World Reborn: the Game Boy Advance shooter that was finished but never shipped
World Reborn was a commercial project that never got its commercial release. It was made by the small US team NeoPong as a horizontal shoot 'em up with role-playing ideas bolted on, aimed at the Game Boy Advance, with a DS version also planned. The game was finished but never published; a developer discussed the shelving on a message board in 2008, and the Unseen64 cancelled-games archive logged it in April 2008. In July 2008 the team shared a ROM publicly, which is how the game reached the retro scene, and the fanzine RGCD reviewed it in its fifth issue in March 2009.
At a glance
- Developer: NeoPong (Charles Galyor, lead designer; Robert Dean, lead programmer; Kirby Thornton, programmer; Bertrand Dupuy, artist; Eric Stamm, musician)
- Intended publisher: Destination Software
- Status: completed but cancelled; shared by the developers in 2008
- Genre: Horizontal shoot 'em up with RPG elements
How it plays
Pilots and ships earn experience points from battles and XP capsules. The story branches, so the crew you end up with depends on your route, and there are four ships: Falcon (the default), Shark, Tiger and Dragon. The setting is a future in which a computer called Judge4101 has turned on humanity. The RGCD reviewer found the story talkative, with plenty of cutscenes between levels, and thought the single life with a shield sat oddly with the RPG ambitions. Despite the progression and route system, it is a shooter rather than a tactics game.