Beta + Cancelled FPS Video Games - Page 65 of 68

A first-person shooter on the Game Boy Color would seem to be a challenge by anyone’s standards, so it should come as little surprise that Tyrannosaurus Tex was created by someone with an urge to do what no-one had done before. Having left Psygnosis after working on titles like the Colony Wars series, Ben John founded UK-based Slitherine Software and set about flexing his coding muscles. After considering a Command & Conquer-style RTS game, he settled on an FPS and began work on a tech demo in early 1999. Enlisting the help of his friend Dan Crawley (concept/character art) and father Mike John (designer), the demo was displayed at the 1999 European Computer Trade Show and attracted the attention of publishers such as Codemasters, Take2 and THQ. The game was ultimately signed-up by Eidos, who added producer Iain McNeil to the team. Full production began in September 1999 with a planned release date of April 2000.

The plot for their ambitious title: One day, the Texan desert town of Eastwood is witness to a spaceship crash, its contents a horde of sinister robots. They not only set about fixing their ship, buried underground in the crash, but also start building a replica of their world and growing dinosaurs from the remains found beneath the earth. All is well until humans begin digging for oil, and the robot/dinosaur masses attack. Tex is approached by an oil company and offered a handsome reward to fix the problem. Some descriptions of the plot mentioned a diamond mine, and that a gem-loving Tex would have to rescue the townsfolk.

The controls were simple by necessity – A to shoot, the D-pad to move around (holding B to strafe), Select to cycle through weapons and Start to pause and bring up a scrolling overhead tile map of the current area.

Tex would start off in a mine before plunging deep into an underground city; a later level would have sent him aboard the crashed spaceship. In all, 28 levels were planned including an end of game boss. Some levels would have been timed and set inside maze-like caves in danger of imminent collapse, while the rest were busier with enemies, light puzzle elements, keys, doors, traps and forcefields, with no time-limit but the same task of surviving to the exit. When all the diamonds were collected in the level a secret area would be unlocked, containing a collectable rune. In all, Slitherine estimated it would take twenty hours to complete the game normally and forty if all of the runes were sought out.

The cowboy would find six types of gun on his journey. Starting off with a reliable-but-weak Colt which could fire at a reduced rate without ammo, Tex would progress to an improved Colt, grenade launcher, continuously-firing laser, guidable harpoon and finally a secret high-tech weapon. Tex was to go up against ten types of enemy; they would either follow a specified route (Routers, such as robots and, deviating randomly from their path, the bats and rats) or head towards the player (Hunters, such as the King T-Rex and velociraptors). Fast-moving Trundle Bots would appear in groups and steal Tex’s ammo on contact. Some strategy would be required, for while the grenade launcher was effective against all classes of enemy, a laser would merely tickle a dinosaur’s scales, whereas a much better-suited harpoon would only deal low damage to the steel body of a robot. Whichever way they were defeated, enemies would break up into four tiles, exploding away from each other toward the corners of the screen.

Among the game’s features: stereo sound (Shin’en Audio Outsourcing Services provided the music), around 10 levels of faux scaling, up to 16 objects on screen, 3 battery-backed up save slots, a 3D engine running at 20-30fps, and 100 high-colour intermission screens which took up half of the 16-megabit cartridge.

An FPS engine on the Game Boy Color was ambitious enough, but Slitherine were to cram in a two-player deathmatch mode as well, a tall order given the bandwidth limitations of the system’s link cable. Players could choose from Tex (starts with Colts, can use any weapon), Hover Robot (may only use a laser, vulnerable to lasers, very fast), Close Combat Droid (started with a laser, may pick up weapons, vulnerable to lasers), Tank (started with a slow-reloading grenade launcher, also vulnerable to lasers) or a ferocious T-Rex (best at close-combat, having only claws for weapons). Only Tex and the first arena were available from the beginning; the other characters and 4 additional levels would unlock through finding runes in single-player mode.

