Tendo City

A game where a guy gets kicked in the crotch by pirates while carrying cheeseburgers and a remake of Conker's Bad Fur Day. Whoopie.

Quote:Rare has made some strange things in its day, and it seems to be continuing on that tradition with its new Grabbed by the Ghoulies franchise. A sort of light-hearted, horror adventure, featuring a cel-shaded look and quirky animation, it's definitely unique.

Quote:While it won't be the first Rare game on Xbox, Conker: Live and Uncut will probably leap to the top of the list of most watned Rare game by virtue of its N64 popularity and the fact that it's in a lot better condition at this point than it's main challenger in the popularity contest: Perfect Dark 2. He's still the raunchiest cartoon squirrel to ever down a bottle of rotgut one minute and curse an evil crap monster the next. Conker: Live and Uncut will feature the single player game from the original N64 title Conker's Bad Fur Day but it will updated with Xbox quality graphics and sound and new naughty content that never made it into the Nintendo game. The main thrust however will be Conker's multiplayer Xbox Live compatibility that will have players shooting up a storm but in cleverly designed missions and movie-themed settings

...Is this the part where I say "What the heck has Rare been doing for the past year?!"

How strange... Conker's Bad Fur Day will be in that game, but with better graphics and extras... weird. But its a great game...

Oh, and it does sound fun... Conker looks like it'd work well as a multiplayer shooter...

That 'Grabbed by the Ghoulies' looks underwhelming, though.

So does Kameo.

Honestly, I'm very dissapointed with Rare's X-Box lineup so far. It seems that Nintendo made the right choice. I guess the best Rare members really did go to FRD and Zoonami.

Who's laughing now, Darunia? :shake:

Yeah, Rare really isn't living up to its expectations so far thats for sure... SFA was a good game that would have been great if given more time to really finish (IE if Rare hadn't left)... but these games? Rare IS going downhill...

OB1, the X-Box owner: This sucks!

OB1, the Nintendo fanboy: Woohoo!!

Pretty much.

My Nintendo fanboy personality just beat the crap out of my X-Box owner personality so it's okay now.

I think the Conker Remake sounds pretty cool. Not mind-blowing, but interesting. I was a big Conker fan, and if I had an X-Box, I'd consider getting Conker: Live and Uncut.

It's not a remake, it's just a graphical update. And it's really sad that the best part of Live and Uncut is an old N64 game. Why did they have to turn it into a stupid squad-based shooter??

Remake, graphical update, same difference... I'd like to see screens. Have any been released?

Its a remake! It adds new content... or would you rather call it a 'extended edition'? :)

Oh, and the main feature is the online shooter, not the N64 game...

It's not a remake. I'd love to be proven wrong, but everything I've read about it doesn't make it sound like a total remake.

Hmm... I still haven't seen enough of Kameo to really give any opinions on it, but since I didn't enjoy Conker I likely won't enjoy these two games. I certainly still want the next PD though.

Oh and ABF, I agree with you about SFA. It COULD have been a great game if Rare actually managed to finish it, instead of wrapping it up and sending it on it's way. However, so far SFA is the worst Rare game I own. One major thing about SFA is how the puzzles all solve themselves. Maybe if huge icons saying "THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO INTERACT WITH" didn't keep appearing over things that ALL LOOK THE SAME the puzzles could have been challenging. A Zelda style game is all about the puzzles after all. Even the fighting (especially boss fights) is just an action oriented puzzle. Had Rare worked on the game for another half year to finish it up, and left out all those FAR too obvious interaction clues (oh another thing, the item menu shouldn't have autoselected the right object to use the second you used the menu), it really could have been great. That's the sad thing.

I guess the question is how long does it take Rare to make a good game now?

I think Grabbed by the Ghoulies is one of the best names ever! Only Rare could think of something like that.

The game itsself though doesn't look too good... and the name and idea for Grabbed by the Ghoulies dates back well before it left Nintendo, or even the N64, so we could chalk it up to Rare's good period... :)

Wow, I'm shocked. What the hell happened to Rare? Why are they making this shit...they're leaving Nintendo did more harm to them than to Nintendo itself. I'm shocked...and I can breath a little easier now, too; I can die a happy man knowing that X-Box won't be getting any great FPS' any time soon.:)

---Barry Burton

Yeah, if only they had something like Doom 3, HL 2, Thief 3, DX 2, or Halo 2 coming out within a year....

Of course, I'll be getting all of those (except for Halo 2) for the PC, but for those that only have X-Boxes it's pretty damn exciting.

And I was really expecting something more "mature" from Ghoulies. The name was discovered in March of 2001 when Rare registered the website for it, and the name is British slang for "grabbed by the balls". So I was expecting something less Zombie Ate My Neighbors and more Conker's BFD.

Yeah it sounds like it'll be good, but not Rare good.

Better than Rare's other games in progress for sure...

That's not saying much.

Seven years later and I'm still wondering when Rare is going to start making some games.

