- EA may have made a lot of improvements to their public image this year, but they’re still notoriously cheap when it comes to quality assurance, especially on their ports. The PSP version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 had a rather strange bug in one of its PGA Tour challenges. Players were required to hit a shot from the rough, but the game had the player tee off from the top of a tree on an upside down course.
- The Sierra-produced Diablo expansion Hellfire contained a bunch of early Half-Life footage and interviews. While the footage looked pretty good at the time, Valve were not happy with the game and spent the next year revising it, turning it into the awesome game it is today. You’ll still see that some of the monsters and set pieces in the footage turn up in the final game, though.
- The Atari Jaguar, 3DO and Macintosh versions of Wolfenstein 3D feature redrawn sprites and textures. The new sprites and textures were done at 128x128 pixel sprites, much bigger than the old 64x64 sprites used by the original version and many of the early ports. The problem? Not all of the soldier angles were redrawn, so they always face forwards.
- Each level in Perfect Dark contains a meticulously hidden piece of Swiss cheese. A cheat was to be activated when a player found all of the cheese pieces, but was scrapped for the final version.
- Nintendo of America is renowned for having some crazy restrictions for NES third parties (and since they controlled 95% of the market, they could get away with it). One of these restrictions was that third parties were not able to distribute cartridges with custom mapper chips in them. Many of Konami’s Famicom games shipped with custom FM soundchips which allowed the system to utilise digital instrument samples during music playback. As a result, the Japanese versions of games such as Contra and Castlevania III have much better soundtracks.
- Spore was originally intended to cover seven stages of creature progress. The two stages that were cut were the molecular stage, intended to be a Tetris-like puzzle game, and the city stage was to deal with management of factors such as agriculture, entertainment, crime and pollution. It was also intended that there would be different types of cities; moving, underground and planet-wide, for example.
- The popular Square Enix RPG Secret of Mana was originally intended to be a launch title for the SNES CD add-on. After the cancellation of the project, the game was squeezed into a cartridge. This proved to be a bit of a problem for the English translation of the project, as space restraints led to large portions of the original script being cut during the localisation process.
- The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall has one of the largest worlds in a game, covering over 161,000 square kilometres, with 15,000 different locations to cover and 750,000 NPCs. As you can imagine, that leads to a hell of a lot of repeated content (especially when it is randomly generated), which is why Morrowind was less than 0.01% of the size. Let’s not even start about the number of bugs in the game.
- Okami’s unique visual style was lauded by just about everyone (including me), but the game was originally designed with a realistic look in mind, as this early trailer indicates.
- The arcade and home versions of Street Fighter: The Movie are almost entirely different games. The more famous arcade game was developed in America, and was based on the Mortal Kombat template of fighting games, and generally considered to be rubbish. The home game was developed by Capcom in Japan using the assets from the arcade game, but the fighting engine used in Super Street Fighter 2. While it is the better game, it was largely disregarded due to the taint of association with the wretched movie.
- Renowned actor Bob Hoskins considers Super Mario Brothers to be the worst movie he ever worked on. He revealed his feelings about the movie in an interview with The Guardian: "The worst thing I ever did? Super Mario Brothers. It was a fkn' nightmare. The whole experience was a nightmare. It had a husband-and-wife team directing, whose arrogance had been mistaken for talent. After so many weeks their own agent told them to get off the set! Fkn' nightmare. Fkn' idiots."
- Full Throttle was due to get a direct sequel – not the well publicised Full Throttle: Hell on Wheels, but an adventure game sequel. Full Throttle 2 (sometimes referred to as Full Throttle: Payback) was cancelled in late 2000. The game’s plot was to deal with the aftermath of the events of Full Throttle and a secret plan to fit all vehicles with hover pads.
- Rayman Raving Rabbids originally started development as Rayman 4, with the full involvement of Michel Ancel, the series creator, who had not worked with Rayman since the second game. Ancel created the Rabbid characters, but after the team got a hold of the Wii development kits, the game quickly evolved into a mini-game compilation, and Ancel left the project.