The game was delayed, and its original release date came and went, pushed back to the end of the year. There was a huge setback, too: Eidos pulled out of the Game Boy Color market and left Slitherine without a publisher, though they did gain a new team member as Iain McNeil chose to stay with the company, bringing along his father as business/financial manager. The in-game artwork, unchanged since the tech demo, was at some point contracted out to be redrawn by bitmap artist Fad Stevens, who also later joined the company. By this time, there were rumblings that the preview screenshots were fake, that proper coding still hadn’t begun. But in August of that year IGN played an early build of the training level and were impressed with what they saw, although they found the AI to be rather weak, and screenshots were noticeably emptier than the jam-packed scenes portrayed in earlier previews, perhaps both due to the nature of the level previewed. They also reported that Slitherine had found a new publisher, and that the game would finally be released in January 2001.

Slitherine announced that the game was complete. However, by April 2001 the company still hadn’t secured a publishing deal (some of the names approached including SCI, Telegames and Take 2). Among the difficulties cited were Nintendo’s high royalty rates for purchasing cartridges and the low margins resulting (exacerbated by the game’s size and battery save) and the lack of a big-name license. Though they continued to seek a publisher for Tex, and briefly considered developing for the Game Boy Advance (interestingly their website contained two animated T-Rex sprites with palettes more suited to the GBA), by the end of the month Slitherine chose to pull out of all future Game Boy development. Tyrannosaurus Tex never did make its way onto store shelves, but the company survives to this day, developing and publishing strategy titles for the PC and other major platforms.

Thanks to Ross Sillifant for the contribution! (United Game interview with Slitherine Software)

March 2013 Update: A rom of a prototype version of the game has been released online, details are at nintendoplayer.com

Images:

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Team Fortress 2 [Proto / Beta / Unused Models]

U64 Staff & Contributors

05-04-2008

6 Comments

Originally planned as a free mod for Quake, development on Team Fortress 2 switched to the GoldSrc/Half-Life engine in 1998 after the development team Team Fortress Software – consisting of Robin Walker and John Cook – were first contracted and finally outright employed by Valve Corporation. At the point of Team Fortress Software’s acquisition production moved up a notch and the game was promoted to a standalone, retail product; to tide fans over – since, as well as time issues, much of the Team Fortress player base had purchased Half-Life solely in anticipation of the free release of Team Fortress 2 – work began on a simple port of the game which was released in 1999 as the free Team Fortress Classic (TFC).

Notably, TFC was built entirely within the publicly available Half-Life SDK as an example to the community and industry of its flexibility.

Images [Proto]:

Preview article from Incite gaming magazine, January 2000.

Images [Final Version]:

Walker and Cook had been heavily influenced by their three-month contractual stint at Valve, and now they were working full-time on their design, which was undergoing rapid metamorphosis. Team Fortress 2 was to be a modern war game, with a command hierarchy including a commander with a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield, parachute drops over enemy territory, networked voice communication and numerous other innovations. This initial design for Team Fortress 2 is quite possibly the only game to have spawned a thriving sub-genre without ever being released itself.

E3 1999

The new design was revealed to the public at the 1999 E3, where it earned several awards including Best Online Game and Best Action Game. By this time Team Fortress 2 had gained a new subtitle, Brotherhood of Arms, and the results of Walker and Cook working at Valve were becoming clear. Several new and at the time unprecedented technologies on show: Parametric animation seamlessly blended animations for smoother, more life-like movement, and Intel’s Multi-resolution mesh technology dynamically reduced the detail of on-screen elements as they became more distant to improve performance (a technique made obsolete by decreasing memory costs; today games use a technique known as level of detail, which uses more memory but less processing power). No date was given at the exposition.

In mid-2000, Valve announced that development of Team Fortress 2 had been delayed for a second time. They put the news down to development switching to an in-house, proprietary engine that is today known as the Source engine. It was at around this time that all news ran dry and Team Fortress 2 entered its notorious six-year radio silence, which was to last until July 13, 2006. During that time, both Walker and Cook worked on various other Valve projects – Walker was project lead on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Cook became a Steam developer, among other tasks – raising doubts that Team Fortress 2 was really the active project that would be repeatedly described.

“Invasion” design

When the Half-Life 2 source tree was leaked in late 2003 three Team Fortress 2 models were included, along with direct references to the game in the stolen source code. They consisted of an alien, Combine-like grunt and a very cartoon-like and out-of-proportion soldier. The code was interpreted by fans as making references to the Seven Hour War, an integral part of the Half-Life story; however, the two leaked player models did not look combine or human.

