Beta + Cancelled RAREware Video Games - Page 8 of 13

We already knew that StarFox Adventures once was the Nintendo 64 title Dinosaur Planet. However, the title did not only change during that transition, but also during its time as a StarFox game.

Although the main enemy in the game is General Scales, you will never fight him. Such a battle against General Scales was planned however, evidence was found in unused audio files on the StarFox Adventures game disc. In addition, it appears as if Fox McCloud would have had only to collect the Krazoa Spirits to save Dinosaur Planet; the Spellstones were only needed for saving Krystal. Fox did not want to leave the planet before Krystal was not safe.

Prior to fighting against General Scales, it seems as if Fox McCloud would have released Krystal. Both would have teamed up for the final section in the Krazoa Palace. [Sadly only Krystal’s audio files for this part were recorded.]

For games developed by Rare, it is also common that a special animation of the company logos was made [Example of Perfect Dark Zero]. For Starfox Adventures something similar was planned, but it did not end up in the final product:

Lead designer Lee Schunemann tried to give an explanation for all these changes: “We ran out of dev time due to the looming Microsoft buyout so we had to wrap up the game and just focus on one final boss.”

In the Krystal Archive we can listen to various unused voice clips that reveale many details on lost parts of the story. There are upwards of 50 clips for other characters that never made it into the game. The Starfox Online archive contains pages for ALL Star Fox Adventures voice clips. There were 730 non-duplicate voice clips in the game. All clips under the Unknown heading were not in the game. You’ll also find a few error clips, many alternate versions of clips, differing voice actors for characters, references to places and events that never made it to the game, and other interesting plotpoints.

Special thanks to Mr Krystal from the Krystal Archive!

As we can read from Giant Bomb’s Starfox Adventure page:

Members of the Star Fox Online forums discovered that a decent portion of the original Dinosaur Planet script is still contained within Star Fox Adventures. A file on the Star Fox Adventures disc called GAMETEXT.bin contains text used in the entire game, both for the Nintendo 64 version of Dinosaur Planet and the GameCube version of Star Fox Adventures. Though not entirely complete, many scenes from Dinosaur Planet’s storyline remain intact.
[…]
It would eventually be revealed that by joining all Krazoa Spirits together at the Krazoa Shrine (originally called “Warlock Mountain” in Dinosaur Planet) they would form the ultimate weapon in the galaxy. Not enough of the Dinosaur Planet script remains to describe what happens after that.

You can find the GAMETEXT.bin to download at the Krystal Archive! Sadly there are numerous examples of text not listed in the file. While the amount listed is considerable, Mr Krystal noticed that only one version of each existed: a given phrase would only be from one game or the other, not both, but which game it referred to would switch from line to line. Large sections, and whole plotpoints appeared to be missing.

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GameCube, Microsoft, Nintendo, Xbox

Quest (Rare MMO) [GameCube / XBOX – Cancelled]

monokoma

07-04-2009

8 Comments

Quest was a cancelled Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game that was in development at Rare Ltd. Before Raretopia.com vanished from the web, they had some interesting informations about the project:

When Microsoft purchased RARE, one of the things it highlighted was its established series. Having paid such a high price for the renowned codehouse, Microsoft naturally wanted to exploit its past work to the utmost. Shortly after its acquisition, it therefore organised a restructuring of the company where high-profile franchises such as Perfect Dark and Conker were prioritized over more experimental titles.
The first game to suffer from this change of focus was RARE’s top-secret online game that was originally planned for the Nintendo GameCube but soon converted to the Microsoft Xbox. Codenamed Quest, it was a massively multiplayer online space shooter led by Mark Edmonds, Duncan Botwood, and Chris Seavor in the programming, design, and art roles respectively. Despite having been in the works for about two years, development on the game was progressing slowly, largely due to its lack of distinct direction with regards to design. With the Xbox already being overcrowded with online games, Microsoft thus decided to cancel the title and relocate the 13-strong team to more important titles.

Thanks to Purerarity, some more info were leaked in october 2011:

Quest started around 2000 after Perfect Dark N64 as a mixed fantasy MMO. One name it had for a while was Elements of 3 Powers but it wasn’t related to Kameo (the other team probably took over the name when it was abandoned). Around 2001 Quest was a space shooter for the Gamecube and in 2002 it was converted to the Xbox and shortly thereafter put on hold. After Perfect Dark Zero a fantasy MMO version came back, this time titled Cascade. It was however cancelled in 2007 when the team did GoldenEye 007 for the XBLA instead. As you all know, the latter was finished but never released.

