PSP

God of War: Chains of Olympus [PSP – Beta]

God of War: Chains of Olympus is an action adventure developed by Ready at Dawn and released in march 2008 for the PSP. As we can read on Wikipedia, the game had already been in the development stages just before the completion of Daxter, when Ready At Dawn pitched the idea of a God of War game for the PSP to SCEA’s Santa Monica Studios.

In an interview after the game was completed, director Ru Weerasuriya stated that several things had to be cut from the game given time constraints. These included multiplayer and co-op aspects as well as other puzzles, characters and dialogue

Also, from an article at Industry Gamers, we found out that the game could have been a side scroller action game:

Dana Jan, lead level designer on the game, revealed that Ready at Dawn briefly thought about making the game 2-D. “There were early discussions of making Chains of Olympus a side-scroller rather than 3D in case the experience couldn’t be fully realized on a handheld,” he said. “This really fueled us to prove that it could be done.”

In the gallery below you can see some footage (thanks to L1qu1dSnak3‘s YT channel1) from the early development of the game: the “Making of Attica” (prototype of the first level) and “The Lost Levels” (removed areas and scenes) videos can be unlocked in the final game (Beat the game in God mode and finish the Challenge of Hades).

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Sticky Balls [PSP – Cancelled]

Sticky Balls is a cancelled puzzle game that was in development for the PSP.  As we can read on Wikipedia, the project was developed by Zed Two initially for Pocket PCs. After Zed Two was bought out by Warthog, a new version was in development for the PSP, until Warthog was bought out by Tiger Telematics and development was switched to the Gizmondo. The game was finally published for the Gizmondo, but it was different from the PSP one (that before being cancelled became more similar to Monkey Balls / Kororinpa).

At the Pickford Bros website (that worked on Sticky Balls) we can read some more info on its development:

Designed with the Pocket PC’s touch screen in mind, the game was prototyped on the PC in Blitz Basic and given to friends and people in the office to play, and even made available for free download from zedtwo.com, but not neccessarily intended as commercial product. The demo ended up being passed around the UK video game industry, and in response to the surprising popularity we developed the game a little further, and opened a website to keep track of hi-score tables.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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Painkiller: Hell Wars [PSP – Cancelled]

Painkiller: Hell Wars is a cancelled FPS that was in development in 2006 by czech studio Mindware Studios (which also developed Painkiller: Overdose and a spiritual successor, Dreamkiller), that would have been published by DreamCatcher Interactive for the PSP. The original Painkiller was released in 2004 for PC and in 2006 a port titled “Hell Wars” was published for the Xbox, but the PSP one would have been different from the other versions. As we can read in a Gamespot preview from E3 2006:

The game’s content appears to be mostly new, with new monsters, weapons, and levels, as opposed to Hell Wars for the Xbox, which was mostly a port of existing PC content.

Sadly Painkiller Hell Wars was never released for the PSP: only few images  and a trailer are available, but the ingame scenes dont seem to be from the PSP version. It’s currently unknown how much of the game was completed before its cancellation.

Thanks to Userdante and Jaxx for the contributions!

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Zero Hour [PSP – Cancelled]

Zero Hour is a cancelled third person shooter / action game that was in development by Argonaut Games for the PSP.  The project started out as a Playstation 2 game, but when Argonaut got PSP early development-kits, they decided to port Zero Hour to the portable console. A demo for the PSP version was shown at E3 2004, but in late October of the same year, Argonaut fired 100 employees and was put up for sale. Lack of a constant stream of deals with publishers led to cashflow issues and a profit warning earlier in the year. Zero Hour vanished with the closure of the studio.

Thanks to USERDANTE and Tanguy for the contributions!

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