Showing posts with label Red Lemon Studios. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Red Lemon Studios. Show all posts

Blowup! - Another unknown Dreamcast game has been found!


Not content with giving us just one new Dreamcast present for Christmas this year, the elves over on the Dreamcast-Talk forum have evidently been working tirelessly on the most recently dumped contents of a broken Dreamcast dev kit in an attempt to bring more festive joy to Dreamcast lovers all over the world.

The most recent discovery appears to be yet another previously unseen Dreamcast title from Red Lemon studios again: Blowup!. Another Dreamcast-Talk user, Ian Micheal, was able to get this game to boot in the early hours of this morning. 

What's particularly fascinating about this demo is that as you can see from the title screen above, it was ultimately intended for display at the E3 expo in the year 2000. This leads me to the assumption that, unlike The Simpsons: Bug Squad!, which was clearly just a developer pitching to a studio, Blowup! was a real game that that was actually in development heading for an actual release at some point.


The only part of this demo which actually runs at the moment is the title screen, which then loops to a promo screen highlighting all of the exciting features that Blowup! will offer, promising compelling gameplay and a rich, detailed story amongst other things. This would have been very common for game demos at the time, especially those playable at E3 so that the gaming press had an idea of what the full game would be like.

Blowup! never did see the light of day; potentially another victim of the Dreamcast's demise and the publisher just not seeing the return on investment on a game that would've likely not have seen shop shelves until 2001.

Unfortunately the demo will not load at the moment beyond the boot screen due to some missing texture files. But I have little doubt that if there is a way to get beyond these screens, the boffins working on it over on Dreamcast-Talk will find out soon enough. We will of course keep you updated here on the Junkyard!

In the meantime, it's fun to speculate on what this mouse wearing a Fez hat would get up to in Blowup!. He looks like a mischievous little blighter, don't you think? Maybe, judging by the second screen, he just fancies a game of pool? Muse away below or on Twitter.

UPDATE: The founder of Red Lemon Studios, Andy Campbell, has added some additional insight: "Blowup! was a puzzle platformer game where you controlled a character who would blow or suck a ball or balls over a level".

So there you have it, looks like it wasn't heading for a release after all!

Previously unknown Dreamcast game discovered - The Simpsons: Bug Squad!

Just when we thought that 2020's surprises were all but over, another gem is uncovered by the Dreamcast community!

Dreamcast-Talk user 'sreak' revealed in a recent forum post over at Dreamcast-Talk that they had a Dreamcast development kit that they were going to export the files from. The initial list of contents seemed to be fairly uninteresting, but things  - as they are known to do - developed quickly.

After dumping the contents, it became apparent that there was a very early playable version of a game that nobody knew existed. Behold: The Simpsons: Bug Squad!


There appears to be zero information about this game available anywhere, indicating that nobody even knew it was in development at the time. This isn't the first time hitherto unknown Dreamcast games have come to the fore - things like Millennium Racer and Deer Avenger 3 were complete unknowns when they leaked onto the internet.

The game certainly doesn't look like any other Simpsons themed games we've played and is a fairly bizarre use of the license - almost like a sort of Toy Commander or Roommania style thing but set inside 742 Evergreen Terrace. Perhaps this is why it didn't get any further in development? We can see from the title screen that the development team behind The Simpsons: Bug Squad! was Red Lemon Studios, who were also working on another Dreamcast game that never saw the light of day, Take the Bullet, which Tom expertly covered in his article on that game back in 2015. Update: it appears the same dev kit also contains a beta version of Take the Bullet - more on this soon!


Fascinating stuff, we're sure you'll agree! Hopefully at some point in the near future somebody with the know-how will export what remains of this mysterious title and create a playable version that can be burnt to a disc and finally experienced on the Dreamcast hardware it never managed to officially grace.

We've said it before and we'll say it again, it is absolutely amazing that even now, almost two full decades after the system's natural life was brought to an abrupt end, that we're still discovering things Dreamcast-related that have never been seen before. Thanks also go to Dreamcast-Talk moderator and all-round Dreamcast knowledge miner pcwzrd13 for bringing this to our attention

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.

Update: Here is some footage of the tech demo, captured by pcwzrd13 from his DreamcasticChannel on YouTube - be sure to go over and subscribe!



Take The Bullet Revealed

Take The Bullet is one of the more infamous cancelled games for the Dreamcast. Developed by Red Lemon Studios, it was an ambitious first person shooter in which you could also use the light gun to shoot onscreen enemies. This kind of thing had been done before (Resident Evil Survivor on the PlayStation is one such example), but nothing on the scale of Take The Bullet had been attempted.
The game was to feature a full on single player campaign, alongside a 4-player multiplayer split screen mode that also added bots into the mix. The solo game involved the player assuming the role of ex-marine and bodyguard Jack Travis, and it was up to you to protect Presidential candidate Kincaide through a varied series of missions (although evidence suggests they may have been mainly escort missions, Travis being a bodyguard and all).

I recently got to play a very early build of this mysterious game, and while I was unable to try it out with the light gun, I was able to capture footage from the first two missions.
While it is clearly very rough around the edges and has very little in the way of sound effects, voice acting or music, this early version of Take The Bullet was spread across several discs - one of which was the split-screen multiplayer death match (interestingly labelled as 'E3 Demo'). I managed to play this death match against an AI bot in single player but I recently had some pretty severe computer issues (basically a failed hard drive in my MacBook) and as such I lost all that footage.