Nintendo killing Project Bean, otherwise known as GoldenEye XBLA, around 2008 was a travesty. The game looked incredible. Even better than 4J's Perfect Dark remaster from a technical/art perspective. You could switch between modern and classic graphics at the press of a button. It looked great, it sounded great, and if PD XBLA is anything to go by, it would have played great.
But then... then there's TimeSplitters. Let's talk about TimeSplitters. After Haze did not turn out well, Free Radical drifted around a bit and started working on TimeSplitters 4. They went back to their old engine, and were aiming for a 60fps next generation TimeSplitters sequel. In their infinite wisdom, Crytek decided that TimeSplitters was too much of a risk and killed the project. Only around 300-400,000 people bought TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. It's not exactly a super popular IP. Also by 2010-ish gamers had decided that "colour" was poison and everything had to be as dark and gritty and moody as possible. For all their crap, Crytek were not exactly wrong about the state of the market. So they assigned Free Radical, now Crytek UK, to work on Crysis multiplayer and the console port of Crysis 1. Afterwards, they were put to work on Homefront: The Revolution. We'll come back to that. (BTW, HFTR is a great game all things considered. Just putting that out there.)
Around this period, Free Radical/Crytek UK worked on a remaster of TimeSplitters 2. This disappeared without a trace because, you know, Crytek and stuff.
What happened after this remains a bit unclear. A programmer named Matt Phillips (creator of that awesome looking Mega Drive Tanglewood game) and a few other Crytek UK programmers created a NEW source port of TimeSplitters 2. Totally different to the old remaster project.
Homefront: The Revolution was still in development under THQ/Crytek at this point. It was a linear FPS game at this point. I'd love to get my hands on that version, BTW.
Somehow when Crytek sold HFTR to Deep Silver, who proceeded to hire the entire development team as a new in-house studio Dambuster Studios, the TimeSplitters 2 "demo" was included. I think it was some kind of technicality where all HFTR assets were sold. This resulted in the TimeSplitters 2 arcade cabinet in HFTR. Runs very well. 4K on PS4 Pro. Proper mouse aim. That kinda thing.
But there's something very off about the TimeSplitters 2 demo. For one thing, it's 1.69GB. For another, it's... I mean, it's literally the entire game. I'm sitting here looking at the file list and everything is here. Every level. Every bit of dialogue. Every piece of music. Even random bits and bobs from Second Sight. In Homefront's exe file, the demo is referred to as TimeSplitters 2 Redux. And the exe has a lot of text baked into it that extends way beyond the content in the demo.
My theory is that TimeSplitters 2 Redux is a full port of TimeSplitters 2 for PC/PS4/XBO, but Dambuster Studios were forced to cripple it in order to stop Crytek from doing what Crytek does best. Whatever loophole let them keep a "demo" of TimeSplitters 2 in HFTR, it wouldn't extend to the full game. Regardless, all the assets of the full game are sitting in HFTR's archives. I'm pretty confident that it could be hacked into a full version.
