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The Lost [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

The Lost was an action adventure/survival horror game co-developed by Irrational Games (the makers of Bioshock) and FXLabs. Set to be released in 2002 for the Playstation 2 and Xbox game consoles, The Lost went through several phases of development hell until it was cancelled.

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The Lost was heavily inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, particularly Inferno. The setting was present day, and the main character was a waitress/medical student named Amanda Wright. Amanda was a single mother who has lost her only daughter, Beatrice, in a tragic car accident. Desperate and suicidal, Amanda made a deal with the devil. Selling her soul, she was given the chance to plunge into the bowels of a concentration camp-esque hell in an attempt to rescue her daughter’s soul. The only aids she had in the bowels of hell are Virgil, a strange reptilian creature who Amanda must free from an enchanted sword, and four hellish beings called the Entities.

Each Entity was playable, with their own special abilities.

* Shadow: A thief-like character, Shadow specializes in stealth and deception.
* Light: Adept in defensive spell-casting, Light can also provide healing spells.
* Corruption: An emaciated mage that performs powerful, offensive spells.
* Instinct: A sword-wielding character that is best used in close combat.

The Lost’s development period had always been relatively rocky. Playable models of the game had been described as unstable, with a jittery framerate. The developer chose to retool the graphics engine in mid-development. Also, Crave Entertainment changed The Lost’s traditional publishing model to a budget game model. Eventually, legal problems amassed, and the completed game was canceled.

In March 2008 it was reported that all development and rights to The Lost was acquired by FXLabs, who later released the game for Windows PCs in India under the title Agni: Queen of Darkness. Agni is thought to feature redone art but keeps basic plot and gameplay elements intact. [Info from Wikipedia]

Chentzilla has gave us some more informations about these The Lost /Agni connections: “There are 4 characters in Agni (plus some more whom the heroine carries within her, but they are not playable). They look different from the ones in The Lost, but have similar abilities. Many other aspects of the prototype are also there, like Irrational’s trademark cameras and turrets (though the design is also different from ‘normal’ turrets and cameras, and from what we have seen in the beta videos as well).

Some things that were promised were cut, like the ability to spend skill points at will, but I actually think that a good thing – sometimes it’s better to simplify the game. Much worse are bugs in scripting – you can simply get stuck in several places, forced to reload an earlier checkpoint (yes, the save system is checkpoints-only). It’s possible that some of the ideas of The Lost ended up in BioShock too.

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A comparison video for Shadow/Ghayab character in The Lost/Agni (published as Inferno in Russia).

 

Nightmare Creatures 3 [XBOX/PS2/GC – Cancelled]

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Nightmare Creatures 3: Angel of Darkness was initially announced for a Spring 2003 release for Sony’s PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft’s Xbox, but the game soon fell into development hell. It began development at Kalisto Entertainment in 2002 and Ubisoft obtained the publishing rights, but Kalisto soon went out of business and Ubisoft assumed development duties. Kalisto’s apparent concept of the game involved a heroine exploring 19th century Prague during the daytime and merging with a raven at nightfall to transform into a beast and battle Adam Crowley’s monsters, but Ubisoft reportedly began designing the game from the ground up when it gained control over the game’s development and it’s unknown whether Kalisto’s original concept remained intact.

Spring 2003 came and went with no news on the title. In 2004, Ubisoft representatives claimed the game had not been cancelled, but the company has remained quiet about Nightmare Creatures 3 ever since.

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6Gun [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

BattleBourne was working on  squad-based shooter entitled 6Gun, which looked rather like SOCOM. A submarine in Primorsk has been boarded and destroyed by a nuclear device, wiping out a whole SEAL team. The Gunslingers – the team the player controls – are sent in to sort things out. There were four campaigns and 12 levels, with missions including hostage rescues, demolitions, sniping, and parachute insertions.

[Contribute by Matt Gander from www.gamesasylum.com]

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100 Bullets (by Acclaim) [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

Acclaim announced plans to release a video game based on 100 Bullets. However, following the collapse of Acclaim’s publishing house, the game has essentially been cancelled. It was intended that the player would be either Cole Burns or Snow Falls (a completely original character) and play in a third person view. The plot was generally unknown, aside from a supposition that it followed the plot of the comic book.

Later D3Publishing obtained the rights from Warner Bros. to publish a 100 Bullets game. They intend to make a video game completely independent from Acclaim’s aborted vision, but still heavily reliant on input and plotting from Brian Azzarello. Not much it currently know about the D3 version and it could have been cancelled too. [Infos from Wikipedia]

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