- Mutant League Football was a successful experiment for EA in the early 90s. It spawned a 39 episode cartoon series and toy line. Yet EA saw it fit to significantly cut the budget of the follow up Mutant League Hockey, and cancel development on Mutant League Basketball, devoting all resources to its Madden franchise instead.
- Syphon Filter’s development arose out of the ashes of a Bubsy 4 prototype, which bore much improved 3D technology. Sony weren’t interested in another furry animal platformer, and offered up Syphon Filter. Yes, Sony Bend was once Eideitic Inc, the guys who made Bubsy 3D. Just goes to show how things can change.
- Fans often see the WWE’s purchase of WCW as a major downturn in professional wrestling. It also had an impact on wrestling video games, as it resulted in the cancellation of WCW Mayhem 2 (as their deal with EA was cancelled), which was due to be developed by AKI Corporation using a new version of their beloved wrestling engine. That game ended up being released as Def Jam Vendetta, featuring rappers instead of wrestlers.
- The first Mercenaries game has a ton of Star Wars references, no doubt due to it being released under LucasArts. These include an international committee claiming that it discovered that Greedo shot first and a lawsuit being filed on Coruscan regarding the exhaust port on the Death Star. Han Solo is unlockable in the PlayStation 2 version of the game.
- Psychonauts was conceived during production on Full Throttle. Tim Schafer had originally intended for Ben to go through a psychedelic experience. The sequence was dropped and the idea was maintained but changed heavily during development – Raz was originally an ostrich, for starters.
- Sega held select Marvel licenses at different times during the early 90s, and unlike current licensees (which, funnily enough, includes Sega) actually made decent games. They experienced a lot of success with their two X-Men games, and a third title called X-Women, which would have you playing as the ladies of the X-Men team, was in production. Unfortunately, the title was cancelled, presumably because it was too close to the end of the Mega Drive’s life cycle (not because of the obvious transgender jokes).
- Perfect Dark Zero ended up as one of the Xbox 360’s launch titles, but its history goes back a lot further. It was originally being developed for the GameCube, but those plans changed when Rare was bought by Microsoft. The game moved over to the Xbox, and was in production there until 2004, when it was moved over to the Xbox 360. The game’s producer states that it was about 12 months from completion. Footage from the Xbox game is pretty impressive – maybe this would have been the big Xbox game of 2005 had the Xbox 360 project not been pushed forward.
- Early press materials for Silent Hill indicated that the game was meant to star two characters with different playable scenarios. The game only released with Harry’s scenario. The other playable character was meant to be Cybil. While Cybil’s scenario was dropped, several clues were not removed from Harry’s story, such as the equipment in the chemistry lab at the school.
- Speaking of Silent Hill, each game in the series has a secret UFO ending, a joke ending where UFOs either kidnap the character or destroy Silent Hill. Silent Hill 2 contains a second joke ending where it is revealed that everything in Silent Hill is controlled by a small dog (a Shiba Inu) in a hidden control room.
- EA are renowned for their tactics of securing exclusive licenses to sports leagues like the NFL, but it wasn’t always that way. The Madden series didn’t carry the official NFL license until Madden NFL 94, but didn’t have the NFL Players Association license until Madden NFL 95. Madden 64 was the last Madden title to be released without any official licensing. NHL 92 had the official license of the league and not the player’s association, NHLPA 93 had the license of the player’s association and not the league. That was fixed by NHL 94.
- It almost wasn’t, however. The NHL was offended by the level of violence in NHLPA 93 and nearly withdrew their support from NHL 94. The reason? NHLPA 93 encourages violence on the ice – the manual even tells you to try to injure the stars on the other team to win a match (injuries result in a pool of blood on the ice). Fights between players were a common occurrence, also resulting in major injuries. All of the violence was removed from NHL 94, and fights would not return until NHL 96.
- The big selling point of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut was that it was to replace certain live action scenes that were cut from the original US and PAL releases, and present the opening cinema in colour. Unfortunately, Capcom screwed up, and the Director’s Cut features exactly the same cinematics as the original game. You can see the original (and horribly cheesy) scene here (bit of gore though, so younger readers and sensitive Attorneys General beware).
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Prettier sprites, but ¼ of the angles |
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