New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Unseen News

RS Links: Essence of Saga Frontier

monokoma
12-07-2008
4 Comments

sagafrontierldo.jpg

Robert Seddon continues his great series of unseen-links, with a couple of pages about the beta content of Saga Frontier. As he says “Information on the removed bits is supposed to be in a Japanese book called ‘The Essence of SaGa Frontier’, but I can only find *incomplete* transcriptions:

www.gamefaqs.com/console/psx/file/198537/22099

Interesting note about the FFVII-style Love Meter. (‘Red’s quest was supposed to have a unique spin to it– he was supposed to have a  love parameter that would determine how close Red and Yuria are. Depending on how Red responded to her, they would either end up together or not. However, due to a lack of memory, this project was scrapped, and it is the general consensus that they end up together.’) Otherwise, it’s too unfinished: ‘This FAQ is far from complete and will expand only when people start asking more questions, since the question-and-answer session makes it easier for our esteemed sources to figure out what people want to know.’ (Nobody asked, I suppose…)

But… here there are some translation information, and http://pics.livejournal.com/blue_rouge has scans. But… they’re both incomplete as of now, and seem to have been
dormant for months, although they may not be dead yet.”

If someone has more informations about the “Essence of SaGa Frontier” book or a complete translation of the removed game-content, please let us know!

Unseen News

New video for the cancelled 2D proto of Rayman2

monokoma
11-07-2008
No Comments

As we know and as they say in Wikipedia, very early into the development of Rayman 2, it was a 2-D game for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. This was later scrapped for the 3D game that Rayman 2 became. Pictures of the 2D version and concept art (a green villain with a chainsaw) and mentions of powers such as the platform fist were published in gaming magazines such as EGM. Now we can take a look at a new video that shows some concepts and models for this proto:

You can check more screens and videos from the 2D version of Rayman 2 in our archive page

Others, PC / MAC, Playstation, Saturn, Sega, Sony

Dreadnought (HMS Carnage) [PC PSX Saturn – Cancelled]

monokoma
09-07-2008
4 Comments

HMS Carnage (later renamed to Dreadnought / Dreadnoughts and internally know as Dread0) is a cancelled Victorian steam-punk shooter (with strategy elements) set on the red planet of Mars, that was in development for almost 3 years by the Tribe team at Ocean Software. It was an ambitious project, but only a small playable demo and detailed FMV were finished before Infogrames acquired Ocean in 1998 and decided to kill it some months later.

It seems that the game concept was somehow similar to Warhawk, released in 2007 for the Playstation 3, in which the player is able to use ground and air vehicles, turrets and on-foot weapons to kill their enemies and complete the mission objectives.

HMS Carnage was mainly a PC-CDROM game and the PSX / Saturn ports were an afterthought: the console versions would have been very different  with more action and less strategy.

At the time Ocean had a reputation for producing low quality movie tie-ins but with the much-hyped arrival of CDROM as a gaming format they wanted to develop some really ground breaking games. Ocean rebranded their internal development department as “Tribe”, invested a lot of money, hired a lot of new talent and asked everyone to come up with amazing original concepts huge enough to fill a CDROM.

HMS Carnage was one of the winning concepts, Silver was another (released 4 years later) and the third was a point ‘n click adventure with Hanna-Barbera characters, called “Zoiks” which was also cancelled.

The game kept its “HMS Carnage” title throughout most of the development, while “Dreadnought” was a name thought up by the marketing department towards the end (the development team didn’t much like it). Probably they though it was a more sellable title for a shooter.

Sadly the name-change was not enough to save the game. When Infogrames bought Ocean and review Dreadnought, too much work and money were still needed to complete the project: they thought that it could have been an economic failure and decided to cancel the development. After the cancellation, part of  the Tribe team went to work at Psygnosis.

A preview for HMS Carnage was published in Edge magazine issue 32 (1996), if you are able to scan those pages, please let us know!

Thanks a lot to Maria Ingold, Matt Wood, Julian Holtom for their help in preserving media and info from their lost project!

Thanks to Robert Seddon and Celine for the magazines scans!

Images:

Videos: