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What are Your Unreleased Holy Grails?

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
Seems weird that someone was enough into collecting to be looking for ROMs but not enough to know how any of it worked... What a loss.
 

Ghost from Spelunker

BAG
(They/Him)
I'm pretty good since we have seen Hard Drivin' for NES and Socks the Cat Rocks the Hill.

Maybe that Battletoads for Gameboy Advance.

But right now I keep thinking of early versions of released games that had big changes made.
 

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Other than the obvious Mega Men and Earthbound 64 most of mine goes into the deeply hypothetical. What would the SNES CD-ROM have given us? What about Project Atlantis, the original update to the Game Boy? Same for the successor to the Game Boy Advance.
Or all of the Secret of Mana content that in theory they were going to put in, back before they had to cram the game onto a cartridge. That was what I was hoping for when they announced the remake--going back and adding cut content.

I suspect that if I went through old Nintendo Powers, I could find a bunch of games that never materialized that I was excited about. The thing is, besides Earthbound 64, Chrono Break and Lufia: Ruins Chaser (and something called Final Fantasy: Earth Quest that never materialized from Square), the things that I most wanted were all released in Japan and not localized. The fan translation scene has been working tirelessly for decades to right that particular wrong, so despite the best efforts of the original publishers I still got to play Lennus 2 and Mystic Ark and Dark Half and all those sorts of games.
 
Great Ace Attorney 1&2 was one of my top unreleased holy grails for several years, but it's coming off the list!

Early prototype versions of Final Fantasy XV/vs XIII are going to be big what ifs for me for a long time. Even as recently as a few months before launch, the Duscae Demo of FFXV presents a very different gameplay experience that I would have preferred over what we got.

Front Mission 2 & 5 will probably never see the light of day in NA, and it makes me sad.

Pretty soon, every Konami property worth a damn will feel like an unreleased holy grail. You just straight up can't buy almost any of the best games from their most illustrious franchises on current gen consoles, and the more time passes the more that's going to just be ridiculous.
 

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
Oh, right, I remembered a good one. I'd love to get my hands on the Black Tiger NES port.

72tuLD5.jpg
 

ShakeWell

Slam Master
(he, etc.)

Sarge

hardcore retro gamin'
I remember actually seeing a screenshot of Black Tiger in a Sears catalog back in the day. Wonder if it's still stashed somewhere back home - I'd love to see if it's the game picture as what's here, or if it was just an arcade shot.

With some effort, I think SF2 could have been perfectly fine on NES. The chibi fighters showed the way forward, but TMNT: Tournament Fighters also showed the NES could at least do a competent fighter.

EDIT: Hot dang, I did remember correctly. Here's the page. It's pretty fuzzy, but this looks like a shot of the arcade game.

3dXp4Um.jpg
 
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RT-55J

space hero for hire
(He/Him + RT/artee)
All this talk about NES obscura reminds me that nobody knows what (if anything) Yeah Yeah Beebiss I is supposed to be.
 
I think the biggest one for me in my lifetime was actually fulfilled: the Master Quest of Ocarina of Time. To this day it still kinda shocks me that we got it in the end.
 

Kzinssie

(she/her)
I think the biggest one for me in my lifetime was actually fulfilled: the Master Quest of Ocarina of Time. To this day it still kinda shocks me that we got it in the end.
The funny thing about that, as someone who made a thread about all the Zelda games in chronological order, is that it was only 4 years later - the real trick is that it took way longer to be confirmed that, yes, Master Quest is Ura Zelda.
 

ShakeWell

Slam Master
(he, etc.)
It's believed to be either Super Pitfall 2 (Atlantis No Nazo) or Rai Rai Kyonshies, a Power Pad game featuring, uh, hopping infant demon ghosts.


It's also speculated that it was a bogus title inserted by some company that put used game ads in magazines to spot people ripping off their price lists.
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
What would the SNES CD-ROM have given us?

Ah, what I consider "the lost generation."

Stuff like Sonic CD and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood have such a unique quality to them I can't quite put into words, and I can't help but wonder what others like it we might have missed by the Play Station never entering the market.

Maybe that Battletoads for Gameboy Advance.

Yikes. I'm content to leave that one buried. Heck, I'll even help spring for cement.

Another one I thought of is Bonk: Brink of Extinction. I was so looking forward to that.
 

Phantoon

I cuss you bad
Ah, what I consider "the lost generation."

Stuff like Sonic CD and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood have such a unique quality to them I can't quite put into words, and I can't help but wonder what others like it we might have missed by the Play Station never entering the market.
I think we got the best of it in the end - Sony were definitely going to screw over Nintendo on the SNES CD. If it had been a success who know what would have happened to Nintendo?
Looking at the CD-ROMs in the market it was likely to be a moderate success at best. As it didn't have any extra processing the cartridges were always going to be more impressive in the end, so maybe we'd have a Famicom Disk System like situation occurring. Still, seeing the original plan for Secret of Mana and the other games that were going to use it would be fascinating.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
Yeah, seeing what happened with the Sega CD and the PC Engine CD I don't think the SNES CD addon getting released would've changed too much. Ditto with the 64DD I guess?
 

Kzinssie

(she/her)
I think the 64DD would have genuinely been pretty impactful, since it would have existed alongside a successful purely disc-based system. I mean, the N64 had an infamous dearth of JRPGs, and that's probably entirely due to it using cartridges.
 

Mightyblue

aggro table, shmaggro table
(He/Him/His)
In terms of specs sure, but you're still in that trap of essentially paying another console's worth of money for a bolt on upgrade and at that point why not get the PS1/2 anyway?
 

Kzinssie

(she/her)
It would presumably be cheaper than a Playstation, and also console wars brand loyalty was in full swing. Playstation doesn't have Zelda, after all.
 

LBD_Nytetrayn

..and his little cat, too
(He/him)
I'm just always going to wonder what Super Mario CD, Zelda CD, maybe Mega Man CD* or Metroid CD would have been like.

Ooh, or Contra CD...

I'm sure there's a universe out there where these came to pass, and that's the one I want to visit... along with the one where SEGA didn't keep sabotaging themselves.
Who knows, maybe they're the same one? It would save me a trip, at least.

* Not counting the likes of Mega man 8 or X4; as great as they are, they feel like a little more of a jump to me somehow.
 
I would really like the opportunity to play a lot of prototypes that we know exist (and sometimes show up at expos) but people refuse to dump like Marble Madness 2 and Beavis and Butthead arcade.
 

Ludendorkk

(he/him)
I think the 64DD would have genuinely been pretty impactful, since it would have existed alongside a successful purely disc-based system. I mean, the N64 had an infamous dearth of JRPGs, and that's probably entirely due to it using cartridges.

Honestly it's close to being Nintendo's biggest failure: the number of games that gen that started trying to dev for 64DD and ended up getting cut down for cartridge, moved to sixth-gen systems, or just cancelled outright is huge, it fucked with Nintendo's entire console output that generation, just a massive black hole for resources that could have been better spent on something other than technology that was obsolete even before the N64 actually released.
 
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