Yeah, what the hell are they up to nowadays? Last I remember hearing from them was Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Sabre Wulf was good, and probably Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge too, on the GBA... not sure about Banjo Pilot, haven't played it. Some people seem to have liked Viva Pinata... they just published Perfect Dark for XBLA... Kameo doesn't look like it was THAT bad from what I've seen of it (no worse than Grabbed by the Ghoulies anyway, and maybe better)... not sure about Banjo-Kazooie: Nute &* Bolts either, I know it's not a platformer at all which is kind of stupid.

Anyway, sure, Rare hasn'[t been the same as it was in the SNES and N64, not even remotely close, but at least this generation they're better than they were last gen, when literally all they published were a handful of GBA games, one very disappointing Gamecube game, one disappointing Xbox game, and one Xbox N64 remake. At least this gen they have published more games. Of course their quality, polish, etc. all aren't anywhere near where they used to be, and Microsoft still hasn't gotten their money's worth, I think most everyone would agree, but I wouldn't say that they're utterly awful. Just not the unbelievable developer that they used to be.


Oh, I got GbtG a few weeks ago. Seems okay, if all you want is a very simple beat 'em up. If you want anything more than that... well, you're playing the wrong game. You can't even jump! What the heck? That is so stupid... evidently originally it was going to be a 3d platformer, but it ended up cut back. It's too bad that happened, as a platformer it might actually have had a chance to be a great game, instead of just a decent but disappointing mindless timewaster.

Nuts & Bolts is a platformer/racer. It's not quite Diddy Kong Racing if that's what you mean. You can get out of your car at any time and go it on foot. Banjo's abilities are more limited, but there's still some platforming in the game. It is mostly a racer though. That said, the racing itself isn't really like a normal racing game. That is, getting to a finish line is rarely the objective. Most of the time they seem to merge platforming with the vehicles, with objectives like making a car that can float in water, or one that's heavy enough to flip over a board. It's a fun game, certainly one of the funner ones Rare's made in a while.

Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Yeah, what the hell are they up to nowadays? Last I remember hearing from them was Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Well, since then they've done three ports of N64 games. That's they're total output over the past year and a half.

And those were actually done by 4J Studios anyway.

How much talent did the various splits to form other companies drain?

Along those same lines, heck, even the Time Splitters guys haven't made anything in a long time.

Retro Studies has made a total of 3 games that I'm aware of for that matter. There's a lot of small companies that are taking their sweet time doing things.

Well, none of it compares to 3DRealms and Duke Nukem. I still would have loved to see that game released. They had apparently wanted to go "gold" on April Fool's Day. That would be the ultimate reverse prank!

Quote:Along those same lines, heck, even the Time Splitters guys haven't made anything in a long time.

They did Haze back in 2008 and it bombed pretty hard, on top of costing quite a bit of money. They actually got bought out by Crytek sometime last year and now go under the name Crytek UK. Right now they're working on Crysis 2's multiplayer mode.

Quote:Retro Studies has made a total of 3 games that I'm aware of for that matter.

They're a smaller company [80 employees compared to over 200] and they probably cost considerably less than $375 million to acquire. On the other hand, I'm not especially pleased at their silence either.

1: Is there a reason we brought back a thread that's seven years old?
2. The team behind the Timesplitters series have always announced that they're working on part 4.

1. I saw a guest reading this thread, so I decided to check it out. I thought it a bit humorous that after seven years, I'm still asking the same question that I originally posed.

2. Timesplitters 4 is currently on hold because Crytek doesn't think the market's right for it at the moment.

I'm still an Apogee/3DRealms fan, so the whole DNF saga was definitely pretty depressing... and yes, certainly worse than Rare. :(

Quote:How much talent did the various splits to form other companies drain?

Rare has definitely lost a lot of its good people, this is certainly one of the major factors in why they aren't as good as they used to be. I think, though, that just not being on Nintendo platforms is another one. PDZ, Kameo, Viva Pinata... I find it hard to imagine the games not doing better on Nintendo platforms, where a much more natural audience for Rare games exists. This is surely why the rumors mostly put Rare working on Natal stuff now, that's closer to Rare's audience... if the thing actually takes off.

Either way though, I think that there's little question that Rare would be in better shape now, at least sales wise but perhaps also quality wise, if they hadn't left Nintendo. But they wanted to go, and Nintendo had gotten tired of how long it was taking them to make games (and that it was getting progressively longer and longer), so it's their own fault that it happened.

Star Fox Adventures is the first game that showed their slip in quality I think. Even so, I'd put most of the blame for SFA on the fact that Rare was sold during it's development. Large sections of the game have a very unpolished and incomplete feeling, with whole dungeons just missing, and one of the final boss fights (the one against General Scales) just plain skipped over to toss you into your Arwing for a very forced "Here's Andross" encounter (I don't really think Andross added anything of value to the game, and then there's the obvious plot hole of how the hell Andross managed to create a thousand year old legend about Krazoa spirits just to pretend to be it). It's similar to the feeling you get when you get the 3rd pearl in Wind Waker, sailing only to find what would have been a 3rd dungeon had just been destroyed as a convenient plot device to prevent the need to make a 3rd dungeon.

All that said, SFA is STILL one of the best looking games of the last generation, and better looking than a lot of Wii games.

Indeed, SF Adventures was really disappointing and ended up being a dull, not very fun game.

Dinosaur Planet would have been a much, much better game... :bummed: