Occasionally we take a break from covering games that were never released, but also look at titles that were released, but had some distinctive differences at one stage or another.
Today we’re covering Cardiaxx, which was released by Electronic Zoo in 1991 and then later by Team 17 in 1993. Thanks to Grzegorz Antosiewicz, here are some highlighted features shown in the press at the time that never made it to the final game:
In early previews from magazines such as K issue 54, Generation4 1991 September, Power Play 1991 12, TGM issue 12 – Grzegorz highlights that you can see unused bosses and power ups pods for your ship.
Demo comparisons
Grzegorz also took screenshots from a playable demo from a coverdisk for Zero magazine in 1991/11 and two screen shots from the finished game for comparison:
Screens from final game:
Screens from Zero demo:
The differences:
The first thing to spot is the different HUD with only a timer, whilst in the finished game you can see more information such as the number of lives or ship shield energy.
In the demo there are also different enemies and power up system. In the finished game, you are granted ship upgrades automatically after destroying waves of enemies, whilst in the demo, you need to pick up an upgrade item that sometimes appears when the last enemy is destroyed. You also need to pick it up fast, because it will vanish after few seconds.
With thanks to Grzegorz Antosiewicz for highlighting these changes. We’ll have another post soon highlighting differences with final release versions.
