New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Star Wars: Battlefront [Beta – Xbox / PS2 / PC]

Star Wars: Battlefront is an action game developed by Pandemic Studios and LucasArts, and released on September 2004 for PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC. Development for Star Wars Battlefront began at Pandemic Studios in 2002. Greg Burrod, executive producer on Battlefront stated “We wanted to create an online shooter title for the Xbox, PS2, and PC which would allow for team strategy and would feature battles and worlds from every one of the six Star Wars films.”

A beta version of Battlefront was released as an extras DVD for one of the trilogy sets. It’s quite interesting and has a lot of ideas that were not in the final version. The build date is February 03 2004, 8 months before the final version was released. Also, the HUD was different and the graphic was still unfinished.

Stranno posted a video and some comparison-screens between the beta and the final version on the Assembler Games Forum!

Videos:

Iridion [GBC – Cancelled]

Shin’en Multimedia was founded in 1999 by coders from the Amiga demoscene.
Manfred Linzner, one of the founders, always had the desire to develop an horizontal shoot-em-up for the beloved Amiga computer but after just programming one stage the project was abandoned.
When the Munich based developer decided to focus to the Game Boy Color the idea of creating a shooter was still alive and they started work on it.
According to developer, Iridion was a horizontally scrolling shooter that pushed the Game Boy Color’s hardware to the maximum with never-before-seen (on the Game Boy) graphical effects.
With the help of its proprietary graphics, coding and music tools, Shin’en was promising some impressive technical feats, like 128 colors simultaneously on screen, smooth two-way parallax scrolling, multi-color overlay-sprites, 3D-rendered animation sequences and more elaborate music pieces than most other Game Boy titles.
The game was planned to have 8 stages, 9 bosses and 12 weapons to dispose the enemies with.
Anyway, after just an excellent one level demo, Shin’en, recognizing that original GBC games were almost impossible to market, dropped this project as well.

When Shin’en shifted their focus to the Game Boy Advance, Iridion was their first game to appear on the “new” system.
Iridion 3D was then released in 2001 for the GBA with commercial success and thus began Shin’en technical excellency on Nintendo platforms that continues to this days with the recently released Nano Assault for Nintendo 3DS.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

Images (GBC version):

Video from the final GBA version:

Jackal [Wii – Prototype]

In 2009, images about an undisclosed project for Wii appeared on 3d artist Eric Testroete’ site. The pictures resemble very closely a 3d rendition of Konami old military game Jackal released in 1986 in the arcades. In light of Konami revival of its older franchises on Wii under the Rebirth brand-name ( Contra, Castlevania, Gradius ) a new Jackal could have been in the card. Too bad it seems the project never went further than that working prototype.

Images:


Cool Boarders: Sold Out [PS2 – Cancelled]

Cool Boarders: Sold Out  is a cancelled game that was in development in 2002 for the PlayStation 2, by Idol Minds. The Cool Boarders series is a snow boarding racing simulator, that was initially developed by UEP Systems for the original PlayStation in 1996. In terms of gameplay, Cool Boarders: Sold Out was probably going to be similar to the previous Cool Boarders games, but it’s a different game than the japanese-only Cool Boarders: Code Alien.  Some 3D models from the game, created by Jason Stempel, are saved below, to preserve the existence of this lost project.

Tech. Notes on the Character Models:

“Concept Artist Jason Burch provided front and side orthogonal concept sketches and it was my responsibility to match the exact likeness of the illustration style and character silhouette.”

“Each character was constructed for use during gameplay and IGCS so each had an articulated face with work, eyes, brow, mouth, jaw and hair joints and also articulated finger control.”

“Modeling and texturing of each character ranged from 3-4 days”

Thanks to Superannuation for the contribution!

Images:

echochrome [Beta – PSP / PS3]

As we can read from Wikipedia, Echochrome  is a puzzle game created by Sony’s JAPAN Studio and Game Yarouze, which is available for PlayStation 3 and PSP. Gameplay involves a mannequin figure traversing a rotatable world where physics and reality depend on perspective. The world is occupied by Oscar Reutersvärd’s impossible constructions. This concept is inspired by M. C. Escher’s artwork, such as “Relativity”. At Siggraph 2007 Art Exhibit Sony shown a beta / concept version of Echochrome, with a nice level-debug editor.

Post by The Monokariba (AKA Monokiba), thanks to bruto77 for the video below!

Videos: