New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

[Projects] Updates on the Zelda 64 Beta Restoration

What Happened to Team Beta Triforce? It has been many long months, and this article is here to explain why TBT suddenly dissapeared off the face of the internet. The leader of Team Beta Triforce, ZeldaMaster90 aka ZM90 was overthrown, the project was made open source and leaderless, and TBT was renamed Z64 Bros.

The revival of TBT started with Z64 Bros members ZeldaMaster90, Flotonic, and ChampionMan. The trio decided that open source was not right for the project and decided to start a secret revival of TBT. ChampionMan removed all videos from the TBT Youtube account which created the illusion of a more dead TBT.

One day Jani, Medli, and ZM90 noticed the Zelda hacking community was in bad shape and decided the revival of TBT was now more important than ever and thus TBT was reborn with most of it’s members.

Currently ZM90 has not touched the beta restoration stuff in months and TBT just recently reformed, they are not done with the demo, and they are just getting things back to normal. Their plan is to release a playable demo of the Zelda 64 Beta Restoration in the following months. You can check the Z64 Beta Restoration page for more info and media.

Gimmick Land [GBC – Unreleased]

After AlphaDream (the team behind the Mario & Luigi RPGs) developed and released their very first video game title, Koto Battle: Tengai no Moribito for the Nintendo Game Boy Color only in Japan, Nintendo wanted AlphaDream’s permission to develop an entirely new RPG with them, titled Gimmick Land. It was finished and almost ready to be released for the Game Boy Color in Japan, until Nintendo released the Game Boy Advance to make the Game Boy Color obsolete. After noticing that, AlphaDream decided to redevelop and rename Gimmick Land as Tomato Adventure for the Game Boy Advance. Only two screenshots of Gimmick Land were released to the public by the developers. [Info from Wikipedia]

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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Sonic 2 (8Bit) [GG/MS – Beta]

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a side-scrolling platform developed by Aspect Co and published by Sega for the Master System and Game Gear, released before the 16-bit version for the Mega Drive / Genesis. Jean-François was able to find a few beta-screens (Game Gear version) from an old magazine, in which we can notice some differences in the HUD and in an image with Pib Badnik: in the final it’s a boss in Gimmick Mountain Zone (one of the last levels) but it appears here in a sort of Green Hill-alike level (with differents palmtrees) and with Robotnik at the same time!

Thanks a lot to Jean-François for the contribution!

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Final Fantasy IV (4) [SNES – Beta & Unused Stuff]

As we can read in Wikipedia, Final Fantasy 4 was developed and published by Squaresoft in 1991 as a part of the Final Fantasy series. The game was originally released for the Super Famicom in Japan, but has been ported with minor changes to the Super Nintendo in USA, re-titled as “Final Fantasy II” due to it being the second of the series released there.

After completing Final Fantasy III for the Famicom (NES) in 1990, Square planned to develop two Final Fantasy games—one for the Nintendo Famicom and the other for the forthcoming Super Famicom (SNES), to be known as Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy V respectively.

Due to financial and scheduling constraints, Square dropped plans for the Famicom game and continued development of the Super Famicom version, retitled Final Fantasy IV. A mock-up screenshot of the cancelled Final Fantasy 4 for the Famicom / NES was produced for a Japanese magazine.

In the released Final Fantasy 4, fans of the saga found some unused stuff still hidden in the game. One of the characters you get at the beginning of the game, Kain, has an unused spell casting animation. In the Slick Productions Forums you can read a theory about where his magic spell list is and see Kain in game using the spell.

Yang, another character that you get and lose and get again, during the battle against him, has an attack text-script, and that includes a script for a character in your party, but it seems that the developers “Dummied” it out. The same script has Yang attack Kain, but at this point, you don’t HAVE Kain in your party, hinting at a possible different story event. Another unseen event was hinted at in the code with a character named “Anna”, she has battle animations and everything but they were never used. More info can be found in here.

Also, there’s a picture of the back of FFIV’s japanese case, shows something that doesn’t happen in the game itself anymore. And another beta picture was found in Nintendo power. As Deathlike2 explained in the GameFAQS forum:

It looks like DK Cecil, Kain, and Yang with Young Rydia and Rosa. None of that is normally possible.

1) Fire2/Fira cannot be learned by Young Rydia until she comes back as Older Rydia.

2) Kain leaves right after the Mist event.

3) That enemy formation does exist, but not in a castle environment (the battle @ Fabul never has such a formation).

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Ascendant (Dungeons) [PS3/X360/PC – Beta]

As reported before, Big Huge Games was working on a new, THQ-published RPG for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. When THQ was hit by financial troubles, Big Huge Games was sold to 38 Studios where it seems that they still work on Ken Rolston’s new “masterpiece”. It’s currently unknown if this game will ever be released. Read more