Star Blade: Operation Blue Planet is a cancelled arcade on-rails shooter that was being developed by Namco. It was supposed to be a sequel of the first Star Blade, originally released in 1991. A proto of the coin-op was playable at Amusement Machine Show in 2001, but the game got quietly canceled, probably because the cabinet was too expensive.
The cabinet was known as “Over Reality Booster System” (ORBS). Its main feature was a special lens that projected a 180 degree image in order to create a very immersive experience for the player.
A few months before the release of the original Wonderswan (March 4, 1999) french magazine PlayerOne issue 92 had a small article about the new platform in which it was shown an image about a mysterious vertical shooter. Overall Wonderswan (and future revision) only had an handful of shmups (Space Invader, SD Gundam Operation U.C., Project E-Force, Judgement Silversword, Cardinal Sins and Run=Dim) and none of them looks like the game shown before the launch.
If you have more info about this project please let us know!
Bloodrayne Betrayal is an action game developed by WayForward that was released in 2011 for Xbox 360 XBLA and PS3 PSN. In the screenshots below we can see some concept arts of the characters and of the levels, both of which changed quite a lot during the development.
Shin’en Multimedia is a development team that was known on Game Boy Advance for the amazing proprietary sound engine and the beautiful 2D graphics of its games (Iridion II, Maya The Bee Sweet Gold etc.). However it is little known that as early as 2001 they were testing polygonal graphics on the little Nintendo handheld with a top down futuristic racing game that resembles F-Zero.
Manfred Linzner, Shin’en co-founder, shared with us the following insights on their 3D engine and the GBA development in general:
We had at this time [2001] a pretty fast 3d engine for flat and textured polygons on GBA running. We used it in some menu parts in Iridion2 and for intros of our games. It featured 16 colors, 60fps, 1×1 resolution. The major performance trick for all of our games and this 3d engine was to use the GBAs 16kb ram-scratchpad area to locate as much data and code there because it was much faster then the rest of the ram. I remember that almost everything in Iridion2 was running in only this 16kb to get the speed we needed. The rest of the RAM was used to store the background images.
Although the project was never completed because Shin’en had too much retail work to do at that time, a decade later the company released on Wiiware the jaw-dropping F.A.S.T. Racing League, a futuristic racing game with a Wipeout aesthetic but with a very personal twist on the gameplay department based on changing phase.
Manfred was so kind to dig out a 11 year old prototype to preserve its existence to the public. You can watch the video below, just keep in mind that being a “work in progress” build it has some glitches (most notably the sound). Also remember that the game target was the tiny GBA screen (240 x 160), so the graphics result stretched out on youtube.
Racer Prototype Credits:
Graphics: Florian Freisleder
Code+Audio: Manfred Linzner
This image from Iridion II show the icons composed by textured 3d polygons:
Space Agency is a cancelled action-rpg planned for the Nintendo DS that was being developed by Audio Inc, the same people behind Contact and Sakura Note. A video of the game was uploaded on youtube by the team in 2009 , but sadly the project never found any publisher, probably because the other Audio Inc titles performed very poorly. The player controlled a new member of the Space Agency, an organization created in order to defend planets from the space pirates.
By exploring the planets and by interacting with the local populations we could acquire various new skills.
It seems also that we had to fight in space with our spaceship and answer help calls.
If you have other informations about this game please let us know!
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