Remember Rare?
If I say Banjo~Kazooie do you suddenly remember a particular world or puzzle? Or maybe a piece of music? What about Blast Corps or Jet Force Gemini? Do your palms sweat when you hear "Silver Coin Challenge"? Do the words Slayer, Laptop Sentry Gun or Cloaking Device make you remember the retinas in your eyeballs burning in to the screen as you played for days on end?
I sure do. In fact, while I was at a used game store I found a horribly neglected cart of Diddy Kong Racing which I immeadiately bought. I'm in Future Fun Land right now and getting ready to beat it so I can do the Adventure 2 Mirror Mode. And suddenly as I crossed the finishing line with 8 silver coins on Darkmoon Caverns it dawned on me.
Grabbed by the Ghoulies should be out now... for the XBox. Now, I dont have an XBox but if there's one thing that will get me to buy one it's a Rare game. So I looked it up for some reviews or info and yeah it's been out for a while... and it bombed. It bombed so bad that you can buy it new for 20 bucks. This is devastating news to me. The reviews, while ranted off by people who's only concern in video games is how much violence or realism the game generates, all said the same thing: It's not up to Rare's standards.
We all know Rare. Rare's standards have always been perfection. I cant believe they would release a game that isn't perfect. It's true that people who are avid XBox followers are pretty mindless people. They want games that either give that 10 minute quick fix or the unending stat-building games. There are no games on XBox that will give you bruises on your hands... a must for any good game. I understand all of this, so it doesn't surpirse me that a game developed by Rare didn't sell well if it's unrealistic or more old school. In Rare games, the most violence you'll see is when you stand up, announce to the entire world that you hate them and throw the controller straight in to the ground... at which point you immeadiately pick it up to try again. If the controller is broken, it's Rare's fault, and you quickly run out the door searching for one faster than a crackhead with a paycheck.
And now this.. Not up to Rare's standards? Is this a sign of Rare's true fall in the industry? Has anyone here played Grabbed by the Ghoulies? If so, post your thoughts on it. On a Nintendo note, has anyone here played the GBA B~K or Sabrewulf games? I refuse to believe that Rare would release a so-called bad game for any system. Even Donkey Kong 64 was gold compared to most of the krap out there.
I haven't played Grabbed by Ghoulies, but I will say that I'm equally upset with Rare's fate. :( Every time I sit to play a Rare N64 game, I have to make sure I have no plans, because I usually become entranced and don't notice the hours slip by. I can't compare the same consistent quality with many other game developers, and I can't help but wonder what projects they would have done on GC, had Nintendo invested money in them.
*shrugs* It may just be me, though... not everyone's into Rare.
Ghoulies is an okay game, definitely not up to Rare's standards. It's like Luigi's Mansion but instead of sucking up ghosts you beat them up. That's it. So just like LM was bad for a Nintendo game, so is GbtG.
B-K GBA is a fun game. It plays pretty much identical to the N64 games, just that it's got a fixed top-down perspective. I think it would have been better a side-scroller, but as it is it's still a good game.
I don't know what happened to Rare. Mickey's Speedway wasn't too hot, SFA wasn't as good as Rare games usually are, and Ghoulies was just huge dissapointment. Perhaps all of those guys that left to form Zoonami and FRD really did have a huge impact on them. But I think it's too early to lose faith in them, as even the best developers make an average game every now and then. Here's hoping for their 2004 lineup. *crosses fingers*
SFA wasn't that good because Rare pretty much just stopped working on it when they were sold to MS. They tied everything up and gave it to Nintendo and left. The game isn't blatently terrible, but it's certainly incomplete. The so called "puzzles" are insults to intelligence. There's HUGE GLOWING BUTTONS over every single "hot spot" so you can't possibly miss it and have to think for yourself. They scream "THIS IS WHERE YOU NEED TO BE!". Then, when you go there and go through your item menu, it AUTOMATICALLY picks the right one, saying "YOU ARE TOO STUPID TO SOLVE THIS ALONE! LET ME HELP!". Really, I never once got stuck. Closest was when I managed to miss a red switch for a few minutes. Honestly, had they forced you to figure out where to use items yourself, like a normal Zelda game, it would have been much more fun I think. However, it's still incomplete. There are whole dungeons missing, and that whole part with General Scales was MAJORLY anticlimactic. I wanted a boss battle to finally test all the skills I had learned with the staff!
It also doesn't help that if you make the mistake of saving after that part, you can't ever go back, which is VERY un-Zelda-like.
I don't tend to get mad at my games. Never really saw the point. I'm there to have fun, so the second I see myself getting frustrated I go do something else. That said it doesn't take but 5 minutes before I'm running back with some amazing strat that's promised to fail :D.
I'll tell you this lazy. SFA was the first Rare game I was really dissappointed with, but the reasons are clear. Honestly, maybe they wanted time to finish it, but knew there was no way Nintendo would deal with a couple more delays when they finally "got rid" of them, so they just said "let's just put everything we have together, fill in the empty spots quickly, and bug test the thing". Grabbed however, was the second, and that was upsetting. That game was NO Battletoads. That game, while it looked good I'll admit, wasn't fun. Playing it, just in the stores, I wasn't really drawn in. Normally, if I play a good game in the stores, a really good game, like what Rare normally makes, I'll sit there for a LONG time until someone with a mop asks me to move my feet. This didn't happen with this game. I played it, trying to get into it. Didn't happen. I ended up FORCING myself through many levels before realizing that this wasn't just a dry spot of the game, that was the entire game. I stopped then, and am not interested in giving it another look. That was the full version in the store, not a demo. I may have been like a 3rd of the way through, I think, so I'm pretty sure I know what to expect. I was expecting Battletoads and I got... well honestly this IS the worst brawler I've played. I know they are supposed to be simple by nature, but they are also supposed to be... fun. Notta here. Being the first game Rare made for MS, I hear that it was the one project MS had a rush on which they couldn't delay. That doesn't really help things when the very core of the game isn't enjoyable, but you know, it doesn't make the game better either...
