(so it doesn't get lost in the general topic) A couple of days a go a special issue of the French magazine, Mega Force (dated October 1996), was... photographed: https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=&num=14266&album=oui It's almost as good as a scan, except not. Later issues of Mega Force were quite good at covering games that were never released. I'm not always sure what can be trusted - a lot of publishers of the era were promoting "32-bit" versions of games without committing specifically to a platform (I very much doubt MDK was Saturn-bound), but sometimes you find gems. This is the only known coverage(?) of "Ballistic (Pinball)". Team 17 said it was coming but it never did. It is the ELEVENTH known Ocean project to be cancelled for the Saturn - well done lads. If it looks familiar, that's because two thirds of it finally saw a release as Addiction Pinball in 1998: The World Rally Fever and Worms tables were made. The Alien Breed one, not so much. The PlayStation port wouldn't arrive until late 1999. But back in 1996 we have two, very blue iterations of Worms Pinball. Worms Pinball also failed to release on the Dreamcast, so nice to see Infogrames carry on Ocean's legacy of not releasing games for Sega platforms.
Very nice thread idea! I've certainly never heard of these pinball titles. ~~but then again, I wasn't one who played much pinball anyway, I probably should though.~~ I don't have a lot of titles on me, but I do have one in mind that I've never seen documented before. While this game came out in Japan in May 1996, with a European French release in December 1996. Rumors did exist at the time of the game's release of a North American release as well. While Bandai never made a public announcement of any plans to release the game in North America. The European version (which interestingly omits some features, such as most of the Japanese dialogue to accommodate a localization) also provides undeniable evidence of the existence of an English language localized build by Bandai America. Keep in mind too, that there's no English text at all in the French version outside of the Credits.
Speaking of Ocean. I was gutted when Waterworld on Saturn was canned. It is said to have some of the best water effects in any 32bit game and make amazing use of the VDP2 Also, I was so looking forward to flying Nightmares on the SEGA/MEGA CD it was said to push the ASIC chip to the max I was so looking forward to flying Nightmares on the SEGA/MEGA CD it was said to push the ASIC chip to the max
Doing some cleanups: https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2021/04/23/alien-odyssey-source-code-for-saturn-port-surfaces/ A couple of years ago it was reported that source code for a Saturn version Alien Odyssesy was found. Alien Odyssey is a 1995 IBM PC game developed by Argonaut Software (of StarFox and Croc fame) and published by Philips Media (of CD-i... fame). We had no knowledge of a Saturn port before this leak. One problem. Nobody has compiled the source code. I've had a brief look at it - there's references to the PSY-Q Development System, but if you don't want debugging, can you get around that? I spotted OBJ files - has it already been built? Judging from the readmes I imagine this is a very early tech demo that may not have been approved for full production. But then again, it could be something completely different. Why might this matter (aside from the obvious reasons)? Philips failed to release any software for the Saturn, but they probably had a T-series code, and this might confirm what it was. Another game of theirs, "Alien Encounter" is also known to exist - are these two projects the same?
This is a game I found while flicking through patents. Specifically I was looking into stuff developed by Takaaki Saito. I was expecting this to be related to Sonic Adventure 2, seeing as it's from 2000 he was one of the 2 Chao Programmers, but it's something completely different I don't recognise. https://jglobal.jst.go.jp/detail?JGLOBAL_ID=200903040438021857 The patent is about an image processing method that generates a black outline around each of a 3D model's features, so that they stand out against the background. Clearly this was pretty deep into development for these screenshots to exist, but I've never seen it before. And, as per usual with patents, it's not super specific, so there's no mention of what this game was called. I would assume it was being developed by some branch of SONICTEAM though, either Sega Software R&D Dept. 8 or Sonic Team USA, since Saito had just come off of Sonic Adventure + ChuChu Rocket! and was going on the Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Advance.
Since we have a topic on unreleased games now, I figured I should also draw some attention to NEC-related unreleased games as those too are within our scope. Unseen64 has a bunch of pages for a variety of unreleased games for systems like the PC Engine and even the PC-FX, of which I have added to this todo list here. These have magazine clips, and we have a lot of the magazines that they can be sourced from, however considering how big the magazine scans are it takes a long time to go through multiple 500+MB issues of the likes of PC Engine Fan to pinpoint the sources of these clips. The way PC Engine Fan covers news on games that end up getting scrapped leads to a lot of fuzziness; most often they'd have small footnotes in their "Maker Land" pages saying things like "we know this company has this game coming soon but there's no news on development yet", which you may find often in the magazine article listings I've put up so far for some of these unreleased games. Even with how long it takes to load and sift through magazines I have managed to source the clips for games like PC Cocoron, Splendid Saga and Battle Jungler, at least.
