Blitz & Massive is a cancelled “point & click” adventure game developed by Spellcaster Studios, following two robots in their adventures all over the galaxy in what was conceived as a parody of sci-fi movies from the ’60s and ’70s. The game used a retro-futuristic look inspired by the same sci-fi movies they referenced to and the 3D engine was in a cell-shaded style.
Just like in a tv series, five episodes were planned, each one containing a tv-like intro with credits and all of them were self-contained, meaning the the story would always be introduced and resolved in the same episode. Spellcaster Studios were inspired by tv series like Star Trek (their main inspiration) and they compared the style of Blitz & Massive to The Secret of Monkey Island and movies that parodied a genre like Spaceballs or Scary Movie.
Developed for PC and Xbox 360, with an investment of 250.000 euros shared between Gameinvest and their own capital, Blitz & Massive was almost complete when it was canceled, with the exception of the cutscenes which were supposed to be created by Overseas Animation Studios, lead by Bruno Patatas.
Spellcaster Studios closed in 2010, mainly because of the worldwide financial crisis and the subsequent reduction of subcontracting work they received. Today the team only remains as a hobby project by Diogo Andrade and Diogo Gomes.
In the gallery below you can see some images from the alpha version presented to Mega Score (Portuguese videogames magazine), that although small and low quality show all parts of the gameplay. Below you can also check a video showing the tutorial section of the game.
Article by Jump/Error, original version in Portuguese on the Videogame PT Blog!
Alien Fear is a FPS that was announced in September 2010, initially developed by The Farm 51 and published by CITY Interactive. In February 2011, CITY Interactive was displeased by the work done by The Farm 51 and moved the project to one of their related companies based in Bydgoszcz, Poland. Here was what we could read on Polish website Polygamia on that matter:
The Farm 51 will no longer produce Alien Fear. Reason? The developer does not meet the artistic requirements.
Do you still remember Alien Fear? We didn’t know much about the game itself, except that it was a “shooter set in a science fiction setting with horror elements”, it would probably run on Unreal Engine 3, and that it was to appear only in digital distribution on PS3, 360 and PC. Now we also know that City Interactive has moved its production to its internal studios, or in legal terms: “while retaining all rights to the production elements of the Alien Fear game already made and received” – it will continue producing the game in its own development studios.
The stock exchange announcement states that it was “the Contractor’s failure to properly fulfill its obligations under the contract, in particular the failure to perform the subject of the contract on time and taking into account artistic requirements.”
When asked for a comment, Marek Tymiński from City Interactive told us: “We focus on the quality of our games, we want Alien Fear to become a hit. This will be brought closer to us by the decision to transfer the project to an internal studio, and – which will happen soon – by expanding the team with new faces from abroad and from Poland.
The Farm 51 responded that they still had rights over the work done so far on the game, so CITY Interactive reworked Alien Fear to change some of the previous work, and planned to release it on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. This was, again, revealed by Polygamia, in April of the same year:
We claim that the withdrawal from the contract made by City Interactive S.A. does not produce any legal effects, and therefore the Agreement is still in force. We were accused of lack of punctuality when the project was delayed by City Interactive S.A. intentionally or at least demonstrating a lack of due diligence or organizational skills. The artistic level of City Interactive S.A. products, which we allegedly did not meet, has been sufficiently documented in reviews of other games of this company, therefore we will not comment on this allegation, leaving the dispute to be resolved by independent experts. All allegations made by City Interactive S.A. are not confirmed by the facts and therefore we argue that they were invented in order to break the Agreement and achieve previously set goals, which we can only guess at. We are convinced of the bad intentions of City Interactive S.A., which may result, for example, from the desire to avoid payment of the contracted amounts from the project budget, mainly sales royalties.
We declare that the copyrights to parts of the project are still owned by The Farm 51 and will only be transferred to City Interactive upon payment of the remuneration. Therefore, until the disputes regarding withdrawal from the contract are clarified, City Interactive S.A. should at least refrain from distributing undue rights to third parties.
The Farm 51
In the late summer of 2012, CITY Interactive restructured and was renamed to CI Games. At the time that they took control of Alien Fear, The Farm 51 reported that the game was 75 percent ready but it is unclear exactly how much was playable.
There are screenshots available of both versions of Alien Fear: the game as designed by The Farm 51 and the later game that was reworked by CITY Interactive/CI Games. Screenshots from the first half of 2011 reveal that Alien Fear utilized a point system similar to the one used in Bulletstorm.
The game’s location was set on a ship in deep space. At this point, Alien Fear was similar in tone to the 2008 game Dead Space with many dark corners populated by monstrous aliens. Others who have viewed these early screenshots of Alien Fear compared it to Doom and Alien. The reworked version of Alien Fear by CI Games used less of an horror setting with larger and more mechanical oriented characters, somehow similar to Gears of War.
In May 2013, Alien Fear was reworked again due to another commitments by the time and title was changed into Alien Rage. As we can see in the screenshots from the second version by CI Games, it featured a slightly different HUD, but mostly a cooperative mode. This was scrapped in the final retail version. The director credited to the game is Mark Bristol. It marked Bristol’s first director credit on a video game and he would also direct Enemy Front in 2014. Alien Rage was released on the PC on September 24, 2013, and later on the Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 in October 2013. It received mixed to negative reviews with many critics focusing on the game’s generic play and glitches.
After Alien Fear, The Farm 51 began work on several new projects, including a FPS mixing The Bourne Identity and Gothic and another FPS with an Indiana Jones atmosphere. They would ultimately create two games for the Xbox 360/Playstation 3: Painkiller: Hell & Damnation and Deadfall Adventures. Work on the Gothic based game likely ended up in Painkiller where the player fights demons, while the Indiana Jones game became Deadfall Adventures which is set in the universe of Allan Quartermain, a 19th century novel and series of films from the 1980’s about an archeologist adventurer.
“Shadow of Memories” is a 2001 released Visual Novel by Konami in guise of a Third Person Action Adventure for the PS2. Set in the fictive German town of Lebensbaum, the game combines solving a murder case (the protagonist’s very own) with a time travel element and gothic fantasy elements. Like Visual Novels, the game did not offer many possibilities to stray from the predestined path(s), which baffled a portion of its players and reviewers at the time as well as its total lack of action elements in any form. Yet, like Visual Novels, its strengths are its setting, atmosphere and story, which branch into not less than half a dozen different endings. Known as “Shadow of Destiny” in the US, the game was ported to several other platforms: in 2002 it was released in the EU for the original XBox, a short time later a PC version was produced for the west and finally in 2009/2010 it came out for the PSP in Japan and North America.
Marking the fourth installment in the Momodora series, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight began development as Momodora IV. Some footage of a playthrough of the alpha / beta Momodora IV has a placeholder music that sounds like someone tapping on a xylophone in parts and in other parts reminds one of Legends of Mana. The game’s beautifully nostalgic graphics appear to contain much of the elements of the game with the exception that the 2-D backgrounds seem to be enhanced in later versions.
While a large number of elements would remain the same between early and later playthroughs of Momodora, there were some noticeable developments made. A shader was added to the final product to shift the overall color palette to better fit levels. The game HUD was improved with the it being switched to the other side of the screen and fonts that were more suitable for the tone of the game. Grass in early playthrough also had not been developed yet to respond to a player’s movement. The characters and animations in the game would remain mostly the same but the boss in Karst City hadn’t been fleshed out. You can see that the sprite is a static image and probable one single sprite rather than a series of sprites layered over one another. Gamepad controls hadn’t been implemented in the Momodora IV beta.
Momodora IV was developed by Bombservice and published by Playsim, the change in title to “Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight“ was likely because the series was still unknown to most of the world and a more interesting subtitle could have attracted more people. In addition to the Momodora games, Bombservice has also developed Bunny Swordmaster Story.
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight was released on March 2016 for PC. A year later on March 2017, the game was released for the Playstation 4 and XBox One.
Death to Spies 3: Ghost of Moscow is the cancelled third game in the Death to Spies franchise, in developed in 2010 by Haggard Games and to be published by 1C Company on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. While the original project was never released on the 7th generation of consoles, the game was later reworked and rebranded as Alekhine’s Gun and published by Maximum Games for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on March 2016.
Previous Death to Spies chapters (Death to Spies and Death to Spies: Moment of Truth) were set during World War II and the protagonist is a member of the Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH called Semyon Strogov. In Ghost of Moscow players had to use stealth to resolve different missions and kill enemies without being detected, exploring non-linear levels with multiple ways of completing objectives, somehow similar to the Hitman series.
As one member of Haggard Games explains, Death to Spies 3: Ghost of Moscow was originally canned because of internal changes at 1C Company:
“Not related to the game. It’s more of their change in business strategy. They closed almost all projects in development and all their internal studios after financial problems and focused only on distribution/publishing already finished products.”
To continue development of the title, Haggard Games ran two crowdfunding campaigns: one on Indiegogo in 2013 and another on Kickstarter in 2014. Unfortunately both campaigns failed to reach the funding goal but they were later able to collaborate with Maximum Games to continue the development of the game as Alekhine’s Gun. This new version follows the same SMERSH (now KGB) agent, Semyon Strogov, who was recruited in the CIA during the 1960’s to untangle a plot inside the United States that could spark nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States.
The original beta version of Death to Spies 3 had two other playable characters: Olga Godunova-Lopes and Victor Kovalev. Players could switch between each character at any time during a mission. Alexegy Agamalov, lead developer of Haggard Games was able to provide more details about some the cuts and changes made on the game:
Matt Redmond: I’ve noticed from media, such as screen shots that Victor Kovalev and Olga Godunova-Lopes were to be playable. Was that removed for gameplay balance or to focus the narrative on Semyon Strogov?
Alexegy Agamalov: They were removed because of complexity. It was too much work to design/balance/playtest/focus test/etc.. And we had to cut some features to release the game in time. (After we signed with Maximum Games additional work related to consoles were added). Story also did change, some levels were redesigned to be played by Semyon only.
MR: What kind of abilities were planned for Victor and Olga?
AA: Olga was able to attract guards and other NPC’s, also climbing into some special places (such as small passages not wide enough for the men). Victor was a sniper and knife master, able to hide in shadows or grass. Semyon was able to use disguises.
MR: How was the story modified as the characters were reduced to only Semyon?
AA: Story was completely changed. First story was based mostly on Bay of Pigs invasion. We also had to change the story because rights on it belonged to our previous publisher.. Well, mostly there was gameplay feature cuts (like removing multi-characters), levels were redesigned. Two of the levels were changed from Cold War era to WW2 era (Dts1 levels remakes).
MR: Did Maximum Games decide to pick up the title as they announced plans that the company wanted to expand their publishing portfolio to more mature/adult games? Or was because of the original gameplay demo? (And how much of the game was completed before Maximum Games picked up the project?)
AA: I can’t speak for Maximum Games, but I guess it was a way for them to expand their portfolio. As for how much it was completed, on the moment of signing with MG, Death to Spies 3 was about half-way completed for features/gameplay and 70% on content (graphics/animations/sounds/etc..)
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