Space Fantasy Zone is a cancelled shoot ’em up planned for the PC-Engine, as a weird mix between the original Fantasy Zone and Space Harrier. The game was in development in 1991 by NEC Avenue, but for some reasons it was never released. A playable version was eventually leaked online so if you are interested to know more about the game, you should be able to easily find it with google.
Thanks to Celine and Guilherme Miranda for the contribution!
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The Incredible Shrinking Character is a cancelled action adventure game that was in development by Go-Go Interactive Studios and that would have been published by Cyberdreams for the Playstation, Saturn and PC in 1996. The plot involved a crazy doctor that shrinked the main character with an experimental potion. Players would had to explore the (now) huge laboratory resolving puzzles, to find a way to return to normal. As we can read at Bill Narum’website, former owner of Go Go Studios:
The year is 1959. You are a Private Investigator hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Julie Caldwell, daughter of a wealthy east-coast industrialist family. The subject, in her early twenties, was last reported heading to visit the home and laboratory of Dr. Warren Franklin. […]
On the afternoon of January 30th, you head off to the doctor’s castle for the interview of a lifetime. Unknown to you, Dr. Franklin has laid a trap, and you awaken in a stupor to find yourself only 3 feet tall and gradually shrinking. You realize now that finding Julie will be no simple task. […]
Another reoccurring sound you can’t help but notice is that of a female screaming, most likely the victimized Julie. The volume and intensity increases as you approach the dungeon. You must find the antidote and save Julie soon, but first you must evade becoming dinner for the doctor’s house cat, and numerous other deadly creatures, bats, rats, roaches and ants, etc. that inhabit the mysterious castle.
They planned at least 10 levels in the game, in which the main character would have shrinked more and more each hour, leaving us to deal with big ants and size-based puzzles. A short preview of The Incredible Shrinking Character with some screens were published in NextGeneration magazine issue 14 and some more info on the project can be found at Bill Narum’website. You can even download a playable beta demo for PC! Huge props to Bill for preserving some documents of this lost game!
Thanks to Celine for the contribution! Thanks to Ari for a backup of the demo!
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Based on the animated film with the same name, Titan AE for the playstation and PC was in development in 1999 by Blitz Games, but it was never released. Only a 1-level demo was somehow leaked online, but thanks to John Doom we can now play some more beta levels that were still hidden in there!
To activate these lost levels, you can download John Doom’s patch. Check the video description for more info.
Q:What is “A.E.FULLGAME_v1.ppf” ?
A:It’s a specific patch file for the psx demo disc “Titan A.E. Demo [U] [SLUS-90082]”
Q:So how can I patch the demo?
A:You need the program “PPF-O-MATIC” and a BIN image of “Titan A.E. Demo [U] [SLUS-90082]”. You guessed it! (I hope…): select the demo image in “ISO File” and “A.E.FULLGAME_v1.ppf” in “Patch”. Ok, now press on Apply and… GG! the demo is patched and now you can play 5 levels!
Sunman is an cancelled NES action game made by Sunsoft which was supposed to be released in 1992. The most interesting aspect about this game is that originally Sunman was going to be a Superman game, and playing it is not hard to spot the resemblances: both heroes have a similar costume and the same powers. We don’t know why in the end Sunsoft didn’t get the official license from DC comics but probably the software house thought that it was a bad idea to spend a remarkable amount of money for a game planned for a rapidly aging console.
Other than that, Sunman was just an anonymous side-scroller game with below-average controls and only five stages, not exactly an appealing new entry for the NES market of the time. Nothing too strange, then, that Sunsoft decided to shelf it for good.
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However, Sunsoft’s Superman survives as a Genesis game, as reported on Wikipedia. The game was published in the same year of Sunman’s prototype, 1992. While the graphic is better so that it can fit a 16bit console like Genesis , the game concept is still quite the same as the NES version. In fact, Superman/Sunman’s moves are the same (except that in the Genesis version he can also fire beams from his eyes) and some maps’ design is very close to the NES version. We can actually say that Genesis’ Superman is what we could’ve seen on NES.
John Doom is trying to make a complete Superman NES game using Sunman, creating and replacing Sunman’s sprites with Superman. You can try the game on John Doom’s space. It runs on vnes, an applet nes emulator (You need Java in order to play the game).
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Roadsters 98 is a prototype racing game by Genetic Fantasia, with a gameplay similar to Micro Machines, that seems to have been cancelled in early development. A playable demo exists, thanks to a scene leaked ROM from the old GameBoy Color days. While there is a game called Roadsters released in Europe and USA in 2000, it is completely different from Roadster 98. The release group got access to some beta software which is normal but in this case they probably thought they’d do a nice pre-store but the final game never appeared – unless this is an insanely rare special release no one knows about.
We can speculate that Genetic Fantasia worked on Roadsters GameBoy Color for Titus, but something went wrong and the publisher decided to release a different game.
Thanks a lot to BigFred for the contribution!
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