Titled Jesse “The Body” Ventura Wrestling Superstars, the game features a cast of generic wrestlers surrounding Jesse, with such names as Sumo, Storm, Rockin’, and my personal favorite, a Jushin Thunder Liger knockoff simply named Death. While the game was submitted for approval to Sega of America and set to release stateside for the Sega Mega Drive, development of the game was abandoned for unknown reasons.

What makes this interesting is that its release would have predated the first ever Fire Pro Wrestling game to make it to the states by 9 years. It wasn’t until 2001 that the twenty-second Fire Pro Wrestling made its way to the Gameboy Advance.

Very little is known about the game, its development, or why it was cancelled. It’s rumored that this game was originally developed as intended, as a western Fire Pro Game starring Ventura, and that the assets were repurposed into Thunder Pro Wrestling Retsuden after development was cancelled. A June 1991 issue of GamePro magazine reinforces this theory, claiming that the game would be out in July. However, considering that Japanese games rarely get developed to be primarily western releases, and the build date on the ROM of March 2nd, 1992 being so close to the Thunder Pro release of the 27th, this doesn’t seem very likely.

You can download the ROM yourself and play it for yourself here.

The post Jesse Ventura Almost Starred In A Fire Pro Wrestling Game appeared first on Gamesline.

For those who don’t wish to watch the video, the short of it is that Josh Stinson, associate video editor at Volition (and one of the best Let’s Players of all time, but I digress) stumbled upon a PSP dev kit with the game loaded inside. Stinson, community manager Mike Watson, and video producer Alexander Mejia pushed for the game to be showed off to the public, and after a lengthy discussion, convinced the highers-up to let the game see the light of day.

Flash forward to today, and the stream came and went, showcasing the game in all its unfinished glory. This would be nothing more than a neat blip in game preservation history, but then Volition did something awesome. They dumped the ISO.

Unseen64 is currently hosting the Saints Row: Undercover ISO on their website, which can be played using a PSP emulator. It is completely free, but be advised that the game is unfinished and will most likely be riddled with bugs and crashes. As Stinson points out in the video, this game could’ve been cast aside and lost to time if the dev kit it was on was thrown away. I wish with all my heart that more developers choose to preserve unreleased content in ways similar to this, so let’s hope they follow Volition’s example.

The post Canceled Saints Row Game Playable…Kinda appeared first on Gamesline.