(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.
