mini games

Miina in Wonderland [Mega Drive, Genesis – Cancelled]

Miina in Wonderland (AKA ミーナ ワンダーランド) is a cancelled mini-games collection planned by Micronet for the Sega Mega Drive. There are not many details about this lost project, but from the few screenshots shared on Twitter by japanese fans, it seems players would have been able to move around a city map with many different buildings, and in each one there would have been a mini game to play. Some of these games were quite strange, such as a chicken race against a masked man.

It seems Miina in Wonderland also had some kind of story-mode, following the adventure of Miina and her fluffy animal friend. A playable prototype was found sometime ago and sold on Yahoo Auction, so we can hope one day a ROM of the game could be uploaded online to be preserved.

If you can read Japanese and see some more interesting details in the scans below, please let us know!

Thanks to GDRI for the contribution!

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Game Boy Gallery [Beta]

Game Boy Gallery is a collection of Game & Watch mini games (Ball, Vermin, Flagman, Manhole, and Mario’s Cement Factory) released in Europe  and Australia in 1995 for the original Game Boy. Aidan noticed that a 1994 UK ad for the Super Game Boy has beta footage of Ball, Vermin, Manhole, and Vermin’s mode select screen. The footage is only a couple of seconds (or, in Ball’s case, a couple of frames), but you can check a few screenshots here, with comparisons to the original G&Ws and the final version of Game Boy Gallery. Manhole’s character also changes his expression!

Thanks to retted98 for the contribution!

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Disney’s E-Ticket [Xbox 360 – Prototype]

E-Ticket was a prototype pitch for a cancelled interactive tour game developed by Los Angeles-based Heavy Iron Studios Inc., which was commissioned by The Walt Disney Company in 2010. The corporation was looking to create a new game using Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360 that would allow players to explore a virtual interpretation of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Although a completed version of this concept would later be developed by Frontier Developments and released under the name of ‘Kinect Disneyland Adventures‘ in late 2011, E-Ticket represents an early, alternative iteration of the project that took different creative liberties with the setting.

E ticket 1

According to three former Heavy Iron Studios employees we spoke with, E-Ticket was conceived when Disney funded the development of a number of prototypes for a Disney World Kinect game at several different studios. Each team was assigned to work on a separate section of the Disney World park. The project, as a whole, was both a technical experiment, as well as a test to see which developer would perform best and be rewarded with a contract to work on the full game.

The original premise was to build a virtual Disneyland that kids could walk through from the comfort of their own living room.

 

The Fast and the Furriest [XBOX 360 – Cancelled]

The Fast & the Furriest is a cancelled party game that was in development in 2006 by Rare for the Xbox 360 Xbox Live Arcade digital service. Other than the normal joypad, the game could have been played with the Xbox Live Vision camera, to track players’ movements in a similar way to the PS2 EYE Toy or Microsoft’s own Kinect. The Fast & the Furriest would have included many different mini-games, as 100 meter dash, bungee run, hurdles and tip-tup curling. As we can read on Joystick:

Each player will be able choose a character like Conker or Banjo which will actually be a “suit” (think mascot suits). Players will then be able to scan their face using the Vision camera to skin the face opening of the character suit.

A playable prototype was created by a team headed by Dale Murchie and composed of developers of Perfect Dark Zero. Still, the project was canned, maybe for quality reasons. Only a short video from The Fast & the Furriest proto was shown at the Develop 2010 Keynote, a revelation that is not usual for a studio as secretive as Rare.. huge props to them!

Thanks to Celine for the contribution!

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