… Den-Sen for the PlayStation 2?
Basically, you’re a little girl who travels around the city by swinging off the city’s power lines via a coat hanger. The screens you see here from a work in progress build that was shown at the Tokyo Game Show in 1999, along with a number of other games in development for PS2, which had just been publicly unveiled.
Unfortunately, not much is know about the game, other than it was being developed internally at Sony in Japan, and was presumably going to be a part of the very first generation of PlayStation 2 software. But the plug was quietly pulled around early 2000 (or somewhere around that time), and these screenshots, which I got from GameSpot when they were still called videogames.com, are all that remains.
I’ve looked everywhere for any additional bits of info… how far along was development before it got the axe, why was it axed, what team was involved, and what else did it’s members work or prior or afterwards… but all attempts have produced nothing. Apparently a QuickTime of the game did exist at one point (I’m assuming it’s from the TGS, which was the only time it was ever shown publicly) but the link (from some obscure European PS2-oriented site) is dead.
I remember falling totally in love with those screenshots upon first sight, and decided that Den-Sen would be the game that justified the purchase of a PlayStation2. Bare in mind that this was late 99, when the Dreamcast was in full swing, and besides that one, quirky Japanese title, nothing else in the proposed PS2 lineup really excited me.
For some reason, the same sorta reminded me of NiGHTS; I guess it had a similar vibe. It felt like the same mechanics as well, of traveling around a 3D space in a mostly on-rails fashion. That, and the fact that it was so original (something which the impending lineup for Sony’s system was sorely lacking, and which turned out to be true).
Though I can’t say I miss that game too much nowadays. At least the PS2 ended up getting titles like Rez, Ico, Chulip, and Katamari Damacy.
Speaking of, when I was digging around my computer last night, just after I unearthed those Den-Sen pics, I also came across these…
… works in progress videos for K Project, which would later become Rez (the K is for Kandinsky). It’s these videos where my obsession for Rez truly began; when they first became public in early 2001 (thanks to DailyRadar at the time), I simply could not stop watching them. Even at such an early stage, one could tell that this game was going to be different, and in the end, it would become a landmark fusion of art and gameplay. Seeing early versions of games is always interesting, and even educational, but especially so for a game like Rez, which really had no direct predecessor.
My favorite is the first video which illustrates a very basic overview of the core gameplay, which I’m assuming at that point were in the final stages of being realized and tweaked. Most interesting is the middle/portion which has trees bursting from the ground, since it foretells the use of birth & creation as a metaphor which was used in the final game’s fifth level to amazing effect. Also, the last portion of the video shows what the player’s character looked like at that point. Instead of abstract geometry, it’s a human being who’s running. I would wager this is where the running man boss from the fourth level came from. Plus the music in the later part of the vid is rather “earthy” and tribal, and a slight contrast to the hard techno which was prominent throughout the final game.
The third video has the game looking quite close to the final product. But the key difference is the variations in sound which the destroyed enemies produce. In the final game, there are eight different tones, depending on the number of enemies destroyed within a single “wave.” But here it, there’s a far wider range, and it’s a bit tricky to pick up on a pattern.
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