At the Lost Levels Forums, GDRI has posted an interesting link to a japanese blog, where we can find some scans with screenshots of Devil Buster, a cancelled action / platform game inspired by Megami Tensei, that was in development for Mega Drive / Genesis at SIMS Studios. In the same topic Kid Fenris and kaboro posted some more screens from the game from other magazines. Props to them!
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Developed by Horny Dog and published by Jester Interactive, Hellgate was going to be a third person shooter for the Dreamcast, where to kill demons and going around for the levels with a motorcycle. Sadly the game was cancelled, as we can read on the old Horny Dog website: “The Sega announcement that they were ceasing production of Dreamcast hardware wasn’t much of a help, as well as the fact one or two members of our team didn’t have the game’s best interest at heart. […] We had spent 15 months developing the title, and although many of us felt we achieved so much, it wasn’t enough to save the title.”
Our friends at SuperiorVersion have found some nice screens from this project, you can check them all in here. A video from the intro of the game was later found by Dreamcast.es!
From the old developers website we can still read some interesting informations about the game:
magine a crossover between Quake and WipeOut. Got that image? Hellgate meshes these two genres, with high speed at your fingertips, as well as some meaty weaponry! There will be four gigantic realms to conquer, as well as ten formidable weapons to defeat the many demons and monsters lurking within Hell.
We will also be supporting Dreamcast’s online capabilities with online Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Sumo and Time Trial modes, and also feature offline 4 player Deathmatch and link-up Deathmatch modes. The exciting thing is, Hellgate could well be the first Dreamcast game to support 12 – yes – 12 people.
In March 2009, a playable beta was somehow leaked and now you can download it and try Hellgate on your Dreamcast! Thanks to X-Cult for the file mirror
Thanks a lot to Borman & Dreamcast.es for the contribution!
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Redline 2 (also know as Redline Arena) was the sequel of Redline, a post-apocalyptic combination of FPS / Car Combat game that was released in 1999 for the PC. Redline Arena was going to be developed for the SEGA Dreamcast: a small team from Beyond Games worked on a playable PC prototype for about 6 weeks, starting with an updated-port of the first game. New features and improved AI were added, with more vehicles and weapons.
An online multiplayer mode was expected too, but it seems that “the Dreamcast’s networking setup was not in sync with the Redline networking code. Lag and latency were going to be serious buzz-kills. Addressing this incompatibility was going to be a monumental task, and ultimately, the project was dropped”.
Even if the game was cancelled for the Dreamcast, somehow the development was shifted to the PS2: the project would eventually become Motor Mayhem, a game that was released in 2001. Early prototypes of Motor Mayhem were built to run in the Redline Arena engine, and so would be its best and last innovations.
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Kiddo has made us to notice about a beta trailer for Mega Man: The Wily Wars (a compilation from Capcom containing remakes of the first three games) that shows an incomplete, buggy version where Mega Man doesn’t die, his jump animations don’t appear right half the time, and various other funny little things.
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Mortal Kombat 4 is considered the 4th intallment of the Mortal Kombat series, 6th if you count MK3U and MKT. Released in 1997, it was the first MK game to use 3D graphics. It was first released in the arcade version and it would be the last arcade MK made. It was released on the N64, Playstation and PC in 1998, ported by Eurocom. An updated version was released on Dreamcast in 1999 called Mortal Kombat Gold, which was identical with the exception of better graphics, added players and a few more stages.
A new character named Belokk was intended to appear in Mortal Kombat Gold, but was cut from the released game. The developer of the game, Eurocom, sent information about the game with Belokk to Game Informer, and as a result, six screenshots of him were published. According to Ed Boon, Belokk was cut due to time constraints during development. Despite the mention of Belokk’s scrap, he was still rumored to appear as a secret character. [Infos from Wikipedia]
Actual secret characters can be accessed via rotating a specific box for a normal character, however when a player do this to Tanya’s box a question mark that was rumored to unlock Belokk appears, but it unlock nothing.
Since it was the first Midway 3D fighting game, the staff had many difficulties while in development, partly due to the fact the staff had doubled in size. Which means many changes were made and many interesting aspects were taken out.
Differences from the arcade version to the N64 version would include: Lower pixel rate and additions such as Goro being a playable character, extra costumes, and another arena called Ice Pit.
Pre-release trailers show Reptile and Fujin with God-O-Mite as their name in the lifebars. More then likely this was before they got to the name detail.
Kitana, Noob Saibot and Kano were orignally going to be in MK4. Kitana was then changed to Tanya. Noob saibot was taken in and out many times and replaced with Reiko. Jarek replaced Kano and for some reason was left with Kano’s moves, which caused many fans to complain because Jarek was hardly original. Noob Saibot can be accessed in the N64 version by a cheat, but was never in the Arcade. These characters were taken out mainly because Midway wanted more new characters in the game.
The hidden character Meat was originaly intended for testing.
Thanks to Pachuka and Sir_Brando for the contributions!
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