The wiki website Hidden Palace has managed to track down a very early prototype of Earthworm Jim 2 for the Super NES. While prototypes are discovered fairly frequently these days, most of them tend to be nearly complete versions of the game they represent. Not this time…this version of Earthworm Jim 2 is radically different from what was sold.
Thanks to the indie development scene, there are plenty of new games coming out for age-old consoles, and some are even good. Fork Parker’s Crunch-Out is one of the more unusual we’ve seen.
Capcom is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Street Fighter franchise by literally going back to the exact product that made it take off. Street Fighter II for the Super NES will be reprinted, the company announced today, in a limited stock of 5,500 pieces. Most of them will be red-colored (“Ryu Red,” as Capcom puts it), but a select 1,000 of them, doled out randomly, will be see-through, glow-in-the-dark and “Blanka Green.”
To give a little background, the Super NES had a fancy satellite service that allowed players to download games from space during designated time periods. The service was never sold outside of Japan, and many of the games that appeared on the service were never sold again in any form. This included a remix of Link to the Past, a 16-bit remake of the original Zelda game, a second SNES F-Zero featuring new tracks, and “Radical Dreamers,” a text adventure from Square that would eventually turn into Chrono Cross.
In the mid-90’s Nintendo tried a unique experiment with the Super Famicom in Japan: if customers signed up for a special service, they could download games via satellite. Unlike the Sega Channel (which came through your cable system and was mostly games already available through retail), Nintendo’s BS-X service consisted of new content.
In the waning years of the Super NES, Nintendo went into production on a sequel to Star Fox, with bigger and grander ambitions than the original, powered by the Super FX2 chip. But the game never came out, being cancelled at the eleventh hour. Now the website Nintendo Life has scored an exclusive interview with Dylan Cuthbert, programmer for Argonaut Software, which made the original Star Fox and its original sequel. Here are the most interesting revelations gathered from that conversation….