The Phantom was an action game that was in development in 2003 at 7th Sense studios: even if the game was finished, the original publisher went bankrupt and there were some problems with the copyrights so it was never released.
Thanks to Maciej for the contribution!
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Celine linked us to the official Platinum Games Site / Blog, in which they have wrote some interesting posts about the development of their game: originally Jack’s character design was different and they tried various color palettes before choosing the final one.
We worked on our first proposal for two weeks, when a programmer walked by and said, “This is great! It feels fresh! I’ve never seen a game like this!” His words were enough to know that the first proposal, black & white, was what we should go with.
There were times when I thought to myself, “Ahhh… I wish I could use some grey…” I even tried it in a few tests, but it just didn’t look good. […] For instance, even though your human eyes see the two-tone as black and white because of the contrast, we actually put desaturated yellow into the game. We would also up the contrast on the far reaches of the background instead of obscuring them. We used lots of little tricks like this.
Many Bloodbath Challenges were cut from the final game, as the one with an huge slingshot:
One day, the environmental kills team were stressed out trying to think up a new Bloodbath Challenge. Well, actually, we were stressed because the challenge that we wanted to go with had been rejected by Nishikawa-san. It would have been a Bloodbath Challenge where you would have fired at enemies with a giant slingshot. It had great Wii Remote controls, and we were almost done programming it; however, unfortunately it was deemed to be too run-of-the mill, and didn’t get the kind of reaction we were shooting for with the challenges. Thus, we didn’t use it.
Also, a removed / censored kill can be seen in the video below.
Thanks to Celine for the contribution!
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Batman: The Dark Knight was an open world action stealth video game loosely based on the 2008 film, The Dark Knight. The game was unofficially revealed in the summer of 2007 as being in the works at Pandemic Studios’ Australian branch in Brisbane.
This cancellation makes The Dark Knight the first Batman film made by Warner Bros. not to receive a video game translation.
As we can read on Kotaku (thanks to Robert Seddon for the link!), the development of Dark Knights had too many problems and it was probably the main reason why the studio was closed:
“Pandemic worked out a deal with Warner/DC and EA to make a Batman game. So Pandemic spent six months on pre-production of a Batman game. Then EA came in and said it had to be a Dark Knight game, so most of that six months’ work was thrown out. EA were forced to rush the project, as their ownership of the Batman rights would expire in December 2008. […] Pandemic thought an open-world game would suit the property best. But few, if any staff at Pandemic Brisbane had experience making open-world games. The decision was made to use the same engine being used for Pandemic’s upcoming WWII action title Saboteur. It’s a pretty engine, but was never built for the kind of open-world game Batman was supposed to be, and this caused a ton of serious technical issues.
Some leaked screenshots were found by Superior Version in January 2009.
Thanks to Borman and Dan for the contribution!
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These concept arts came from a cancelled game that was in development at Ubisoft Montpellier for the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3. The project was a shooter based on a World War II setting.
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Soulless is a side-scroller action game that was developed by Cobra Blade and released in 2008 for Mac. The original concept of the project was a quick Wizard of Wor style game with Space Marines against zombies, but it later became the side-scroller action game that we can play today. In the beta version the space marine armour was different from the final one.
Thanks to Cobra for the contribution!
Beta (click for bigger version):
Final (click for bigger version):
