New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

PSP, Sony

Cannon Fodder 3 [PSP – Cancelled]

monokoma
18-10-2009
2 Comments

Cannon Fodder 3 is the cancelled PSP sequel of a series of  war themed RTS / top down shooters developed by Sensible Software, initially released for the Commodore Amiga. On 28 August 2006, Codemasters announced that a brand new version of Cannon Fodder would appear exclusively on the PlayStation Portable. The game would have retained its familiar top down view, and the big heads of the soldiers, and for the first time the game would have been 3D. The game has since been canceled by the publisher. [Info from Wikipedia]

As we can read from an interview with Jon Hare (co-founder of Sensible Software) at Cubed3:

It does upset me that three times we started that project. It was a good project, good design, we had an extremely good team in London to develop it. Unfortunately, through no fault of their own, Codemasters hit economic problems and had to sell the studio, so everything just went.

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

Images:

Others, PC / MAC

[Indie Unseen] Embodiment of Scarlet Devil – Beta / Unused

U64 Staff & Contributors
18-10-2009
3 Comments

Project Touhou is a Japanese PC game series made by one man, ZUN (working under Team Shanghai Alice), and usually, nothing is left over from the beta’s. However, in Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the sixth Touhou game, a character known as Rin Satsuki was originally meant to be a playable character, although was cut out of the final game. Her name still remains in the code, and there is only one official image of her, which originally appeared on ZUN’s website.

Update: as Susumu has make us to notice, this image did not appear on ZUN’s website. It is from the Comiket booklet that shows which doujin circles are appearing at that current event and where and when. It should also be mentioned that the picture has never been official confirmed as being her, but is widely assumed to be her, as she’s never appeared anywhere else.

Also Gabrielwoj, had found other two unused sprites in the game:

Probably, a beta sprite of Rin Satsuki. Strangely enough, it was found in Stage 1 Folder, which maybe Rin Satsuki was to be the Mid-Boss of Stage 1.
Or, it is a beta sprite of Rumia (it has similar animations on her arms, but with some different details)

Those one has been found at the EXTRA stage folder, probably, Koakuma was to be another mid-boss for the stage (or maybe ZUN only recolored the same sprites of Patchouli’s Stage [Stage 4])

Notice from the 2 Images: The white colored sprite is probably for some glow, all the sprites in the game have this “effect”.

Thanks a lot to Takoto, Susumu and Gabrielwoj for the contributions!

Images:

200pxth06rinsatsuki

Others, PC / MAC

Rock [PC – Cancelled]

monokoma
18-10-2009
No Comments

Rock is a space combat sim / mech sim / FPS hybrid that was in development in 1999 / 2000 by Singletrack for PC, but later cancelled because the studio was closed. The team planned to combine 3 genres into a single game, to let the player a lot of freedom in how to resolve the missions. It was an ambitious project, as we can read from a preview published in Computer Gaming World magazine (thanks to Roushimsx on the HG101 Forum):

Imagine a game where you can jump into a tarfighter, dogfight our way to a martian plain, hop out, toss a grenade in a Mech to kill the pilot so you can claim the assault robot for yourself, rampage across a warzone in your new weapons platform and finally jump out and enter a building, killing some fuards before you plat explosives to level it – all of this without any load screens to stall the action.

Cooperative online multiplayer was also planned. After Singletrack closed down, the Rock team ended up moving on to Incognito Entertainment (later purchased by Sony) and started to work on Warhawk for the PS3. You can feel that some of the concepts from Rock were implemented into Warhack.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!

Images:

Unseen News

RS Links: the unseen Syndicate prototypes

monokoma
16-10-2009
2 Comments

syndacateporotos

Robert Seddon has made us to notice an interview that Inc Gamers had with Sean Cooper, creator of Syndicate, a real time strategy / shooter that was released in 1993 for PC and various consoles. The article mentions various prototype Syndicate sequels that were never released, though it doesn’t have much information about them. As we can read:

During his time at EA, Cooper claims he saw a few demo builds of a new Syndicate title and was unimpressed.

“One of [the prototypes] … it was something about using different senses. Something was leaving a scent and the agents were following it. I remember seeing them demo it in a conference room and thinking ‘what are they trying to achieve? what are they doing?'”

We can only wonder if one of those protos could have been the Syndicate game that was in development for the PS2. For now only few artworks of the PS2 version are preserved, but we still did not see any in-game screenshots from it or from the other unseen Syndicate projects.

Thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!