New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Ferrari 360 Challenge [PS2 – Cancelled]

Ferrari 360 Challenge is a cancelled racing game that was in development by Brain in a Jar Games and it would have been published by Acclaim for the Playstation 2. It was one of the first announced PS2 games from Acclaim and it promised an arcade racing engine with two main racing modes, eight different circuits, limited car deformation and two-player split-screen multiplayer. The project was officially cancelled in august 2000, because of high development costs and undisclosed troubles with the Ferrari license.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Full Auto (Inertia) [PC – Cancelled]

Full Auto, also know as Inertia, was one of the first prototypes in development  (in 1997) at Pseudo Interactive and it’s interesting to notice that it had the same name of a game developed by the same company and released in 2006 for the XBOX 360.  Inertia was a car combat game too and we can wonder if this proto influenced somehow FA 360. As we can read in one of developers’s site, the game “… suffered from problems such as feature creep, code bloat, and scheduling overruns, and was eventually cancelled shortly after being featured at Microsoft’s Gamestock ’99 press event. However, the publisher was impressed enough with the potential shown by the game to continue their working relationship with Pseudo Interactive, which is how PI came to be one of the first third party developers working on a title for the XBox console…the title that would in the end be known as Cel Damage.

Some more info can be found in an old press-release:

Players maneuver futuristic combat vehicles and battle their way through the rich, alien and interactive world of “Full Auto,” an advanced 3-D vehicular shooter game. As a car-warrior for hire, gamers custom-build their battle cars and prepare for intense combat missions and death-match battles. Players pit their skills against evil corporate mercenaries or sophisticated mechs in either single-player or Internet multiplayer mode via the MSN™ Gaming Zone (http://www.zone.com/). Players succeed by increasing their wealth and improving their car in this intense, nonlinear action game.

Unrestrained gameplay. Players devise unique strategies on the fly, manage their resources carefully, and uncover hidden surprises in 27 interactive, unrestrained and highly replayable missions, battle arenas and racetracks.

Customizable vehicles. Players design their battle vehicles from a large selection of options — cars, weapons, engines and accessories — to meet the challenges of precision driving and intense shooting battles.

Huge interactive environments. Players delve deep into the secrets of a strange alien planet as they progress through 17 challenging missions, including exploration, assassination, demolition and high-speed chases. Skills are honed in one of 10 arenas as users compete in events such as races, death-match combat, “Capture the Flag” and more. While a special tutorial mission makes gameplay easy to learn, “Full Auto” is difficult to master.

Thanks to Hey Hey and Vicente for the contributions!

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Chachamaru Boukenki 2 [NES – Cancelled]

Chachamaru Boukenki 2 is a cancelled RPG that was in development by Human Entertainment for Famicom/NES. The main character was modeled after a developer at Human that later would appear as referee in a Fire Pro Wrestling for Super Famicom. The bizzare fact about Chachamaru Boukenki 2 is that despite it was never released, the third episode that was planned for Game Boy was actually published. Below you can see what it said to be the only screenshot ever released.

Thanks to GaijinPunch for the help with the japanese language.

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Battle Heat [PC-FX – unused character]

Battle Heat is an animated fighting game developed by Hudson Soft and released for the PC-FX. The video below shown what it seems to be an unused character:

My console fall on the floor and when a try choose a character the game stop for sec and the name Simeon appear.The music is unused too.when you put the cd in the pc engine you can see a girl in the upper upper right in sd form see not in the game.

Article by dfrost

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Rumble: The Mad Match [GBC – Cancelled]

Rumble: The Mad Match is a cancelled fantasy dodge ball game that was in development for the GameBoy Color at Protonic Interactive (also known as Prograph Research) around 2000. The italian team cooked up a game that looks very reminiscent of Neo Geo classic Windjammers only with six (plus one hidden) strange fantasy creatures as players. The goal was to score more points than your opponent by throwing the ball behind him even with the use of special moves.

Here what Massimiliano Calamai, Prograph Research developer at the time,  recalls about the project:

Rumble was designed and completed in a few months in a space of time secondary to the priority projects of Prograph.
Game Boy Color market was already down sharply and we found no publisher interested in publishing; unfortunately at that time you had to have an interesting license or  else paradoxically , even if the product was complete,  it was not worth to be published due to the high cartridge production costs.
The game was never released despite being complete.

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