There are a lot of game projects that just didn’t happen for one reason or another, but to me, it’s most heartbreaking when a game’s completely finished and just doesn’t see the light of day. Propeller Arena, a first-party flight combat game for the Dreamcast, is one of those games. Why didn’t it release? Well, it was a late-2001 game about planes flying around tall buildings, so it suffered the fate that the original Advance Wars avoided by a day: a world that just wasn’t ready to have fun with that setting. READ MORE
Considering how much I’ve read in my life and how much I love science fiction, you might be surprised to hear it took me until my junior year of college to finally read Ender’s Game. Of course, once I did, I was instantly enamored with the fictional world it contained. As an avid gamer, though, I was intensely interested in both the learning, adaptive game Ender played on his desk and the Battle Room. Apparently, Chair Entertainment was as well, because soon after word came that a movie based on Ender’s Game was in the works, it announced plans to release a game based on that very part of the book. READ MORE
The Star Fox series was an iconic one for Nintendo, even at its debut. With the success of the original game, it would only make sense to release a new game that expanded on the already-successful formula. Fans would eventually get that news in the form of Star Fox 2 at the 1995 Winter CES in Las Vegas.
Everything Nintendo premiered at the show was either pegged as second rate or a failure. Most of the games would be canceled. READ MORE
Baldur’s Gate is a legend when it comes to PC gaming. The first two games were already considered some of the best RPGs on the PC, and the Infinity Engine games were all well known among gamers. It is easy to understand why a sequel in the Baldur’s Gate series would be highly anticipated. BioWare’s Infinity Engine went on to power an entire library of RPGs. Following Interplay’s success with Fallout, several employees left the company and formed Black Isle Studios, which would go on to produce Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale, and collaborate with BioWare to develop Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. READ MORE
Many retro game fans like to theorize and fantasize about what might have saved Sega. Many say that it was the Sega CD and 32X that undermined consumer confidence in Sega. Others say that it was the PlayStation 2’s unparalleled dominance of the console market that killed the Dreamcast, and by extension, Sega itself. Others even say that it was its lack of effort in the handheld space to keep up with Nintendo’s Game Boy to help stave off defeat during the lean years. One factor that most agree contributed is that Sega didn’t really carry the genres that were popular on the Genesis into the next generation on the Saturn, causing a huge backlash of disinterest outside of Japan. READ MORE
