New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Devil Buster [MD/G – Cancelled]

At the Lost Levels Forums, GDRI has posted an interesting link to a japanese blog, where we can find some scans with screenshots of Devil Buster, a cancelled action / platform game inspired by Megami Tensei, that was in development for Mega Drive / Genesis at SIMS Studios. In the same topic Kid Fenris and kaboro posted some more screens from the game from other magazines. Props to them!

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Mega Man X-3 [SNES – Unused Stuff]

Mega Man X3 was released in 1995 by Capcom. It was the third game in the Mega Man X sub-franchise and the last to appear on the Super Nintendo. GoldS has found some unused objects and behaviors that were still hidden in the game code, and you can see them in the following videos. Props to him!

Ian has made us to notice that:

Video 1:

  • The Ganseki may have orinnaly droped spiked balls on Zero in the intro stage, In the final the spiked balls just drop from the ceiling.
  • The Wild Tanks may have orginaly been completly submereged underground as to surprise the player but, in the final the “arm” is left out as to give the player an advantage.
  • Looking at the bottom entering door in Hornet’s stage may have been a test for doors that enter from another side that the right, Like in Mega Man 1 witch had doors that oped from the top and bottom of the screen.
  • The Ride Armor Boss may have been a test for a possible fight with Vile’s Ride Armor on Auto-Piolt or somthing, It may have been a fortress level boss as when defeated X does his victroy pose and warps out(Like finishing a end level boss), In the final Vile is in his Ride Armor before it’s destroed.

Video 2:

  • The Harmfull Carry Arm may have been a trap confusing players into
    taking damages, or the orignals may have had a timer so that if the player took too long they would begin to take damage.
  • For the Upside down enimies they may have been a time when these enemy types would cling to a ceiling to attack and or surprise them.

Thanks to Bowsersenemy and xMrNx we can see some unused Zero sprites and a strange W Meter bar that are still hidden in the game code. It seems that the unused W meter could be found in the memory of MMX 1 and 2 as well.

Videos:

 

 

Career Criminal [X360 / PS3 – Cancelled]

Career Criminal is an action game that was in development at Midway Austin (formerly Inevitable Entertainment) for the XBOX 360 and PS3, but later cancelled because it was too risky economically. It seems that the game would have been about stealing jewels / other precious stuff and it was set in a sandbox world. Sadly the studio closed its doors in December 2008, laying off the entire local workforce as part of a larger, company-wide, action.

As we can read on Kotaku, the president of Midway explained that: “The Career Criminal title was a large, ambitious, open-world project. Midway management recognizes that ambitious games need extensive resources and can require lengthy development cycles with much iteration. We are willing to invest in the long run and we need to continue developing new intellectual properties. But all of our projects have to demonstrate a likelihood of success and profitability. The resource needs, feature set, schedule and financial profile for the Career Criminal project were not converging towards a reasonable chance of success.”

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Videos:

RS Links: Planes in Ant Attack!

Another interesting link from Robert Seddon: on Wikipedia we can read that “Ant Attack is a ZX Spectrum computer game by Sandy White. It was published in 1983 by Quicksilva, and converted to the Commodore 64 in 1984.  The code for the ZX Spectrum version of Ant Attack contains graphics depicting a plane although these were not used in the final game.” We can see this unused plane in the screenshot below on the bottom-left!

sprites

Return Fire 3 [PS2 – Cancelled]

The original Return Fire is a 1995 video game developed by Silent Software, Inc. for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and later ported to Windows personal computers, PlayStation and Sega Saturn in 1996. It was preceded by Fire Power (1987) and followed by Return Fire 2 (1998). The game is a vehicular shooter  in which the player’s goal is to capture the enemy flag and return with it to their base. [Infos from Wikipedia]

It seems that a third chapter was in development at Infogrames / Atari for the Playstation 2, but it was later cancelled for unknow reasons and only few concepts / 3D models remain from the project.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

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