The Source SDK was released with the Half-Life 2 source code, and also provided references to the game. Some code merely confirmed what was already believed, but other segments provided completely new information, such as the presence of NPCs in multiplayer matches, the possibility of the game taking place in the Half-Life 2 universe, fixed plasma gun and missile launcher emplacements, and more.

None of the leaked information appears to have any bearing on today’s version of the game. This iteration was mentioned in an August 2007 interview with Gabe Newell by GameTrailers, in which he mentions “Invasion” as being the second-phase of Team Fortress 2’s development under Valve Software.

Final design

The next significant public development occurred in the run up to Half-Life 2’s 2004 release: Valve’s Director of Marketing Doug Lombardi claimed both that Team Fortress 2 was still in development and that information concerning it would come after Half-Life 2’s release. This did not happen; nor was any news released after Lombardi’s similar claim during an early interview regarding Half-Life 2: Episode One. Near the time of Episode One’s release Gabe Newell again claimed that news on Team Fortress 2 would be forthcoming – and this time it was. Team Fortress 2 was re-unveiled a month later at the July 2006 EA Summer Showcase event.

Walker revealed in March 2007 that Valve had quietly built “probably three to four different games” before settling on their final design. Due to the game’s lengthy development cycle it is often mentioned alongside Duke Nukem Forever, another long-anticipated game that has seen many years of protracted development and engine changes.

The beta features three multiplayer maps which contain commentary on the game design, level design and character design, and provide more information on the history behind the development. The commentary suggests that part of the reason for the intentionally cartoonish style was the difficulty in explaining the maps and characters in realistic terms — questions like “Why would two teams put their bases so close to each other?” become more relevant when there is an emphasis on realism in a game.

The art style for the game was inspired by J. C. Leyendecker, as well as Dean Cornwell and Norman Rockwell. Their distinctive styles of strong silhouettes and shading to draw attention to specific details were adapted in order to make the models distinct, with a focus on making the characters’ team, class and current weapon distinct and easily identifiable.

The commentary also explains why the commander (a single player who sees a top-down map and is responsible for organizing the team) was not included in the final design: it was too hard to make the experience fun given a poor team and a good commander, or a good team and a poor commander.” [info from wikipedia]

The Scout was one of the first TF2 classes that was created when Valve decided to try out a more stylized approach to the game. Various character designs were drawn before find the final one.

Images Concept Arts:

Also, various weapons were removed from the final game and even the levels were a bit different in the beta (as you can see from the videos below) . In the beta version of Team Fortress 2, the Demoman had six grenades to spill out. However, they were removed for balance issues. Many more unused and beta models can still be found in the game’s code, as you can read from Uber Charged!

Images (unused models):

Thanks to FullMetalMC, Ace.Dark and NastyKill for the contributions!

Videos:

Leaked, Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox, Xbox 360

Half Life 2 [Beta / Concept / Prototype]

U64 Staff & Contributors

05-04-2008

25 Comments

The book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar revealed many of the game’s original settings and action that were cut down or removed entirely from the final game. Half-Life 2 was originally intended to be a far darker game where the Combine were more obviously draining the oceans for minerals and replacing the atmosphere with noxious, murky gases. Promotional shots and gameplay videos released before the game became available showed parts of these scenes, and also showed enemies that do not appear anywhere in the final game, such as the “Hydra,” a massive, gelatinous, translucent, neon-blue creature that lived in the sewers. It was planned as a massive bulk far below the city with tentacles that would reach up and spear through enemies, including Combine soldiers. The Hydra was apparently cut because its AI proved troublesome: while impressive when attacking NPCs, it was less interesting, and more frustrating for players to fight, and was also difficult to code.

Images:

Other enemies cut from the game included Combine assassins (their AI was salvaged to form the Fast Zombie; they were females, very similar in attitude to the Half-Life black ops; they are included in Half-Life 2: Survivor), a newly skinned bullsquid, houndeyes, various Synths and Combine soldiers. There was also a planned creature called the Cremator who would clean the streets of bodies after a skirmish with a massive acid gun called an Immolator, which would double as an offensive weapon when the Cremator would become an enemy. The Cremator’s head would eventually be featured in Eli’s lab in Black Mesa East, encased in a jar of formaldehyde, which Eli will make comments about when the player nears the jar and views it.

