Shojo R (少女R) is a cancelled Dreamcast game that was in development by Compile in 1999. Unfortunately at the moment we don’t have any detail about the project and its gameplay, only some concept art were found by Videogamesdensetsu on Twitter.
By translating those Twitter messages it seems that Famitsu DreamCast magazine at the time published a short preview of the game (if you know someone who may own this issue, please let us know!). In the west Compile is mostly known for such games as Puyo Puyo (puzzle game) and Aleste (shoot ‘em up), during their lifespan they worked on many different games and it’s hard to say what kind of gameplay this Shojo R could have had.
By the look of the concept art available we can speculate it could have been a third person action / shooter game set in a sci-fi / military setting. In one of the scans we can also read “network game“, but we are not sure if it’s related to Shojo R or it was for something else.
As we can read on Wikipedia in 2003 Compile suffered from bankruptcy and as a result key staff moved to Compile Heart, the company’s spiritual successor, whereas shoot-’em-up staff moved to MileStone Inc.
Shojo R may remain forever as one of the many obscure, unseen cancelled Dreamcast games we’ll never know more about.
Pandemic Studios was the company who developed the Mercenaries series and unfortunately it was shut down in 2009, forcing the studio to cancel 2 projects they were currently working on at the time: Mercenaries 3: No Limits and Mercs Inc.
It is sad and frustrating that Pandemic was shut down as there clearly was a passion behind the creation of this new project. EA boss John Riccitielo at the time really wanted Mercenaries 3 to be released and he confirmed during an interview that if it was up to him that it could go on for a very long time.. going as far as a Mercenaries 10 release.
An article by Cnet explains well the financial struggles EA endured in 2009 and the reason why they felt the need to close Pandemic:
“An Electronic Arts spokesperson confirmed the news to CNET, but called it a consolidation rather than a closing, saying that the company merged Pandemic with EA’s nearby LA campus. The core team of developers integrated into EA will continue to work on Pandemic properties.
Hit by weak game sales, EA has been hurting since last year when it warned that 2009 would be a tough one. The company said at the time that it would need to cut staff, trim product lines, and close studios. EA initially announced job cuts of 10 percent of its workforce, then later revised that to 11 percent. In January, EA also jettisoned Pandemic’s studio in Brisbane, Australia.”
Since the studio closed in 2009 and their last game was released in 2008, Mercenaries 3 didn’t go very far into development. For that reason, not much is known about the game and most of it is sadly up to speculation. Fortunately, we do have a little video showing gameplay footage of what could have been, showing off core mechanics for a few minutes with audio commentary.
During the video, there is a radio conversation between the main character and what we can presume is their boss giving them the mission. The game is set in Cuba 2017 and the protagonist is given directives to meet and escort a journalist for the Russian mafia. You meet her inside a church in an animated black and white placeholder cutscene and shortly afterwards they both drive to where the journalist needs to find proof that ‘Blackfire’ has deployed combat drones. The video ends abruptly with the main character trying to shoot a drone with a machine gun and then with a bazooka.
Since the main character in that video is a character never before seen in the series, it is very likely that its model was a placeholder used for testing purposes until they would have finished creating the real main character for this new game, or maybe it was meant to be a different hero this time around. Sadly we do not have more information about this.
We received details about a few interesting unreleased PS1 / PS2 games that recently appeared on eBay. A couple of these are English versions of Japan-only games which existence was unconfirmed until now, while the third one is a completely cancelled flight combat sim (Update: “Iron Eagle Max” was released as “Side Winder Max” in Japan, thanks to Ozzy2k for the info!):
Every blue moon, something truly special appears on eBay that is undeniably incredible. In this instance, not one, not two, but THREE incredible items have popped up. One unreleased PSX game in final form, and two PS2 games!
PANZER FRONT BIS: Panzer Front Bis. is a follow up to the acclaimed Panzer Front game. Only released in the Japanese language, Panzer Front bis. now has a full and final release in the English language:
POLAROID PETE: Polaroid Pete is the canceled and unreleased English translation of the critically acclaimed Japanese game “Gekisha Boy Gekibo 2”, which has garnered cult classic status.
IRON EAGLE MAX: Iron Eagle Max is an unreleased fighter pilot flight sim. Gameplay has a complete and polished feel. The only information we were able to track down about this game is an old article, cementing it’s legitimacy as a press review disc.