From what little I've played of BK on GBA, however, I was able to turn my doubts around. Even though it's 2D, it's amazing how, as OB1 says, it manages to perfectly capture the gameplay. It's a VERY fun little game that I may eventually buy. Personally, I've had enough of those sorts of platform games for some time though, so it'll be a while before I get it because of that. However, it does show Rare still has the talent.
That's why I've still got very high expectations of PDZ. Yes, a lot of talent left, sadly enough, but a lot is STILL there, including a lot of people behind the gem that is Perfect Dark. Besides that, maybe MS will come along and buy the two spin off companies and then put them back into Rare :D. Heh... I can see that conversation... "Didn't you say you were never coming back?" "Oh yeah? Shut up."
DJ, Rare worked on SFA for what, four years or something? More than enough time to get the puzzles and battles down. The conversion to the GC and the license change certainly slowed things down, but most of that work was probably just redoing all of the graphics and learning how to use a new system. I seriously doubt they did the visuals first and then at the last second threw in some puzzles. No, this was a case of a good developer dropping the ball. It happens. Nintendo has also done it before. Plenty of times.
Ghoulies was probably a case of a rushed Rare game. I hope.
I played Ghoulies...for about an hour. I just couldn't get into it. It was sort of fun in a bust everything up kind of way, but there just wasn't enough to bring me back to play more. Maybe that's due to having other games that are better or something, but Ghoulies definitely isn't Rare at it's finest.
I understand they worked on it for some time, but it's rather obvious that the gameplay itself was incomplete. Maybe it did take a long time for them to come up with a lot of the levels and stuff. Seems that way anyway, because it reeks of incompletion.
I'm willing to bet that most of those 4 years it was sitting on someone's hard drive collecting virtual dust while Rare and Nintendo settled on agreements over copyrights.
But DJ, I doubt that the puzzles in SFA were overly easy because of its rushed production. The game was built on the idea of showing off hardware, so it had to be accepted by all skill levels. Typical Rare design. Unfortunately the second part of that design is to make much more challenging areas of the game for advanced players... that design never saw the light of day except maybe on paper.
Rare will make a big come back as soon as they release Conker's BFD. I can see the commercial now with the tag line of "Go piss off your friends" while showing a clip of Coinker urinating on someone in multiplayer. It'll be great. But then what's next? A game where you play as a fairy that collects animals in a magical forest? I bet XBox fans will love that!
The die hard fanboys of the system? Yeah I bet! :D Those people are idiots though. Generally there are the casuals, a mixed bag as it should be, the generalists, who treat it like any other system, and the fanboys, which by all rights I'm surprised even exist. That last catagory is truly a frightening bunch, or would be if I could ever understand a thing they say. MS is working on spreading it's audience to everyone though, so that in the future games like Blinx might actually sell more.
i saw a lot of areas in screenshots for dinosaur planet on N64 that seem to have been completely removed from SFA...along with an announced character or 2. and it seemed like there were towns in dinosaur planet, when it was still an N64 game as opposed to the rural, primitive world of SFA. ah well, i was hoping it'd be more like zelda and less like how it was.
That probably has alot to do with it as well Big Guy.
DJ/ Fanboys are why the video game industry exists. And why would Blinx sell more? It's not a very good game.
If it's not a shooter it generally doesn't sell all that well on the X-Box.
... I never beat first Wizpig so I never got Future Fun Land... super hard race...
Oh, I played JFG some a few weeks ago... got some stuff I hadn't, like a hidden level and some tribals... great, great game. It'd been too long since I last played it. :)
Rare's N64 lineup is amazing. Oh, Rare was good before the N64, but I'd say that they really stepped it up another notch (over DKC). So many games that are go good and last so long... it really is quite sad to see where they are now.
But at least like several publishers I used to love (*cough*LucasartsSierraInterplayMicroproseLookingGlassEtc*cough* they still EXIST...
ABF, I wouldn't say they are at that sort of level NOW. Let's wait until the big name titles come out and make up our minds then. Grunty's Revenge is enough to convince me they still have the right stuff. If Perfect Dark Zero is disappointing then a judgement shall be made, for me anyway.
I can't wait until Banjo comes out.
One thing I'm wondering about though is not that they're not a Nintendo second-party, whose games with they copy and improve upon?
Quote:whose games with they copy and improve upon?
Um...Electronic Arts?
Haha, now that would be awesome!
DJ, Grunty's Revenge was also essentially finished years ago... but you're right, they aren't definitely at that level yet. But I see them starting to slide down the slope.
They can still copy Nintendo's games, just can't use their mascots. Apparently they got some inspiration for Perfect Dark by playing Metal Gear Solid on PS.
Yeah, they can still copy Nintendo, they just won't get any help from them anymore.
Which means they probably won't do it as well...
Look at Left Field -- Nintendo dropped them and what did they do now? MTX Motocross for PS2 and X-Box and while it's okay it doesn't sound anywhere near as good as Excitebike 64...