10 Highly Anticipated Video Games You'll Never Get To Play

Making video games is a perilous process that has claimed many a promising title. While countless games get quietly axed when development hits a snag, some games live on in vaporware purgatory, with loyal fans longing for their release.

Why do we care? Because if these games were ever allowed to see the light of day, they would almost certainly kick ass.

You know those legions of ant-sized grunts you'd cruelly send marching to their bloody demise in Starcraft? Well it turns out one of those grunts was actually a sexy girl named Nova with a penchant for ass-clinging outfits. Who knew?

OK, deep down, all of us knew. And so did Blizzard, who in 2002 teased us with this awesome-looking tactical action game set in the Starcraft universe normally reserved for Real-Time Strategy geeks.

How much ass would it have kicked?
If Blizzard had devoted even a fraction of the same time and effort to Starcraft Ghost's gameplay that they clearly sunk into lovingly rendering agent Nova's taut, bountiful butt cheeks ...

... then this game may have cured cancer had it ever seen the light of day.

So is there any chance it'll come out?
Early in 2006, Starcraft Ghost was put on "indefinite hold," but like the creepy dude who won't get out of his ex's bushes, Blizzard just seems to be incapable of letting this one go. Hell, supposedly Blizzard has a full-sized statue of the game's protagonist Nova sitting in their lobby.

When a company has erected a towering camel-toe flashing statue of a character near the front door of their headquarters, that can usually be taken as a good sign they may still have plans for them. On the other hand, maybe they ordered the statue back when the project was alive and decided that since they paid for it, they might as well use it, dammit.

If Starcraft Ghost ever happens we'd have to think it'd come out after Blizzard's next monster, a little game called Starcraft II. In other words if you're dead set on masturbating to Starcraft units in the near future you'd better plan on buying Starcraft II and a magnifying glass.

If you're a Star Trek fan and tired of message boards, chatrooms, blogs, wikis and slash fic being the only ways for you to indulge your crippling Star Trek obsession while on your computer, this game was for you. Star Trek Online was to be an online role-playing game, which would feature established Star Trek characters, races and planets.

How much ass would it have kicked?
Between the series and the films and the endless novels, the Star Trek universe is so vast it makes the Starcraft universe look like something scribbled on the back of a napkin. This game could present endless possibilities: Casually stroll the halls of the USS Enterprise, fight a Gorn gladiator to the death, chug Romulan ale with rowdy Klingons, high five commander Riker as you double team alien chicks with strange and exotic foreheads.

If you're a well-adjusted contributing member of society the previous sentence was likely a baffling sequence of gibberish, while if you're a Trekkie you probably just shit your elastic-waist jeans in excitement.

Seriously, though, you don't need to be a Trek fan to get excited about this game. Due to budget constraints most Star Trek episodes consisted entirely of people poking at plywood control panels, spouting techno-babble about tachyon rays or looking pained as they got mind-raped by telepaths (you'd be surprised how often it happened) but a Trek game would be free to shed all that and focus on the kick-ass stuff usually only glimpsed in the TV shows.

So is there any chance it'll come out?
On January 14, 2008, Perpetual Entertainment announced they were no longer working on the game and the entire team who was working on it was let go. That's about as dead as games get.

Apparently the license has been transferred to Cryptic Studios (the people behind the City of Heroes MMORPG) so it's possible they'll eventually do a version of this game at some point in the distant future (they'd presumably be starting from scratch). And here we spent all that time learning how to call someone gay in Klingon.

The Shenmue saga was quite simply one of the most ambitious and groundbreaking video game projects ever envisioned (the original cost an astounding $70 million to make, even now one of the most expensive games ever made). Originally intended as a trilogy, Shenmue landed on the Sega Dreamcast and introduced the world to the kind of sandbox-style action that the Grand Theft Auto series later took and ran to the end zone with.

How much ass would it have kicked?
Opinion on Shenmue is somewhat split these days. Detractors argue the games were slow and clunky by today's standards, while Shenmue fanatics argue that the detractors are a bunch of stupidheads.

What can't be denied is the sheer scope of these games. If nothing else, Shenmue III would be one hell of a spectacle if it were finally unleashed, particularly if the proud tradition of compelling dialog from the first two games is carried on ...

We had hoped Shenmue III would finally let him find that sailor.

So is there any chance it'll come out?
The first two games in the series sold well, but not well enough to make back the absolutely bat-shit insane amount of money spent producing them. It's been said that in order for Shenmue to turn a profit every Dreamcast owner would have had to buy the game ... twice.

Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki has repeatedly shot down rumors that the third game is in development, although if he were to read some of the endings fans have written for the series he might be forced to make Shenmue III out of disgust.

If you ask us, there aren't enough games set in the early '70s, an era when the streets were full of huge cars and pimps, when everybody smoked and cops carried huge revolvers that could kill you from the sound alone.

That's what we were expecting from the Dirty Harry game they were making for the PS3 and XBox 360, in which you got to play as Clint Eastwood's legendary dirty cop, voiced by Eastwood himself.

How much ass would it have kicked?
Let's put it this way: from the trailer it looked like you could interrogate scumbags by squeezing their head in a vice.

Hopefully there'd be an option to unscrew the vice and carry it with you, because you basically can solve every problem that way. Captain on your ass because you're a loose cannon? Put his head in a vice.

On top of that, you have what could have been a truly unique setting, the gritty, funky world of 1972 San Francisco.

So is there any chance it'll come out?
Sadly, the game was never as far along as that trailer makes it look (Warner Bros. just had an animation team cook up the trailer for marketing purposes, none of that was gameplay) and the project never really got off the ground.

As with Star Trek, there is some vague desire to some day make a game out of the franchise, but as to when and how, who knows. If they want Eastwood to do the voice, they need to get on that because the man just turned 136.

Diablo III is perhaps the most obsessed-over game to never have its existence officially acknowledged. Numerous sites and message boards are dedicated exclusively to a game that's developing into a legend on par with Bigfoot or Richard Gere's poor gerbil.

How much ass would it have kicked?
The Diablo series is what happens when you let red-blooded, meat-eating Americans make a role-playing game. Gone are the androgynous heroes, talking raccoons and quests that revolve around retrieving used panties you find in Japanese RPGs, replaced instead with demon killing. Lots and lots demon killing. Besides Blizzard simply doesn't make bad games, producing literally nothing but genre-defining classics for the past decade plus.

So is there any chance it'll come out?
Unfortunately for Diablo enthusiasts Blizzard North, the division of the company devoted to the Diablo franchise, dissolved a few years back. Several Blizzard North employees subsequently formed their own company and started developing Hellgate: London, a game fans considered a spiritual successor to Diablo II right up until the moment it came out and they realized it was complete crap.

Things aren't all grim though. Blizzard posted job listings on their website back in 2006 calling for people to join the "team behind Diablo I and II" and various Blizzard big wigs have said they would continue work on Diablo in the future. Considering how long it's taking Starcraft II to show up, "the future" seems to mean, "Some time before the sun goes supernova."