Sadly there are no Quest images or videos available at the moment.

Microsoft, Xbox 360

Urchin (Rare Ltd.) [Xbox 360 – Cancelled]

monokoma

04-04-2009

6 Comments

Urchin was an adventure fantasy / horror game that was in development at Rare Ltd. for Xbox 360. A few pieces of concept art were revealed by Rare artist Ryan Firchau at the “Nordic Game Conference”, held in Malmö in Sweden in May 2008.

While details are scarce, it is known that Urchin was in development by the team that was responsible for Conker: Live and Reloaded. After that title, was released, they helped finishing Perfect Dark Zero for Xbox 360 launch before regrouping as the “Conker team” again. In late 2006, Urchin was cancelled after only a few months of work.

As Zenek has wrote on the Rare-Extreme Forum, it appears as if there was a Dumbot from Conker: Live & Reloaded named “Urchin Pig Girl”. From this little easter egg and from one of the concept arts leaked, we can speculate that the protagonist of Urchin was going to be that little girl with her pig, called Lilith. Other game characters were a professor (The Dean?), werewolves and zombies.

Some more info on this cancelled project were shared in an interview with Chris Seavor:

Well, Urchin was the little thing I always wanted to make and who knows may well still make one day (not called Urchin obviously)…… A lovely , creepy , beautiful and tight little fairy tale for those who felt short changed by Fable’s good v bad mechanic.. In Urchin, it was ALL about being bad :)
Urchin had a ton of concepts done, some design, and the whole story arc figured out… I’d planned it as 3 games, each with a cliffhanger ending.

Another interview from Eurogamer:

Chris Seavor: Yeah. I wanted a change and I asked them. They said, okay, we’ll get back to you. That’s when I started Urchin, which was a dark fairytale from the point of view of a character who was the baddie rather than a good character. It was in the mould of Fable. The hook was, it wasn’t about whether you were good or bad. It was about how bad you were. But it was moral in that badness is down to your point of view, which is how I managed to get it to work in terms of problems parents might have with it.
When you killed the princess and ripped open her guts to get her heart, which was one of the quests, on the face of it it looked like you were quite a bad character, but in reality you’d then find out the princess was an evil vampire character who was killing local girls. That was an example quest. That’s how we managed to pitch it so it was all right with all the ratings people. That would have been quite good. It was certainly different.
When were you making Urchin?
Chris Seavor: Straight after Live & Reloaded, for the Xbox 360. We did a load of stuff. We had the graphics looking great on that. We spent a good eight months on that. We had a fighting system I called “Dirty Fighting”. The girl was quite brutal. So when she fights she has to use everything. She’s not very strong so she has to be very clever. So she does things like kick them in the knackers and use traps. She had a pall, this pig, who you also used in quests. He was quite heavy and strong, and she was quite light. It was a kind of a Banjo-Kazooie dynamic in that one was helping the other and one had strengths and one had weaknesses. But it was also about the character.
We did the thing Molyneux said he was going to do with the dog in Fable. We had already done it with the pig in that it was also the thing that was your manual, the in-game help. He would tell you stuff and say, oh, that’s interesting, what’s over there? And off he’d run. It worked really well.
Chris Seavor: It was going along and going along, and Microsoft were quite interested and then they weren’t. Just at that point when we were going shall we do this or not, are we going to pitch this for a greenlight, Chris and Tim said, oh, do you want to do PD? I went, oh, all right then. So we carried on with that.
That was another one of those things where I look back and think, should I have done that? Should I have stuck to my guns? I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

Another interesting description of Urchin was written by Xellos in the Playtonic forum:

It was an game about a roughly 12-year old gothic female child. You would have a wild boar as a companion solving the game’s various obstacles and puzzles. He was quite heavy and strong, and the girl was quite light. It was a kind of a Banjo-Kazooie dynamic in that one was helping the other and one had strengths and one had weaknesses.
There was going to be a fighting system in place called “Dirty Fighting”. The girl was going to be quite brutal. When she fights she has to use everything. Since she’s not very strong, so she has to be very clever to survive. She would do things like kick her opponents in the balls, or use traps to kill them.
It was going be having a dark fairytale like story. For example: One of the quests would involve you killing a princess and ripping open her guts to get her heart, on the face of it it looked like you were quite a bad character, but in reality you’d then find out the princess was an evil vampire who was killing local girls.

