New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Moonlight Fables [DS – Cancelled]

Moonlight Fables is a cancelled side-scrolling action-adventure game, exclusively for the DS, that was slated for release in 2005 by Majesco. Designed by Cyber Philharmonic Video Game Design, the game was going to feature touch-screen input, use of the DS’s two screens and “multiplayer network play” (according to official publicity). Whether this refers to online play, or simply close-range wireless play, is not specified. While an action-adventure, the game would also have tasked the player with different puzzles to solve.

The game was gothic-fantasy-themed, and featured 19-year-old werewolf and Officer School For International Strike Forces graduate Trista Silver. Interestingly, the game was planned to have all of its levels merged into one giant area, allowing seamless movement between sections. It was going to include a range of weapons to master, including the mystical Moon Sword, various types of blaster and the player’s own werewolf teeth and claws. Quite an impressive visual arsenal was in the works, which boasted such features as a blend of 2D and 3D art styles, and a dynamic camera that zoomed in and panned around to highlight specific events.

Although Moonlight Fables was one of the first titles announced for the DS by a western publisher, it went through a major developmental overhaul mid-production. After these major changes, Majesco re-evaluated the game, and took it off their release list. It has since been officially cancelled.

The original website for the game can still be accessed via the Internet Archive.

Article by Franklint

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Freezer Level

Trista Silver

Omikron 2 Nomad Soul Exodus [Dreamcast/PS2 – Cancelled]

Omikron 2 Exodus was meant to be a sequel for Ps2 and Dreamcast of the game Omikron: The Nomad Soul. The title was later changed to “Omikron 2 Karma” and the development was moved to XBOX 360 and PS3. There are not many informations about the project, but thanks to the Omikron Game Blog we can finally see some concept arts and read more about the game!

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Tiny Toon Adventures [Jaguar – Cancelled]

A platform game with Tiny Toon characters, in development for the Jaguar but later cancelled. It seems that a beta-demo of this game was leaked some time ago. In 2006, Atariboy has posted on the Toon Zone Forum some images and sprites from this game, that were found on the official site of the developers.

Thanks to MathUser for some of these scans!

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Hidden beta characters have been found in GTA3

In the Youtube Channel of Cshit87 we can see a couple of interesting videos about some beta characters that have been found still in the game code.

Darkel

Darkel is a character dropped during the development of Grand Theft Auto III. Little is known about the character, except that he was to be a revolutionary urchin who vowed to bring down the city’s economy. One mission involved stealing an ice cream van, using it to attract pedestrians, then blowing it up. This mission was given by El Burro in the final version of game, to kill a group of gang members. Darkel was also originally expected to give out Rampage-esque missions.

Darkel had his voice recorded for this part by Bill Fiore, but was never used in game. However, the character remains listed in GTA III’s manual’s credits, as well as having a character texture retained in the game’s data files. The official GTA III website suggests that Darkel was to reside in the Harbour Tunnel that runs underneath a portion of Portland. [Info from Wikipedia]

Novy

Who’s Novy? Novy was the original protagonist before Claude. But just like Darkel, novy was dropped out of the final version. He was discovered and put in-game by Ka-Boom.

Screenshots from beta version of the game

Esperanto

Old beta footages

Jungle Bots [N64 – Cancelled]

jungle-botsn64-cancelled

A cancelled FPS game for the Nintendo 64, with animal-robots. Jungle Bots was meant to be published by  Titus  and developed by Conceptual Realities / Navigator Entertainment. It seems that the game was never completed and was canceled in mid-development by Titus. The development was pretty tricky, the polygon and texture budgets were extremely limited due to the cartridge format and the target ROM size was only 32 MB.  The company that was working on the game had never made a game before and previously they had  only designed and built theme park attractions. The staff wasn’t really prepared for the game making process and some wrong decisions by management ultimately caused the company to have to shut down and the entire staff was laid off.

Thanks a lot to gilgamesh for these screens and informations and to Vaettur for the logo!

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