poorly.

As we can read in an interview with Gareth Davies (that worked as junior artist and additional design for the project) on No Mutants Allowed:

I’m also pretty disappointed that Tactics 2 never saw the light of day, since it’s a title that would have benefited from the experience and criticisms of the first game. Plus we were very conscious of heeding Fallout canon as best we could, and providing more interesting tactical missions rather than the run and gun focus of the first game.

You can read more info on Fallout Wikia! Sadly only few concept arts remain from this project.

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Dominion [PC/XBOX – Cancelled]

Dominion  is a cancelled Action RPG that was in development from 2001 to 2003 by Pharaoh Productions for the PC, with a planned Xbox port. The game was meant to be based on the multiplayer mode, with up to 8 players (LAN or Internet) on the Xbox and probably more for the PC version. The game was never released probably because of quality issues and for the lack of a publisher interested in the project.

From the only screens preserved in the gallery below we can speculate that Pharaoh Productions worked on the graphic engine and the game’s world for a long time, but they did never finish to implement a real gameplay system into Dominion. It’s possible that they never started to work on the Xbox version, as the images look to be from the PC build (those little icons would never work on a console port).

In 2004 Pharaoh Productions closed down when their founder, David Allen, resigned from the gaming business.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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