Green Beret, retitled Rush’n Attack in North America, is an action / platform arcade game released by Konami in 1985. In february 2009, www.coplanet.it made an interview with Naps Team, in which they revealed that a Gameboy Color port of Green Beret was in development in late 2000. Sadly the project was cancelled, probably because of the near release date of the new Gameboy Advance.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution and to Vaettur for the logo!
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Also know as “Turrican 64”, Thornado was an action game / third person shooter that was in development at Factor 5 as a spiritual successor to the Turrican series, but with some inspiration from Metroid. This project was originally announced for the Nintendo 64, but it seems that only an early prototype / tech demo was created before it was put on hold, probably because Factor 5 was too busy to work on Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.
Originally they wanted to call the game “Turrican 64” but they could not settle on an agreement with the rights owner of the “Turrican” franchise, Rainbow Arts / Softgold. Eggebrecht said that it was internally referred to as “Thornado”, a mixture of “Thor” and “Tornado”.
The game would had featured eight levels with shooting and puzzles elements. Additionally, the game had two protagonists, a male and a female The music would have been done by Chris Huelsbeck again and a sample is still available to download from the official F5 website.
As we can see from the few screens below, F5 realized a nice Target Render for Thornado 64, that was used to show how the game would have looked on the Nintendo console. The scene shows a scenario from the end of time, in which you had to jump over cars, shots to enemies and then fight an huge final boss. That’s only a tech demo though and probably they never created a playable one.
After some time and many delays, Thornado was cancelled for the N64 and Factor 5 tried to move it to the new “Dolphin” hardware (later know as the GameCube). As we know, even Thornado GameCube was cancelled and after so many years the project vanished forever from the gaming world.
Thanks a lot to Celine for the contribution!
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Panzer Dragoon Saga is a RPG released for the Sega Saturn in 1998. It was the third Panzer Dragoon game to be released and so far it remains the only game in the series that is not a rail shooter. Like the other Panzer Dragoon games on the Saturn, it was developed by Sega’s internal Team Andromeda development studio. The team disbanded after Saga’s release. [Infos from Wikipedia]
As we can read in an interesting article from The Will of the Ancients, in the early screenshots of the game we can see a beta HUD, unfinished environments, changes in the character placements and other minor differences. Also, in this other article we can read that some unused text is still hidden in the code: “If you put one of the Panzer Dragoon Saga game discs into your PC and open certain files in a text editor, you’ll be able to read the script for the game, which is all stored as normal text. […] However, virtually every section of text contains some lines of script that don’t appear in the finished game; there are bits of conversations that don’t take place, descriptions of items that don’t exist, and other odd things besides.”
In May 2008 Hidden Palace, thanks to donations from The Will of the Ancients community, released various beta versions of the game (from 1996 and 1997) with some differences like a removed Dermot’s Ranch camp area, missing Village of Cainus, different controls & english translation.
Also, Evilhamwizard was able to find a debug menu in the Panzer Dragoon Saga beta (Sept 16 1997 build):
Now, this appears to be the only debug that’s activated for the moment. For some reason, the battle system, the world map (I guess) system, and the menu/title screens don’t have debugs. I went though many of the PRG files, and it appears that some boss battles have special debugs enabled. But I’m not sure. The game DOES have a map select, battle select, and a sound test that’s all on the title screen (the files for the sound test still exist in this build as well as the final, I believe).[…]
Now onto the debug itself. Like I said, this debug in particular can only be loaded on a FIELD map. To get the debug to show up, however, is easy and only requires a second controller (you could probably use one controller and just switch ports). To enable it, you have to press START first to get it to show up on the second controller. Then you have to move the dpad a little to highlight what you want. After pressing start for the first time, you can then use the R button to call up the debug screen with the second controller as well. To select anything from the list, I believe I used the A button. To mess with the variables, ABC on the second controller decrease the values while XYZ increase them.
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Resident Evil 5 was officially announced on June 2005, but it was shown to the public for the first time only two months later in a CG trailer. Capcom created another trailer for the game in 2007. Even in the last year of the development Capcom was still moving things around. For example, the crash site of the helicopter was originally a fully playable section, not a series of QTE. >>> Read the full article: Resident Evil 5 Beta Analysis
Article by yota
Resident Evil 5 was officially announced on June 2005, but it was shown for the first time to the public only two months later in a CG trailer. This video was essentially one of the concepts that the developers were working on since the release of Resident Evil 4: in what at time seemed to be the Middle East or Africa, we saw Chris exploring the alleys of a city and then being attacked by a group of enemies.
The graphics style and the general mood were already much similar to the released game, even if Chris looked somewhat younger and less bulky.It is interesting to note that producer of the game said, in an old interview, that originally the time of the day and the weather were supposed to have a major impact on the gameplay and affect the main characters abilities. Also, Resident Evil 5 was intended to be single player. Sheva was originally a NPC and a member of a local militia.She would have meet Chris only later in the game.
Anyway, Capcom created another trailer for Resident Evil 5 in 2007. The beginning of this video was not that different from the final game: Chris walked for a bit in the village and then suddenly all the natives seemed to vanish. There were, however, many important differences: Sheva and the dealer were nowhere to be found, Chris didn’t have his safari dress, cutscenes and dialogues were shorter, the location where we fought for the first time was completely removed, enemies had some attacks that can’t be found in the released game, such as the headbutt, and so on.
Even in the last year of the development Capcom was still moving things around. For example, the crash site of the helicopter was originally a fully playable section, not a series of QTE’s.
2004 Beta artworks
The merchant from Re 4 was supposed to return in Resident Evil 5. There were many shops around the town and you could even stole weapons and ammo.