The game was originally intended to be much more diverse in settings (to the extent that the game felt almost overblown, and little time being spent on developing existing characters; one of the key reasons for it being cut). Parts of the book detail how Gordon would fight alongside characters such as Odessa Cubbage, albeit under a different name and in a different place, as well as fighting together with Colonel Vance – a character that was later merged with Eli to become Doctor Eli Vance – and Vance’s forces. Originally, Eli and Alyx Vance had no relation, and Eli’s lab was originally intended to resemble a form of scrapyard and town in a cave than a better equipped laboratory within a hydroelectric power station; the scrapyard area where the Gravity Gun tutorial takes place resembles the original concept; being an auxiliary area as opposed to the bulk of the lab. The Citadel also looked very different, it was more round than the bulky Citadel from the final version.

Other cuts from the game included a drivable jetski, which was eventually replaced by the airboat in the final game because it was too much like running around on foot. Another vehicle to be included was what looked like a large mining device, to be used in Ravenholm. Also, many weapons were cut.

The E3 video “Traptown” shows that at some point in the game’s development it was also possible to shoot any gun while using the HEV suit’s zoom function and that the player could discard weapons, indicating they could only carry a specified amount of firearms at a time. Traptown was to be a section of the Ravenholm chapter. It seems to share some similarities with a section from the Ravenholm chapter from the released version of Half-Life 2, mostly the setting of the section. The trailer also showed the ability of Combine enemies to try to break down doors, which did not make it in the final release.

This is thought to be a scripted sequence for the E³ video. At the end of the video, the player shoots an explosive barrel that was behind an old car, which made the car explode and jump into a nearby zombie. This wasn’t possible in the final version, although there is a roadblock in the Highway 17 chapter of the finished game where the player does something similar to a barrel-toting truck. Also, Ravenholm (or probably only the Traptown section) featured both Combine soldiers and zombies in its beta stage, as well as Father Grigori, which, according to Raising The Bar and the leaked sound files, was to be tougher and less humorous.

Initially a small mining town called Quarrytown, which was more of a puzzle solving section of Half-Life 2, with zombies added as the town’s pests, Valve liked the idea of having a town full of zombies, so Quarrytown eventually became a big town, which was full of traps, made by Father Grigori, the town’s priest and only remaining survivor. The E3 video, Traptown, featured both Combine Soldiers and zombies, the soldiers being added probably because Valve thought that the video wouldn’t have been as interesting only with the zombies, which are slow and easy to kill.

It remains unknown if most of the cut Half-Life 2 scenes will eventually be completed and released, or if they are lost forever. A removed section of the original Half-Life was eventually released as the Half-Life: Uplink demo; a similar situation was in place with the HDR technology demo, Lost Coast, which was based on a scene that was cut from the sequel. It is possible or even likely that more removed sections of HL2 will be seen in future expansion packs, as Half-Life 2: Episode One didn’t contain any of the aforementioned content. There’s a possibility that Kraken Base might be in the further episodes of Half-Life 2 because Doctor Judith Mossman is only seen in Episode One on a monitor in the Citadel reporting from an Arctic base. This might mean that Kraken Base (possibly under a different name) is being put back into the storyline.

Episode Two includes areas of gameplay based around the “Antlion hive” areas cut from Half-Life 2, and the presence of the cut “Antlion King”, now renamed to be an ‘Antlion guardian’. Episode Two also makes references to the Borealis icebreaker that was cut from Half Life 2, a research vessel revealed to have been created by Aperture Science for some unknown purpose. It is likely that players will explore the Borealis and related arctic base in Episode Three.

Info from wikipedia: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_cut_from_Half-Life_2

Two very similar prototypes were leaked months before the game came out. Obscene amounts of Half Life 2 development data have slipped out of Valve’s grasp and can easily be found on the internet. This includes concept art, sound files, models and countless maps. Thanks to this we can see just about every change ever made to Half Life 2. To read about its original story and see pictures not featured here check out Half Life Wikia.

A mod for HL2, know as “Missing Informations” add some of the beta / unused stuff back in the game. You can download it in here. Some videos with unused models and beta stuff can be found at HL202 Youtube Channel!

Chris put together a site where anyone can download the Leak, patches, WC Mappack and more: http://hl2betapage.webs.com/

Thanks to D-vide, Nastykill, Megalol and discworld for the contributions!

