The Best Games Never Published

Been waiting along time for duke nukem forever they announced that game when duke 3d was still popular.

Was very disappointed when wing commander 2 for snes never came out I wanted that game very much. Now to remind you all why Im so great. https://www.wcnews.com/news/2005/05/27 :D
 
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Stone48420 said:
Been waiting along time for duke nukem forever they announced that game when duke 3d was still popular.
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There have been a number of fine Duke Nukem games between now and Duke 3D. Manhatten Project got a couple of awards, if I remember correctly.
 
After seening the Nexus2 techdemo trailer I would liked to play that game. I found Nexus 1 very funny..sometimes unfair but still a great game. A second title would have been nice.
 
There was an old 4X space strategy game called Stars! (2.x) that came out in the mid nineties that I really loved. In fact, I still play it when I run across an old copy that I have stashed somewhere. Back when I first started posting in alt.games.wing-commander, I also followed rec.games.computer.stars. They were both very active at the time. The big Stars 3.0 sequel was in work back then in 1996, but it kept getting delayed. There was an interim upgrade (Stars 2.5) released around the time of Prophecy/Secret Ops to keep people happy.

I started working at GameStop in 2000, and the new Stars game had gotten an entry in the product database with some kind of 2001 release date. That date came and went though, and apparently the developer had a falling out with the publisher. They claimed that at worse, they'd still self publish it somehow, which seemed like a reasonable thing since Stars 2.0 was a backwater-distribution shareware type of game.

In the early 2000s, the game went on to have a limited beta test with a small number of members from the online community, and they even sold the game's soundtrack CD online. But things never really progressed from there. The developer fell off the face of the earth around 2002 or 2003, magazines stopped reporting on the game and no stores listed it anymore.

The series had a strong community hub site though that forged on in the absence of any news. They had a forum with over a thousand users and tens of thousands of posts, a chat room, a seti@home group and all the stuff that the CIC had back in the day. People sent in wallpapers and fan fiction and wondered about what would happen next. Then the guy who ran the website disappeared too at some point in 2005 or so.

And still the site's forum continued to be somewhat active with a small dedicated band of fans keeping things alive. Then they noticed that the site's domain registration was due to expire within a year. People tried getting ahold of the admin with no luck. A real sad depression kind of sank in as the remaining residents counted down to the domain's last month. They said goodbyes, and finally the site blinked out of existence - and with it the Stars community. That was a year ago.

Not all that long ago, I considered Starbase Delta and the Wing Commander CIC to be like sister sites. I'd build off some of their ideas, and suggest things for them. At one point in time, we were both about equally popular and had about the same amount of traffic. The difference though was that they had a new game in production and ours had all just been cancelled (with all our Origin friends laid off).

Even though there were WC games that were cancelled, fate ended up being much more kind to us. Many times since Secret Ops was released, Electronic Arts has tried to bring back Wing Commander. They could have stopped trying, and maybe they would have if there weren't thousands of diehard Wingnuts anxiously awaiting the next thing when times looked down. Thanks to everyone's eternal dedication, when Stars 3.0 disappeared, we got Prophecy Advance. And when the Stars CIC went away, EA Replay was announced. And now we're months, maybe weeks, away from the first brand new Wing Commander game in a decade.
 
Is that really a game that will never be published? Things seem to be going slowly but steadily, and boy am I excited!
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Yes, they announced that it was cancelled last month.
 
On the "Best Incomplete Game that Would be Awesome if they could finish it" I would inlclude KOTOR 2 and X-Com 3 Apocalypse.
 
Call me crazy but here's one franchise that got screwed

A Skies of Arcadia sequel....and granted it would be kind of hard considering you explored Arcadia already, but seriously what gives? Best DC RPG and no sequel?
 
KOTOR2 and SS2 are two games worth playing on their fan-improved versions (SS2 is very much complete, of course).

The work done in SS2 is similar to the new and improved WCP with hi-res and DVD quality video. KOTOR 2 is a whole new thing, fans are actually implementing storyline material that was left unused on the game.
 
Is that SS2 graphics patch still available? I tried to find it and couldn't. Ditto that website that had all the great SS and SS2 music remixes.
 
LeHah, try looking in TTLG (through the looking glass), the Looking Glass equivalent to the CIC.
They even have the official SS2 soundtrack, from the hands of Brosius himself.
 
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