Thanks to Oolon for the contribution!

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Microsoft, Xbox 360

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts [Beta – Xbox 360]

U64 Staff & Contributors

03-12-2008

2 Comments

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a Xbox 360 title developed by Rare Ltd. and published by Microsoft in 2008. Unlike it’s predecessors, Nuts & Bolts was not a pure platformer; instead it involved building a car and driving with it. First concepts of this gameplay mechanic reach back to 2002-2004, when a small team was working on a prototype for a new Banjo-Kazooie game – at that time still for the original Xbox.

In 2005/2006, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts evolved from a prototype into a real beta game. Hence choices for the design direction were taken as seen in the following gallery with early concept art. But there were also various changes in the later stages of development. One of the levels in the final game is called “Klungo´s Arcade”, but in the beta version it was called “Klungo´s Play Emporium” and below you can see an image that shows what it was gonna look like. After that, there is a screenshot from the same level in the final version. Do you see the differences?

Beta:

Final:

On the official Rare website we can even read some interesting informations on the sixth removed level from the game: “Partway through all this, we learned that one Game World was to be dropped to give us a chance of getting the game finished on time, bringing the total down from six to five. This was a bit of a headache and involved some redesign, as the Seaside lost its Game World doors to the Docks, which required a different Trolley ability to reach, so certain features got changed or moved about to cope with the restructure. Beyond that, we also had a problem in that the size of the actual Town asset was so big, the game kept running out of memory, so a few things had to be pruned.

The pier used to have a pavilion you could drive through halfway along it, complete with arcade cabinets and a lower deck. That had to go, which was a shame. There was also a harbour beacon near the beach huts that got ripped out too. On the whole, though, there weren’t too many sacrifices made in getting everything stable.”

Thanks to Spiral Mountain Forum users, we even noticed some other differences in the early version of the game, like a different vehicle editor and parts, beta trolley and Grunty under the sun.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was Rare’s third idea in their plans to create a sequel to Banjo-Tooie. In an interview with Gregg Mayles, he said that the first idea was to create a remake of Banjo-Kazooie that would purport to be a direct port, but would feature extreme changes unexpectedly.

For example, a massive queen termite would emerge from the termite hill in Mumbo’s Mountain, causing Banjo to have to get oranges for Conga to throw at it. The second concept involved more traditional platforming, but with Gruntilda trying to follow Banjo and Kazooie around every world and replicating their moves in an effort to better them. The working title for the vehicle idea was Banjo-Buildie, but Mayles stated that it was too similar to the previous titles to have an impact. The team later stated that they had also attempted to make a rather more straight sequel to Tooie without any kind of twist but that they felt it was a “stale” method. [Infos from Wikipedia]

Also, as noted by [Nintex] in the NeoGAF Forum, an entire world was scrapped to reach the deadline:

This world is referenced several times in the game by characters in Showdown Town. A villager references Weird west by saying it was once accessible through the boarded up windows and doorways found near the Pier. LOG makes the comment, “You should be grateful, I could’ve sent you to Hoedown Town. It’s awful. The music, the dancing! Oh my!” A penguin in Showdown Town also makes a reference to this world saying, “You know the docks used to be twice as long? There used to be doors that lead to the Weird West game world.”

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Unused Music:

Thanks a lot to Lord Deathsaur and Nintex for the contribution!

Nintendo, SNES + Super Famicom

Donkey Kong Country 2 [SNES – Beta / Unused Stuff]

monokoma

18-10-2008

11 Comments

Here are some beta / unused finds from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest! Robert Seddon linked us to another interesting topic in the DKC Atlas Forum, where Kiddy14 has found out about a beta video of DKC2 with lots of differences from the final version! In there we can see that there’s no fog in Web Woods, the Lava Lagoon has no lava and there are Klaptraps around there, the player can not swim in the water and there’s a storm in Mainbrace Mayhem and Krow’s Nest. For more infos check the original topic in the DKCA Forum! Also, they found some unused sprites for Dixie and Diddy Kong. There was also a character cut from the game. His name was Mr. X. It is speculated that he was supposed to be the boss of Gusty Gulch but never made it to the final game and was was replaced by another boss named Kreepy Krow.

Codes for unused levels and more can be found at The Cutting Room Floor!

Thanks to Gabriel for the contribution of the sprite pictures!

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