New Cancelled Games & Their Lost Media Added to the Archive

Project Katana / Red Steel [Beta / Prototype]

Red Steel is a FPS published by Ubisoft for the Nintendo Wii, created by the Ubisoft Paris studio and released on November 19, 2006 in North America. Red Steel was one of the first Wii games to be developed by other studios outside of Nintendo. [Info from Wikipedia]

When the game was just a concept, it was know internally as “Project Katana” and Ubisoft started to work on a  GameCube prototype, as the Wii Development Kits were still not available. Some screens from the Katana GameCube prototype build were somehow leaked thanks to Wombat on the Assembler Forum: “screenshots from the booting sequence of Project Katana ‘playing ground’. These were made prior E3 2006 and running on an standard GameCube devlopment kit, but offcource with the Wii-controller connected to it. This ‘playing ground’ was used by the makers to see how the wii-mote reacts and works.”

Additionally, some early concept arts from Project Katana can be seen in the gallery below: it’s possibile that some of those places were not used in the final game and even the protagonist’s character design seems a bit different from the final one. Also, there were some target renders released before the published game, that have a much more better graphic than the final one.

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Cars [GC – Tech Demo]

This tech demo was shown at the Space World 2000, along with other GameCube tech demos (as the Perfect Dark and Banjo Threeie ones), just to have a look at the graphic power of the new Nintendo console. This was probably never meant to be a complete game, but just a bunch of 3D cars to let people know that there would have been racing games for the GameCube with this kind of graphic details.

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Ghouls & Ghosts Online [Proto / Cancelled]

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Ghouls & Ghosts Online was planned to be a MMO of CAPCOM’s cult classic Ghouls ‘N Goblins with platforming challenges and hordes of monsters to battle as well as community features like guilds. This project was announced at GDC in 2003 but the ambitious multiplatform MMO never saw the light of day.

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Saffire Shooter (Rainbow Six?) [GC – Tech Demo]

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This first person shooter, in the vein of Rainbow Six, was one of the first “Dolphin” tech demos that were shown before the console became the “GameCube”. It was made by Saffire, a development studio that worked on Rainbow Six for the Nintendo 64 and one of the first studios that started to work on GameCube games.  Even if various RS titles were released for the GameCube, no one of them was ever made by Saffire and this video remains just an interesting concept that was never realized.

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Metroid IV Fusion [GBA – Beta / Proto]

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Metroid Fusion, originally known as Metroid 4, was in development for the GameBoy Color before being stopped and reworked for the GBA. In the gallery below you can see how different the Metroid Fusion beta was, especially in its early proto version shown in 2001. When the game was released in november 2002, the graphic was completely redone and many features were removed, as the ability to walk up on walls and ceilings.

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Some screenshot from: http://www.classicgaming.com/mdb

Even the later beta had various differences.

This video showcases Metroid Fusion with an odd looking HUD, and at 0:07 you can see that the enemy’s right side is blown off, a feature not present in the full game. Other things are that title cards seem to have a different font, and at 0:24 there’s a scope icon at the top right. also, at 0:33 Samus seems to be wearing a dress.

In these videos there are some unused debug rooms, though the loading points WERE hacked to get them loaded.

In this one the X parasites look different, and at 0:18 the doors look completely different. Throughout the video the scope thing (as said earlier) at the top right has a wavy texture (Maybe radio or heartbeat monitor?). The enemies also respawn much faster than in the final.

There are also some unused music hidden in the final game’s code. You can listen them in the videos below.

Thanks to Mariosegafreak for the contribution! An archive of screens, info and videos of the early Metroid Fusion versions, can be found at Celebi23’s website!

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