ONM Remembered – #112
“This definitely isn’t Nintendo’s new machine.”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 91 (April 2000)
I’ve usually a good memory of all the games featured in the Nintendo mags that either never saw release or only in a totally modified format – Jest, Kirby’s Air Ride, Buggy Boogie, Robotech – I know ’em all, man! But Saffire does not ring any bells at all. Probably because this was the one time it showed up, while most other games seemed to crop up again and again just to taunt you with the fact they existed, but only in the buried hard drives of inaccessible corporate vaults. Sigh.
It may be a preview for a game from over ten years ago with no attempt at resembling gameplay, but it looks pretty nifty to me. Unseen 64 claims it eventually mutated into Barbarian… which looks nothing like this, and also looks a bit shit. That’s a crying shame. It would’ve been nice to have a Tomb Raider style adventure to kick off the GameCube.
Also, whoops, Disney’s Dinosaur never came to GameCube either! It did come to Game Boy Color, though, so you can rest easy. For all the hype they attempted with that five minute trailer (whose bright idea was that?), I haven’t heard a single opinion about the movie. No “it’s the worst thing ever” or “surprisingly decent” or even “purely mediocre” – I haven’t heard a single opinion on it! That’s quite possibly the worst fate any media could befall. Poor Disney.
Hey, tilt controls! Remember when that was a thing? No, actually, because I don’t think any of the tilt-enabled Game Boy games even arrived here in Europe (good save, Mercury-based products!). I suppose you could theorise this was the beginnings of the Wii Remote in development, but I wouldn’t want to be talking out of my own ass. I do too much of that as it is!
Also: “imagine controlling Mario by just moving the controller in any direction you like!”
I can imagine! It’d be a really fucking insufferable!
