Cancelled or Retooled Games

[Big Panda]

Many games have been developed over the years. Sometimes, these games never get to see the light of day. In other instances, some of these games even arrive in certain territories with a totally different face.

Here, we can reveal and discuss these little gems.

You remember the first ever South Park video game ever released? That really crappy "first person shooter" with the snowballs? It was developed by Acclaim and released on the home consoles of the time. But did you know that it was also intended to be accompanied by playformer on the Game Boy Color?

The game was completed and ready to be shipped out, however, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't feel comfortable having a game based on their mature TV series released on a console primarily aimed at children. Parker and Stone kept some of the prototype copies however in commemoration of it being the first South Park game ever.

Only a single screenshot of the original game exists: http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/lostmedia/images/5/56/Southparkbeta.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20150417211234

While the game in its original format has never seen the light of day in any territory, Acclaim later retooled the game twice over into other title: in the US, it was retooled and released as The New Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley, while in Europe, it came out as Maya the Bee.

This isn't the first time video games have changed regionally due to licensing however, as this video details:

 

 

[ImPantsAtThis]

Eight Days is a cancelled-but-not-cancelled ('on hold' since 2009, announced in 2006 -- you do the math) PS3 shooter developed by SCE London, often known for its gameplay vids being re-used as spoof "GTA V leaked footage" before the game had any real footage.

 

 

The game itself was sort of a spectacle shooter (think Uncharted-level set pieces) set over, well, eight days and featured the player and an AI partner, two ethically disparate vigilantes battling a mob syndicate, with one of the characters being the 'good' path, and the other the 'bad' path, with the player able to switch between the two. As you can see in the video, there's a few neat bits of interplay between the protagonists, as the two of them can pass over each other in cover and swap guns on the fly.

There's some debate as to whether the trailers/gameplay vids for this game were legit, with some citing the lack of a proper HUD or the overly-polished animations* as reasons (interesting fact: Jim Jagger, the Animation Director for this game, later went on to work at Rockstar North, specifically on GTA V as Lead Animator along with providing help on L.A. Noire). Personally, I don't care either way -- it's not like the game's gonna come out any time soon, and the footage still looks cool.

*That said, do some of the characters' aiming animations look really stiff to anyone else?

[Big Panda]

I'm sure you all know the about Puyo Puyo being localised as Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine outside of Japan. But did you know that's not the only localised version of the game?

Two years later, the game was reskinned once more as Kirby's Avalanche, released on the SNES.

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At one point, there were plans for another Japanese title to get a Sonic-style makeover. The RPG game Popful Mail (originally a PC game in Japan) was planned to be localised for international audiences as "Sister Sonic" for the Mega CD, featuring Sonic's "long lost sister". Nothing of the game was ever shown, and angry fans expressed their outrage over the planned localisation, and the Sonic version of the game was canned in favour of a straight-up translation of the original Popful Mail game.

[Phos]

Ok, this is a really weird one...  Remember Hydro Thunder?  A lot of the people who worked on it at Midway left during that company's collapse, and formed their own company, called Raw Thrills.  There, they made a spiritual successor called "H2Overdrive".  Interestingly, this wasn't the first game in development to use that name, several years prior, Crave Entertainment was developing a PS2 game also named H2Overdrive, footage of it has been found since, but I don't think that's the end of the story.  Several years later, a new company called Vector Unit developed a Hydro Thunder Sequel for the 360, and... certain thing about it remind me of H2Overdrive!  The most notable is how the boats turn, in both games they seem to rotate farther than they've actually turned and then settle back when the stick is released.  It seems as though these two games managed to coincidentally swap names.  

[Agie]

I would still like to play Twelve Tales: Conker 64. It seems like a whole other game from what it got retooled into; Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Basically, Twelve Tales was a kid friendly game, not unlike Conker's Pocket Tales. In fact, I think Pocket Tales was made partially to hold people over while they waited for Twelve Tales.

Then Banjo-Kazooie happened, and the team started fearing that they were getting too similar to it. Then playtesters hated it for the same reasons. So they changed direction, and heavily retooled it into the violent, darkly humorous, not so kid-friendly game we have today. This had the side effect of turning Pocket Tales from holdover game into an anomaly in the Conker series, since it's a kid friendly game in what became an adult-oriented series.

BFD was amazing, though, and I'm glad we got it, but I'd still like to play Twelve Tails. But it's unlikely to happen, especially if what I've heard of losing the original BFD assets are true; if they lost the assets for what we got, then what chance do we have of playing what could have been?

[Tornado]

Sister Sonic always sounded like the worst thing, and considering what Popful Mail is (a very Japanese Classicvania/Zelda II-style platformer with some sprinkled Western RPG trapping) they would have had to completely remake the game to actually do it; so we dodged a major bullet. When I read about it seemed like another one of those SoA/SoJ slapfights.