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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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Projects, Unseen News

[Project] The Axel Project: Half Life 2 beta restoration

U64 Staff & Contributors

27-10-2010

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Founded in 2009, The Axel Project aims to recreate the original Half Life 2 beta leak story line as envisioned by VALVe circa 2003. Their upcoming binary patch features numerous fixes to engine stability as well as the addition of retail engine features (such as background maps, bloom). For a full list of features and fixes, see The Axel Project blog!

Some key highlights:

* Updated water shader
– Fixed blackness
– Improved refraction
* Fixed several engine exploits
* Improved rendering performance
* Updated VGUI (transition effects and improved stability)
* Added FP16 HDR
– With luminance-based bloom
– Controllable via ConVars
* Fixed terrain morphing
* Added background map support
* Updated post processing shaders
* Fixed all reproducible bug reports from Alpha 1
* Fixed BSP V19 and V20 loading algorithm
* Improved overall security of engine and closed several exploits

Leaked, Projects, Unseen News

The cancelled Titan A.E. game is almost restored

U64 Staff & Contributors

20-10-2010

7 Comments

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!

Tau14 (the original demo level)
Trade
Vigo 1st Prime
Drej Ship
Derelic ship

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!

Projects, Unseen News

[Project] The Advent Rising restoration

U64 Staff & Contributors

10-10-2010

No Comments

As we read in the Advent Rising beta article, there were a lot of stuff planned for the game that never made it into the final, especially in the PC version. Advent Revising is a fan-made patch that aims to restore the cinematics of Advent Rising to their intended quality. This English patch adds back thirteen movie files cut from the PC version of the game, corrects cases of desync and playback errors present in cutscenes, corrects and retimes all of the game’s subtitles, enables full 4:3 display with Vsync and trilinear filtering, and adds additional functionality to the player such as teleportation and level skip.

Leaked, Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Sunman [NES – Cancelled]

yota

04-10-2010

6 Comments

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.

Update:

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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