Action

Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

PALPS [NES – Cancelled]

Celine
05-12-2012
No Comments

PALPS is a Nintendo unreleased Disk System exclusive game that many don’t know about. It was a very novel game. Basically it was an action game, where the player could not control the hero’s movement during play. The hero moves according to the player’s programmed movements. You defeat enemies with bullets and sometimes there will be an obstacle to deal with. As you advance through the game, the variety of icon tips increases.

The hero’s movement was programmed exclusively with the simplified language part that was said to be more intuitive and advanced than Family Basic. When it appeared on japanese magazines the game was said to not be ready to be seen at all and you can see below some screenshots from an early build. It was so early in development that the genre was still largely undecided. It’s still unknown why Nintendo decided to never release this piece of software.

Very grateful to Susumu for the translation from japanese.

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Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony

Heavenly Sword 2 [Cancelled – PS3]

monokoma
23-11-2012
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The original Heavenly Sword is an action game developed by Ninja Theory and published for the PlayStation 3 in 2007. In 2008 Sony Cambridge was working on a sequel, Heavenly Sword 2, that was cancelled in early development. As we can read on Wikipedia, according to Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades, the story for the sequel was already been written; in fact a whole trilogy was being planned.

On May 2008, Ninja Theory’s IT Manager “Peonic” announced that a follow-up to Heavenly Sword by them would be extremely unlikely due to their decision to pursue opportunities within multi-platform development:

“We’re not abandoning HS just on a whim because we want to go off and do something different – there’s a great huge raft of reasons behind us taking the direction we are – and it’s also the nature of the business that I’m not allowed to share any of those reasons with you. As for the ‘you’re just not doing HS2 NOW’ comments – well one thing you learn in this industry is that you never say ‘Never’. So I’m not going to say we’ll “never” go back and make HS2 – but it’s something I personally see as extremely unlikely.”

Nevertheless, since Sony retains the IP of Heavenly Sword, there is always the possibility of production on a sequel being outsourced to another developer in the future. Only a few artworks from Sony Cambridge’s cancelled Heavenly Sword 2 are saved below, to preserve its existence.

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Microsoft, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Orpheus [PS2 XBOX – Prototype]

U64 Staff & Contributors
17-10-2012
1 Comment

Orpheus was one of many cancelled prototypes /concepts for games that french studio Darkworks worked on during 2003/2004. It appears as if Darkworks could not find a publisher and the title was abandoned. Instead, they started to work on I Am Alive for Ubisoft, before the publisher decided to move the development to Ubisoft Shanghai. Sadly we don’t know what kind of gameplay could have been planned for Orpheus and only few concept arts remain, to preserve the existence of this project.

Thanks to Dorwaks for the contribution!

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Neo-Geo Pocket, Others

Magician Lord 2 [Neo Geo Pocket – Cancelled]

Celine
11-10-2012
No Comments

Magician Lord 2 is a cancelled sequel for ADK‘s sidescrolling action game, that was in development for the Neo Geo Pocket. When SNK released his handheld system Neo Geo Pocket in 1998, its historic ally ADK started to work on the new platform. ADK thought to resume one of its past franchise: Magician Lord.

A sequel was already in development in the mid nineties exclusively for Neo Geo CD (alongside Crystalis 2) but it was eventually canned. The NGP game was a direct sequel of the cult Neo Geo title, with Elta (the original protagonist) that could morph in even more creatures than previously, although game mechanics looked more oriented toward a Metroid/Castlevania type of gameplay.

Unfortunately even this time Magician Lord 2 and another NGP game, World of Heroes, was never released because ADK went bankrupt in early 2000. Recently an alpha version of Magician Lord 2 which was available to the japanese press got unearthed thanks to Puyo/Gamekult.

For more details (in french) read the article on Gamekult.

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Leaked, Microsoft, Xbox

Storm Riders [Xbox – Cancelled]

monokoma
09-10-2012
No Comments

Storm Riders is a cancelled action game that was in development for the original Xbox, that could have been based on a korean film / comic with the same name. There are not many info on its development, but an early beta version / prototype of the game was somehow found on an old Xbox Debug Kit by Museman and it was shared online thanks to the Assembler Games Forum. The menu, HUD and some of the character’s moves are really similar to Ninja Gaiden, but there aren’t any connection with Tecmo’s game.

As wrote by Andrew Borman in the Assembler Forum:

Storm Riders was built really, really late in the Xbox’s life, July 22 2005, NG started life in like 1999 before being announced at e3 2002 and released in March 2004. I havent found any evidence other than one comment that seemed to think it came from a Tecmo Xbox. Ive dug through the XBE some more and didnt find anything. It was compiled from a folder called Phoenix, which I thought might be related to Iron Phoenix, but beyond that I havent seen the evidence to link it, so I moed on.

Borrowing assets isn’t all that unusual in the dev world, so the NG assets are meaningless. But if you look up Storm Riders Online, which was to be an MMO, it was made by a studio called Phoenix Games Studio, which with the compile info points to it being from them, which is a studio in Malaysia. This also links back to the fact that the Xbox it was found on was 220v, which wouldnt be the case for a Japanese box, but does match for Malaysia. So that is much more likely

Thanks a lot to MegaMoto85 for the video!

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