RTS

Dee Dee Planet [DC – Unreleased]

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“I’d never played any video games until then, but in order to act as a director for this game project, I bought all video games available and some software. As this ‘Dee Dee PLANET’ was based on 8 bit games from the 80’s, I played the old Nintendo selectively. ‘Dee Dee PLANET’ is categorized as a shooting game, but almost all existing shooting games have lots of options which players can choose as they like. Players choose their weapons, vehicles and fields, and they upgrade their characters based on their score. This can be applied to other genres like car-racing, fighting and role-playing games.

This ‘Dee Dee PLANET’ is a kind of shooting game which shoots using a parabola, and is pastoral rather than speedy. It has a mathematical clearness by controlling the parabola with only two parameters – angle and shooting power. We set up a totally different theme apart from the offensiveness of other shooting games.

Players fight with their opponents operating their robots inside of three different zones – block zone, gel zone and liquid zone. Each zone is filled with different materials (gas, viscous material and liquid), different gravity and different resistance. There’s also difference in the power of each wheel as player’s feet and weapon. They have affinities between each zone. Players cannot choose those elements by themselves, they’re just given to them. It’s kind of an Oriental outlook on the world – ‘once a man comes into this world with his own body, he has to live out his life’. We included absurd events and developments in our first plan. Some of them were actually included in the game, and some were taken off from the specifications in the process.” [Quoted from shift.jp.org]

Dee Dee Planet was finished, but canceled due to a large networking bug.

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Advanced Wars: Under Fire [GC – Battalion Wars Beta]

Battalion Wars was originally entitled Advance Wars: Under Fire, but the name was dropped after E3 2003. This would have put it in the Advance Wars series of video games, as well as the Nintendo Wars series of games. However, all of those games are turn-based, whereas this game is a real-time strategy game. [Infos from Wikipedia]

In the early screens and trailer, the graphic style was still not finalized (it had a more “realistic” feeling), the HUD was different and some of the characters (the general on the right) were removed from the final version.

Thanks to Michael Cheek for the contribution!

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Technosaur [PC – Cancelled]

TECHNOSAUR was a cancelled computer game development project that started at Jim’s Restaurant late one night, when four game designers from Origin Systems got together to bitch about work over a cheap (and greasy) dinner. Amid ancient, hacking waitresses, soggy blueberry pancakes, and teenage vamps out way past their bedtimes, the idea of a conflict between the most elite military forces of the modern world and a culture of cybernetic, almost alien humans from Earth’s own future began to take form.

Real-time strategy from an overhead vantage, set in a simulated natural environment where rain would fall at random intervals, day would fade to night, fires would spread through fields and forests, and packs of cybernetically augmented velociraptors would shred anything standing in their way…it all sounded like fun. Exciting ideas made even better by an air of subversion.

Over the next 12 months, the project advanced and the team grew. However, things at the parent company “didn’t work out as planned” and the project was eventually cancelled.

[Contribute by Harvey Smith]

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Source: www.planetdeusex.com/witchboy/personalsite/tsaur.htm 

Starcraft [PC – Prototype / Beta]

The pre-alpha version of StarCraft was still very similar to Warcraft II in terms of user interface and style. After receiving much criticism on the 1996 E3 for this lack of technological improvement, Blizzard started to rework the game engine. This included changing the interface from the distinctive Warcraft II-sidebar to the now common bottom bar. Further improvements included pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds using 3D Studio Max. An isometric view was used, unlike Warcraft II’s top down perspective. – [info from wikipedia]

Thanks to MicroChirp for the contribution!

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[images from www.sclegacy.com]

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Command & Destroy [GBA – Cancelled]

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Pining for a Game Boy Advance version of Command and Conquer? There was an upcoming RTS game, cheekily titled Command and Destroy Advance, but it was cancelled. We say cheekily titled, as the game looked rather similar to Westwood’s classic Command and Conquer. Inspiration or plagarism? The game took place in 2018, in a scenario where Earth is stripped of all natural resources. You could have play as three different sides: Humans, Aliens or Worms (big worms, mind). There were 50 different units to build and control, and multiplayer skirmishes. Sadly, the developers never found a publisher..

It seems that this game was somehow released on the DS, but it appears that it wasn’t carried in stores and was only sold by mail order.

Thanks to Paul Masterson & Matt Gander for the contributions!

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