New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Saint Row 2 [X360/PS3/PC – Beta]

Saints Row 2 is a sandbox / action game game developed by Volition Inc and published by THQ for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008. James Tsai,  SR2’s Lead Designer, in and interview with IGN revealed that some content had to be removed from the game before it was published:

JT: In the early stages of development we had some really crass stuff in the game, the kind of things that put you in that weird place where you’re laughing and squirming uncomfortably with guilt at the same time. One prototype had you driving a truck full of smuggled underage foreign prostitutes across the city while rival pimps rammed into you, knocking the girls out and cutting into your human trafficking profits. Another had you using a high pressure fire hose to wash homeless people off the street and into the gutter. Not exactly Nobel Prize material.

There was a lot of stuff we had in that didn’t register very high on the human decency scale, so we dialed some things back. For instance we changed the gender of the first character you encounter, since beating a female doctor to death with an IV stand wasn’t the impression we wanted to leave with the very first player action in the game. Instead, we have you beat a male doctor to death with an IV stand, to ease you into the killing.

From the early screens we can also notice various beta differences:

  • You can not customize characters in youe crib in the final
  • There was a different looking crib
  • Hideout has a different appearance
  • A pic shows  a cutscene that was removed

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TransWorld Skateboarding [XBOX – Cancelled]

TransWorld Skateboarding is a cancelled sport / skateboarding game that was in development by Barking Dog Studios in 2001, for the original Xbox. The project was announced at E3 2001, when Infogrames unveiled 3 Transworld Games: Skateboarding, Snowboarding and Surf. In the end only the snowboard and surf games were released, while Skateboarding was cancelled, maybe because of the low scores and sales of the other 2 projects.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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Valerian [PSX – Prototype]

Valerian is a cancelled Playstation game that was in development in 1998 by Virtual Studio, a french team owned (?) by Infogrames. There are not many info on the project but thanks to Daydi we found out that the game was based on a french comic, “Valérian and Laureline”. The character model that can be seen in one of the images, it’s identical to the comic’s male protagonist. As we can read on Wikipedia:

The series centres around the adventures of the spatio-temporal agent, the dark-haired Valérian, and his redheaded female companion, Laureline, as they travel the universe through space and time. Valérian is a classical anti-hero, strong and brave but with a tendency to follow the orders of his superiors even if he feels, deep down, that it is the wrong thing to do. […] Influenced by classic literary science fiction, the series combines elements of space opera and time travel.

The game was probably going to follow the comic’s plot, and the player would have been able to explore levels in different spaces and times. We can speculate that Virtual Studio tried to pitch a game based on the comic to some french publishers, but without any success. In the end  a game based on the Valerian comic was never relased and only few target renders remain, saved in the gallery below to preserve its existence.

Thanks to Daydi for the contribution!

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Radio Flyer [SNES – Cancelled]

Radio Flyer is a cancelled flying game that was in development by Ocean in 1992 for the Super Nintendo. It seems that the project was based on the film with the same name from Columbia Pictures, in which 2 young brothers escape their chaotic family life with dreams of flying. Inspired by a local legend, they attempt to build a working airplane from their ordinary red wagon.

Celine was able to find a couple fo screenshot from the game in Console Mania #13 (an italian magazine), PlayerOne #23 and EGM #25. Looking at those we can speculate that Radio Flyer could have been somehow similar to Pilot Wings SNES. The project was canned for unknown reasons but as Evan G from SNES Central has wrote, it could be because the movie was a flop / sucked.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Ambrosia Odyssey [PS2 – Cancelled]

Ambrosia Odyssey is a cancelled Action RPG with online multiplayer that was in development for the Playstation 2 in 2003 by Rocket Studio with help from KAI Graphics (for CG movies) and Supersweep (for music), meant to be published by Square Enix. The game had a multiple branching storyline  in offline mode, in which you were able to create towns and foster their development to follow different plots, then connect online to share your game world with other players and visit their own towns and stories.

A video of the game was shown at the Tokyo Game Show 2003, but it only has some characters creation footage, blurred combats and a pre-rendered FMV (thanks a lot to CRC for preserving this video!).

An online beta testing was planned for spring 2004 (?), but we are not sure if it really happened before the cancellation. Ambrosia Odyssey was soon removed from Square Enix release list, maybe because of the popularity of their other online game, Final Fantasy XI.

Thanks to Userdante for the contribution!

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