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New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

She Queen Death Machine is a cancelled side-scrolling action game which was in development by Psygnosis in 1995, to be released for PC MS-DOS. No more details remain from this lost game and it was mostly unknown to the public until Grzegorz found a few images hidden in old gaming magazines: Generation 4 (issue 76), Top Secret (issue 37), and Secret Service (May 1995).

In these magazines She Queen Death Machine was described as an exciting action platformer with lots of shooting, punching and explosions. Because of the game’s title and by looking at the characters sprites, it seems the main protagonist was meant to be a female soldier. Other features listed in these short previews were multi-directional screen scrolling, parallax effects, many different weapons to use and bosses at end of levels. One of these levels was described as a military camp with hangars and towers with enemy guards lurking everywhere.

After a few previews in gaming magazines, She Queen Death Machine vanished forever. After Sony acquired Psygnosis in 1993 and released their Playstation in 1995, their resources were switched from PC to the more profitable Playstation market. She Queen Death Machine may be one of the games cancelled because of this.

Thanks to Grzegorz for the contribution!

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Nintendo, Nintendo 64 & 64DD

Metal Slader Glory 2 [Nintendo 64DD – Cancelled]

monokoma

13-02-2018

No Comments

The original Metal Slader Glory is a sci-fi visual novel / graphic adventure developed by HAL Laboratory and published in 1991 for the Nintendo Famicom. The game’s plot is similar to many popular mech-anime series, with a group of young boys and girls fighting against their enemies using cool robots.

As we can read on Wikipedia the game soon became a cult-classic and a sought-after collector’s item in the secondhand market due to its quality and its rarity. This may be the reason why Nintendo and HAL initially decided to create a new Metal Slader Glory for their Nintendo 64 DD Add-on.

As revealed by Metal Slader Glory scenario director & character-designer Yoshimiru (よしみる) in a doujin booklet he published a few years ago and later in a series of tweets, it seems Metal Slader Glory 64 would have been a sequel / prequel, as the main character was planned to be Kisaragi Yayoi, a girl who (as far as we know) is just a secondary NPC in the original Famicom game (plus he also revealed they planned a new character named Uzuki). The team also wanted to use many of the 64DD features, such as its internal clock and rewritable disks.

Unfortunately after a while Metal Slader Glory 2 was cancelled – maybe because Nintendo kept delaying their 64DD – and instead the team developed a simple remake of the first game for the Super Famicom under the title “Metal Slader Glory: Director’s Cut”, later released in 2000 as the last official game ever published for SNES in Japan.

We can only imagine how many more obscure lost cancelled games for N64 are still hidden out there to be discovered one day.

Thanks to VGDensetsu for the contribution!

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Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Moeyo Butaman [NES – Cancelled]

monokoma

13-02-2018

1 Comment

Moeyo Butaman (燃えよぶたマン!?) is a cancelled NES / Famicom game that was in development in 1992 and it would have been published by Sigma Enterprises. Only a couple of (tiny) scans from old japanese gaming magazines remain to remember the existence of this game.

The main protagonist was going to be some kind of super-hero pig, and as noted by GDRI gameplay could have been similar to Time Zone, another action platformer published by Sigma in 1991.

Characters designer for Moeyo Butaman was Gen Sato – a designer / animator who also worked on “Suishou no Dragon” with Squaresoft and on many anime – who seems to have a playable cart of Moeyo Butaman in his personal collection.

We can only hope that one day he could dump the game to preserve it from being lost forever.

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Playstation, Sony

Gotcha! (Relief Ace) [Playstation – Cancelled]

monokoma

13-02-2018

5 Comments

Gotcha! (ガッチャ) is a cancelled Playstation game that was in development by a really obscure Japanese company named “Relief Ace” (リリーフエース), of which we cannot find much information online. Thanks to GDRI we know that Relief Ace published at least two games before vanishing forever, “Shin Fortune Quest: Shokutaku no Kishi-tachi” for Playstation and “Ojousama Express” for Sega Saturn, but none of them looks anything like Gotcha!.

We only know about this lost Playstation game thanks to a video that was uploaded a couple of years ago on Youtube, but later removed (or at least I cannot find it online anymore, so I re-uploaded my backup-copy). From this short promotional teaser it seems Gotcha! could have been some kind of 3D action game in which to find people hiding in the crowd to hit them with a toy hammer.. Or something like that? Yeah, we are not sure.

If you can help to unveil more details about this mysterious game or Relief Ace, please let us know!

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Video:

32X / Mega CD, Sega

Morphs: Flashback 2 [Sega Mega CD – Cancelled]

monokoma

08-02-2018

9 Comments

Morphs: Flashback 2 is the cancelled sequel to the original game developed in 1992 by Delphine Software. As the first game Flashback 2 would have been a 2D sci-fi cinematic platformer and this new chapter was planned for the ill-fated Genesis / Mega Drive’s Sega Mega CD add-on. For some reasons Delphine were huge fans of the Sega Mega Drive, and as told by Paul Cussiet (Flashback’s creator) to Retro Gamer magazine (#118): “The best version for me is the Mega Drive version. The game was created for this platform“.

Flashback 2 was never officially announced by Delphine, but we were able to gather a few details about this lost sequel thanks to Thierry Levastre, a french developer who worked at Delphine as a 2D / 3D artist for many years. Thierry told us that the Flashback team did start working on Flashback 2 after the first one was released, but only an early draft of its story, game intro and a short animation of a mech were done before the project was cancelled.

Initially it seems Delphine decided to move away from sci-fi games and instead started working on a new medieval fantasy adventure titled “Dragon Blade” and a new racing game titled “Enduro Rider”, which later were picked up by BMG Interactive to be published for PC and Playstation in USA. After many years of development Dragon Blade evolved into Darkstone: Evil Reigns (finally published in 1999) and Enduro Rider probably became Moto Racer (finally published in 1997).

We can speculate Delphine had some internal development problems with Dragon Blade and Enduro Rider, as they soon resurrected their Flashback sequel to work again on this idea. They scrapped their classic 2D graphic and rotoscoped animations, to invest their efforts in creating a fully 3D world. In the end the project evolved into “Fade to Black”, the official 3D sequel to Flashback released in 1995 for PC and Playstation. As far as we know, the initial story planned for Flashback 2 was adapted and reused for Fade to Black.

The short Flashback 2 mech animation created by Thierry was running on the Dpoly Editor on Amiga and presumably unreadable, but many years later Gregory Montoir was able to create some kind of web-player which reads DPoly files and this animation can now be seen again in motion (even if a little bugged – choose “mecha”).

It’s interesting to notice that Delphine also worked on the cancelled third chapter of Flashback, titled “Flashback Legends”, in development for GBA in early ‘00s. Unfortunately Delphine had to close down in 2002 for bankruptcy.

Thanks to Thierry for the contribution!

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