Videos:

Microsoft, Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony, Xbox 360

Killing Day [PS3/X360 – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

05-04-2008

No Comments

Killing Day was a 1st person shooter being designed for the Xbox 360 and ps3, a pre-rendered video was shown at E3 2005 for the Ps3. Not much more is known about this game other then that it was cancelled in the middle of production. Jan Sanghera from Ubisoft UK has stated that the game has been cancelled in early development.

Images:

Video:

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Xbox 360

Prey (1995 / 1997 Version) [Cancelled – PC]

U64 Staff & Contributors

05-04-2008

4 Comments

In 1995, the first incarnation of the game was announced. Prey was envisioned by 3D Realms as the first of a number of games to be running on unique, cutting edge game engine technology, developed in house. In this sense the project played the same role as Unreal did for Epic Games, and it would retain this role in the company’s strategy throughout its development time in the 3D Realms studios.

Prey as a game was to go through many different forms during this first development period. A rapid succession of different designs were outlined by Tom Hall (previously of id software and later of Ion Storm), who was at that time fresh off the Rise of the Triad team at Apogee Software. After about a year’s worth of work, however, Tom Hall abandoned the project and left the company to form Ion Storm with ex-Id compatriot John Romero. At this point 3D Realms brought on Paul Schuytema to begin the next phase in the game’s development.

Images:

For more screens: www.apogeegames.com/prey/files/files.htm

The new team would go on to create the most coherent design the game ever had. The alien abduction theme from Hall’s work was retained, but now the game was to be set on a massive, living alien space ship inhabited by a number of different alien races (three of them collectively known as the “Trocara” and a fourth called the “Keepers”), the player himself would take the role of a Native American hero, called Talon Brave.

The game was the first in the genre to make use of portal technology, a feature that allowed rips in space to be created, moved and reshaped in real time. This was to be a core feature of the gameplay, along with heavily destructible environments. It was also thought at the time this engine would be used for Duke Nukem 5 (the game after Duke Nukem Forever). Demonstrations of these features drew widespread acclaim at the 1997 and 1998 E³ exhibitions – the television program Infinite MHz was able to capture exclusive footage of the game’s private behind-closed-doors demo at the games both E³ showings.

However, despite the best of starts, Prey’s development was troubled. Seemingly insurmountable technical problems ground development to a near-halt, and this version of Prey too fell apart. Later, on an internet discussion board head engineer William Scarboro would comment that “In hindsight, portal tricks such as these should be used as tricks, not as an engine paradigm.”

Shortly after the Schuytema variant of Prey disbanded, 3D Realms attempted again to revive the project by bringing on tech programmer Corrinne Yu in November of 1998. Development of the game itself was not part of this effort, Yu was working by herself on the game engine exclusively. However, after a time, this iteration of Prey fell apart as well. 3D Realms and Corrinne Yu parted ways, and Prey began its long period of inactivity in 1999. The title was put on indefinite hold (although never formally cancelled, contrary to popular opinion).

On March 8, 2000, Prey.net (an early Prey site with a section about KMFDM) released a Real Audio file of a third KMFDM song: “Missing Time”, which was going to be part of the Prey soundtrack[10] but was featured in the movie Heavy Metal 2000 instead (under the name MDFMK which is a side project of KMFDM members during their temporary break-up).

In 2001, 3D Realms began development on a new version of the title. This time, with the advantage of the necessary portal technology already being a stable and functional component of all modern game engines, 3D Realms was able to license the necessary technology instead of having to develop it. 3D Realms chose the id Tech 4 game engine from id Software, and Rune developer Human Head Studios was commissioned to develop the game using the previous designs as a base.

Rumors of this new project leaked out to the public in 2002, through the website Evil Avatar, but were at that time neither confirmed nor denied. It wasn’t until 2005, when the cryptic clue “Keep your eyes open for the unveiling of our next game very soon. ;)” appeared on the 3D Realms website that the previous rumors were confirmed in any way. This was followed by a CNN article by Chris Morris, claiming that Prey was not only in development, but that it would be shown at E³.

Soon afterwards, the official Prey teaser site was launched, confirming the game’s existence, and hinting that more would be revealed in the June issue of PC Gamer, which indeed featured a seven page article on Prey. On April 26, 2005 Prey was officially announced in a press release by 2K Games. On June 28, 2006 it was announced that Prey had officially gone gold for PC and XBOX 360.

[Info from Wikipedia]