platform

Kirby’s Adventure [NES – Beta / Unused]

Kirby’s Adventure is a platform game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the NES in 1992 (Japan)  and 1993 (USA andEurope). As we can read at Wiki Rusted Logic, the game features a great amount of debug rooms and unused content, some of which would end up in future Kirby games.

Miniboss test rooms. Not just any minibosses though — these rooms have the faster, more difficult versions of Bugzzy, Poppy Bros. Sr., Rolling Turtle, and Mr. Tick Tock that are found in stage 7-2’s hidden route.

Rooms 0142-0144: These rooms, however, weren’t used. Meta Knight battles for the layouts of rooms #142 & #144 still exist in the game, but not for room #143.

Room 0145: A pretty cool cannon puzzle that’s only accessible from the debug room. To get the cannon to fire, you have to pound in the stake with the Hammer or Stone abilities, then quickly inhale the Laser Ball to get the Laser ability. Next, quickly fire a laser at the slope at the bottom before the ice block appears to block you, then hop into the cannon. It’s tricky to get it timed right, but it does work.

Unused Ability : these tiles of a tiny Kirby are found in sprite bank 8C, along with the graphics for the Mike and Ball abilities. These graphics were possibly used for an ability that no longer exists in the game. The oddly sized Kirby would have been used for a shrinking animation […] This Mini ability might have been replaced with the UFO power [..] 12 years later, this ability would finally be implemented in Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. However, in that game, you can’t slide while using this power.

Also, CrashAndSonicChao found the lost Mini Kirby sprites thanks to a sprite editor:

Thanks to ORKAL‘s Youtube Channel we can see an interesing video that shows many of the unused content.

You can find more about the Kirby series in the WiKirby!

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Slipshod [PS2/XBOX – Cancelled]

Slipshod is a cancelled platform game that was in development by Electronic Arts in 2001, for the Playstation 2 and Xbox. It was supposed to launch a new platform franchise for EA (something like Crash Bandicoot or Ratchet & Clank), but sadly after some years of development, they decided to disband the team and kill the game.

One of the levels was finished and playable, but it was too easy and not much fun to play. The Slipshod team put a lot of time and effort into the artwork and the graphic engine but they did not have enough time to develope the actual game play.

The main character design and background evolved a lot during the development: named “‘Buggy”, he was originally meant to be a pizza delivery bug in a “human-sized” world, who rode a segway and was trying to save his girlfriend. After 2 years of work, EA decided to change the whole game from scratch. In another concept “Buggy” was more like a ninja bug, who had to collect scrolls. One of the last changes before the cancellation put Buggy  in a “bug-sized” world, having the whole game to take place in a tree stump.

After the target of the project was changed again to create the new “bug-scaled” world, rumors of the cancellation started to pass inside the dev-team and soon after they were all reassigned to different games. EA decided that they had already put too much time and money into the development of Slipshod, and to start over would have been too cost prohibitive.

Slipshod had the potential to be a fun game, but sadly the continuous changes of  perspectives and scenario ended up killing the project.

Thanks a lot to Hey Hey for the contribution and to Tyler for his help to preserve info and media from this lost game!

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Jalapeno Harry [PSX – Cancelled]

Jalapeno Harry is a cancelled platform game that was in development by Sony in 1997 / 1998 for the original Playstation. There is not much information available on this unreleased project, except some concept artwork that shows what the game would have looked like. We can read some more info about Jalapeno in this quote by Jason Rubin on IGN:

Sony even started to mess around with its own, internal platformer based on the success of Crash. “Because Universal owned Crash, before Sony bought Naughty Dog, Sony thought that in case Crash went away, they needed to have an engine that could do what we were doing,” Rubin said, “and they actually internally started working on a ‘Crash Killer,’ they called it, that was eventually Harry Jalapeno, believe it or not.”

Maybe Sony decided to stop the work on Jalapeno Harry as Naughty Dog and Universal made the Crash Bandicoot series a Playstation 1 exclusive and they did not need to spend money on another platform brand.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution and to Sir_Brando for the english corrections!

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Ms. Pacman: Maze Madness 2 [XBOX/PS2/GC – Cancelled]

In 2005 TKO Software were working on a sequel to Ms. Pacman: Maze Madness, a platform game that was originally released for the Nintendo 64, Playstation and Dreamcast. Ms. Pacman: Maze Madness 2 was going to be published for the Xbox, Playstation 2 and GameCube, but the project was cancelled in mid development because of saturated market for the genre.

Thanks to Hey Hey for the contribution!

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Cooly Skunk [SNES – Cancelled]

Cooly Skunk (also known as “Punky Skunk” in USA) is a platform game that was originally in development by Visit for the Super Famicom / Super Nintendo. The game was never released for the Nintendo console, but the title was somehow resurrected (by Ukiyotei?) with some graphical changes for the Playstation and later published in Japan by Visit and in America by Jaleco.

In Cooly Skunk the player takes the role of an anthropomorphic skunk and the game plays much like other side-scrolling action games, featuring a set of special tools including a skunk spray, parasail, a pogo stick, inline skates, digging claws, and a snowboard.

The project was probably canned for the 16 bit system because of  the new Playstation and Saturn consoles, that “killed” the SNES / Mega Drive (Genesis) market. Although released for the Playstation, it seems that the game was “not finished to completion” (at least from what we can read on Wikipedia, does anyone know more about this?). Cooly Skunk remains a collectors curiosity due to the generally unfinished nature of the game and its Super Famicom origins.

Celine was able to find some screenshots of the Super Famicom / Super Nintendo version on Super Power magazine issue 41. A playable demo was found and released online in January 2019!

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