And then I remembered there was a topic A few late 1991/early 1992 EA Mega Drive games have posters, with a catalogue on the back: COMING SOON !!! - games that weren't released. Unless they were. Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday and Rings of Power made it to market (they're even listed in one of the boxes above... so shouldn't really be here). Beirut Breakout is Desert Strike, The Lord of the Rings (Electronic Arts) and Zombie High are known quantities, but the rest... not so much This leaves three mysteries - "Body Count", which is probably a different game to the other Body Count - Odysseus - Headbanger Ball The internet is telling me that Headbanger Ball was a prototype name for Crue Ball... but isn't providing evidence. The other two are complete unknowns. Are they actually unreleased games, or just prototype names for later EA products?
The EA version of Body Count was an unreleased game, it was going to be an action RPG. There's a mention of it in this interview.
An observation from that EA poster catalog: The F-22 Interceptor: Advanced Tactical Fighter advertisement seems to feature an image from an earlier build. The pause/status screen depicts the player's aircraft as a YF-23, the aircraft that lost to the YF-22 in the Advanced Tactical Fighter program. Notably, EA reprinted that same, unused YF-23 image as the icon for the "Action" section of the catalog. Now I'm wondering if there's any evidence of this game starting out as "YF-23 Interceptor" or a more open-ended "Advanced Tactical Fighter" simulator. Here's the pause/status screen from the final version for comparison, featuring the eponymous (Y)F-22:
I seem to remember EA was going to bring Wing Commander 2 to the Mega Drive as well using a special chip for scaling and rotation
I had a quick look - there's a couple of posters that use that F23 screenshot, but everything we currently have(?) calls the game F-22 Inteceptor. There wasn't much build up for this one - magazines only seemed to feature it post-launch.
I hadn't noticed before but wikipedia says this (but doesn't mention any sources): "The game's prototype name was Twisted Flipper. The producer of the game, Richard Robbins, initially pursued the name Headbangers Ball, but MTV balked at a license and Mötley Crüe was added relatively late in development" Headbangers Ball was my favourite show on MTV, as is heavy metal music and all its subgenres ... ALL METAL RULES! ...
This was the sentence I didn't trust - "MTV balked at a license" has been copy-pasted verbatim across the net, but I can't help but ask... "why would they?". MTV were involved in video games both before and after Crue Ball. Sense makes no. I'm semi-fascinated by the idea of F-22 Interceptor not having an F-22 in it though. I know F-117 Night Storm had to make things up because the real plane was shrouded in secrecy - it hadn't dawned on me that we might have multiple "realistic" simulators simulating what is effectively fictional aircraft. Turns out it's a bunch of them - "JetFighter II: Advanced Tactical Fighter" from 1990 simulates the F23-D (and was getting in the way of my searches). "F29 Retaliator" is fictional. There's two "ATF" games based on prototype planes. Even Jungle Strike has an F-117 in there. Speaking of which In my search for F-23s in F-22, I found myself hunting for the "EA Air Force" line - a short-lived sub-brand that EA applied to F-22, Desert Strike, and LHX. They didn't apply it to Jungle Strike (so there's only three in the set), but from the looks of this (later) poster, they planned to. A very low priority task of mine was to work out when the company started to call itself "EA" rather than "Electronic Arts" (and whether they ever referred to themselves as "EOA" as their old logo implies). The EA Air Force line might have been the first to use this moniker (it may pre-date EA Sports, or the original "EASN" (Electronic Arts Sports Network)), thus you could argue F-22 Interceptor was the first EA game. But I haven't checked. We could really do with some EA catalogues from 1990/1991/1992 - they seemed to quite busy at "not releasing games".
I totally agree... I'm also a bit sceptical... if only there was a source to back it up, it would make a great story...
The back of that one; Looking through usenet posts someone got F-22 for Christmas, so should be either November or December 1991 release. EA Hockey released September, possibly August 1991 in the UK. It was #1 for the ELSPA console chart for the week ending 1991-09-21, but I don't have previous weeks to know the exact release week. CTW #354, published 1991-09-16 has it as "Out Now". There should be another poster for the following month; https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/rec.games.video/c/7quy6YpO8Fo/m/nByX1ECFXxYJ There's also another poster with boxart for Black Crypt and Leander (released as Galahad).
Slightly earlier one with different boxart, the poster text still says F-22, but the boxart isn't fully legible, although "Interceptor II" can be seen. There are a lot of variants to find ...
