The first of the two prototype games I’ll be looking at is a first person shooter, one which is actually quite old. It started off as MIDI Maze on the Atari ST and was a very early shooting game that let you daisy chain consoles together for 16 player multiplayer in the first FPS deathmatch game. It then gained a bit of infamy as Faceball 2000 on the GameBoy, where developers Xanth wanted to also have 16 players, but Nintendo rejected the cables that would have come with the game so it only officially supported four, although the code for 16 player is still in the game and someone managed to get 15 players working using GBA link cables spliced into Game Boy link cables.

The Virtual Boy sequel seems like it would have been a decent version of the game. I was disappointed that it does not make use of the two d-pads for increased movement (they just do the same thing), and you can’t even move and turn at the same time. The levels take place in small arenas consisting of regular walls, destructible walls and glass walls. It’s not a particularly smooth game, but it’s decent enough. There were only ever plans for two player deathmatches in this version. This prototype only has a small number of levels, but fans of the Virtual Boy have created a version with a lot more levels.

Fine

Remake or remaster?

A collection of the different versions of MIDI Maze/Faceball (including multiple cancelled versions) would be interesting as a kind of “documentary” game, like the sort of thing Digital Eclipse make.