Bonk (also known as “PC Genjin” in Japan and “BC Kid” in Europe) is the name of the main character in a series of platforming games that was started on the PC Engine in 1990 when the first title, Bonk’s Adventure, was developed by Hudson. Bonk soon became the mascot of Hudson in an 8/16-bit market filled with mascot-platformers (Mario, Sonic, etc.) and they released a few sequels for PC Engine and Super Famicom.
When Nintendo announced their Ultra 64 in late 1994 many Japanese companies started to plan 3D versions of their main properties for the 64 bit console and with the showcase of Mario 64 it looked like 3D platforming was finally finding its roots. At the time Hudson had a very good relationship with Nintendo, in 1997 they released Dual Heroes and Bomberman 64, while sometime later they also co-developed Mario Party together, a title that became a popular hit with the N64 user-base.
What most gamers do not know is that in 1995 Hudson in cooperation with A.I Studio (the team that already worked on other PC Genjin titles) were also planning a new, exclusive Bonk game for the Ultra 64, tentatively titled “Ultra Genjin”, that would have been the first 3D Bonk game to be released.
Unfortunately the Ultra Genjin team was still not used to creating 3D platforming games and they were not sure about how to develop this new version of Bonk or how to implement its characteristic 2D design into 3D graphics. In the end they decided to cancel the project and focus on other titles. The images you can see on this page are the only remaining documents on the development of Ultra Genjin with the first draft of Bonk in 3D.
Yoshikawa: Ultra Genjin was being planned during the game industry’s transition from 2D to 3D games. I studied the practical aspects of this quite a bit, but I think that nobody really knew what should be done with games at the time. As a result of trial and error, we were able to adapt the design for Ultra Genjin to Bomberman Hero.”
The last original Bonk game released for consoles remains Cho Genjin 2, published in 1995 for the Super Famicom and the series never had a proper 3D incarnation. Other 3D Bonk games were cancelled many years later including Bonk 3D for Nintendo 3DS and Bonk: Brink of Extinction for Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Because of several financial losses Hudson sold most of its shares to Konami and in 2012 Hudson Soft Co. Ltd completely ceased to exist and fully merged with Konami, losing all of their IPs. It’s currently unknown if we’ll ever see another Bonk game in the future.
Satellite Man was a scrapped, albeit completely finished, game for the SNES by Japanese developer T&E Soft. The game was a comedic side-scrolling brawler akin to Final Fight that featured Satellite Man, a superhero who could harness the power of satellites, as he attempted to make his way to the moon to save it from an evil mastermind who claimed it for himself.
Details of the game are scarce as few people have seen it and it is unlikely that any of it remains to this day, but descriptions of the game by its developers reveal that the game had an absurd sense of humor, such as the fact that the titular hero is broke and has to hitch a ride to the moon on a NASA rocket ship.
The game’s bosses reflected this comedic style as well with “Baron Engine”, a man with a v8 engine for a body who chased the player around in a child’s toy car, a bee who carried explosives appropriately named “Dynamite Bee” and “Captain Go”, an Apollo Lunar Module with a dangling body and a face of a man from T&E’s sales department.
Unlike some of the other side-scrolling fighters at the time Satellite Man was single player only and had a button for punches, kicks, grabs and special attacks. There were three special attacks, two of which were the ability to shoot down a damaging beam from a satellite and the ability to create two shadow versions of yourself to help fight. These special moves were unlocked by filling a recharging “satellite bar” and the player could use three special attacks in a row if the bar was fully charged. In an attempt to make the game seem more like an American comic book the developers added text bubbles like “BOOM” and “POW” that would pop up when enemies were hit.
Despite being 100% finished after half a year of development the game never saw the light of day. This was mostly due to the fact that one of the developers handed a copy of the game to company co-founder Eiji Yokoyama and promised him he would laugh every 30 seconds, to which Yokoyama responded by not laughing once throughout the entire game.
The developers also chalk it up to the fact that T&E had recently worked on the SNES version of Rise of the Robots, a critical and financial failure that is lauded as one of the worst fighting games of all time, and didn’t think they could sell another fighting game so soon afterwards. As many other lost SNES games, not much remains from Satellite Man: a single screenshot was found by Arc Hound in the Mar. ’93 issue of Micom BASIC Magazine, while a sketch and few memories from former T&E Soft developers were published by John Szczepaniak on the “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Volume 2”.
Article by Tristan Avery, thanks to John for the contribution!
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