Games That Weren't^®

Yet another game which gets thrown into the archives, brought to GTW’s attention by Jason Kelk, and also released from the man himself.

Extreme Force featured graphics by Julian Francois and was coded by his then girlfriend Amanda Wynne. This is a promising game which plays slightly like a combination of Trantor and Great Gurianos.

The game features massive graphics (especially the main character who is quite impressive) and a reasonable perspective effect on the floor, which was certainly impressive for its time.

Music and sound effects were composed by both Marc Francois and Sean Connolly, though not all the tunes were fully implemented in the game, and only really Sean’s SFX and a tune by Marc have been used in the preview which you can check out.

Playability wise, you mainly just shoot as much as you can, while changing direction at will and crouching to reach the smaller creatures. Pressing space will change your weapons. It basically is at a very early stage in the preview.

Once you reach the end of the screen, you will get a congratulations message, and will encounter a rather neat menu system which was for the game and a superb piece of music by Marc Francois. If you click on EXIT, the game will crash out.

The game was never fully completed, due to Julian and his girlfriend splitting up. Had they stayed together, then no doubt the game would have likely been completed.

It is a shame, as this is certainly a promising game. It would have needed a lot of work to it to make it extra special from the rest, but certainly it was getting there.

Hopefully in the future we will hear from Julian himself, and maybe even his girlfriend to find out more about this cool little preview. But for now, check out yet another game that never was…

A exciting game… though lost along with the relationship sadly..

A nice early promising preview of a Lightforce clone, which although a little buggy in its early stages, has the qualities which made Lightforce as addictive as it was.

Featuring graphics typical of a Lightforce clone, they do let the game down slightly, as being a game from 1991, a little more would have been expected in the department after shooters such as "Dominator" being released 2 years earlier. Sprites aren’t too bad and make up for the slightly bland backdrops.

The music however isn’t too bad, and with the classic gameplay, makes up a promising looking game, which as with others in the archive, never quite made it past its final hurdle.

Another game within the archive with no credits or known details. There are some minor credits on the title screen, which unfortunatly don’t event to much (Due to them being initials).

It has been confirmed that this is no more than a hack of Warhawk, but was it an official hack to be a proper release or just a quick personal hack job?

Do you know any more about this dev?

Exodus was to be a very ambitious war game which was described by its developer as a mix of Elite, Civilization and Traveler RPG. Paul Clansey was the C64 developer and shed some light on a development not really mentioned in the press, as you can read in “Creator Speaks”.

Whilst Paul coded the C64 edition, Ian Weatherburn was producing the ST edition around 1988-89 for a company called New Frontier Productions. The game was designed by Tony Hetherington and there were possibly others working on the ST version with Ian. It seems that based from Amiga Power magazine, the game was intended for release by Activision in late 1989.

The game itself was a space RPG and economic trading war game, which was very ambitious for the team and very well presented (with excellent graphics by Tony). Proper storyboards and sketches were produced throughout the development as part of the planning (which sadly seem to be lost to time now).

Paul felt it was a mash up of best bits from other games, and needed work to tie it all together, but there were struggles with getting the wire frame sequences running at a decent speed on the C64 in particular. Over time, the company were not happy at all with progress, and it was cancelled before it could get much further.

In 2016, Paul was sorting out his notes and materials to help with a magazine interview, when he uncovered a disk of a demo sent to EA at the time. This was sent to GTW and fully preserved, and now with Paul’s permission we are able to present the final version of the game as it stood.

There are two parts in total. It seems the first part of Exodus (“trd” on the disk) is the trading part of the game. This has the menu system in place and a lot of options to play with. The second part (“arc” on the disk) is the arcade/Elite wire frame part. Load the “LOADT” and “LOADA” files to load either part in correctly.

At the moment, we don’t fully understand what it is you have to do or what all the controls are, but Paul will hopefully shed some more light soon when he’s had chance to play through and work things out again.

As you will see, the wire frame part is unfortunately very slow – but it is likely there could have been improvements had time been given. It does look very impressive even at this early stage.

Check out a promising title that was never to be, and we hope to have more details on it soon.

Not much to say about this game apart from its little resembelence to "Bear George", with its falling apples.

As you can tell, there is little information on this game which never got completed. All that remains currently is a small preview of level one, with some good cartoony graphics and cute little main character.

The game currently is nothing to write home about, which could be put down to its early stages. Just how much better a later version would be, is only known by the creator of this preview.

We recently had an email from the game’s developer who offers the information that there is a second level out there
which we may see sometime soon. In addition to this a whole load of sketches and plans for the game.

The developer may still wish to come back to this game one day and finish it off, so for now it sits in GTW, but in the future
could be taken out as a full version is released.

It’s early days, but we hope to hear more from the author about this title…

Another obscure title in the archives to maybe be finished…

A new GTW discovered by Jazzcat recently (plus fixed by Ian Coog), and passed onto GTW.

This is a very early preview by Vibrants, which seems to be a gory but cute Op-Wolf clone of somekind. It’s hard to tell because this preview is at such a early phase.

There is a brief story at the beginning of the game title screen as follows :

“Your girlfriend Cindy has been taken away by the evil king from the planet squarx, you have to get her back before he turns her to his queen with his dark power. You don’t have so much time. There is one problem!! The evil king got alot of murder-robots garding his castle, you have to kill them all before you are able to get through to Cindy and the Evil King!!”

This seems to be where the name ‘Evil King’ came from, though there is no sign of this name given for the actual game on the title screen. We assume though that ‘Evil King’ IS the name.

Really what we have here is all that remains of a game which sadly seems to have been scrapped very early on. Possibly the idea got stale, or even there were “life” things going on which prevented the game being completed.

The game after many years has now been sneaked out to the public to have a look at for the first time. Another concept which has failed. It is not playable, apart from a few seconds satistfaction of blasting some sprites to bits.. then its turn off and possibly wonder what could have been.

Music is by Thomas Mogensen, better known as Drax, and is a cover of Rob Hubbard’s Delta. Not sure if this has been released yet, though HVSC will hopefully confirm.

Its worth a look out of curiosity, but don’t expect loads of thrills here.

It could possibly be seen as a predecessor to ‘Blood’…

Now its getting hard… as the reviewing gets bog down, I keep coming across countless shooters, some real stinkers but some like this which look the business for the future, but get thrown away like the trash.

Escape From Mars has the basic elements present which make the game look a stunning sideways SEU, although the game lacks any real playability. Put that down to another early version, and a keen graphic artist! (Check that lovely ship!) :)

Music also makes good company for the nice graphics, so did a later version (Or even a final game we wish!) feature the playability aswell?…. Or was it all but a cover up? :)

The game it seems was reworked and actually released as Hidihood in 1993 by CP Verlag … http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3531&d=18&h=0

So it is very much a case closed!