Rare was very close to me at one point in time. I always get this sullen and sad feeling every time I think about them now, not because they are no longer with Nintendo… but they are no longer themselves.
During E3 2k3 I was expecting MS and Rare to show off something really special so that they could draw attention to themselves and build up hype. What I saw was probably THE most unappealing game I have EVER seen this side of No Rules: GET PHAT for the GBA, A game I really didn’t think was all that special on the GC, and what appeared to be a Conker remake, with Live tacked on in lieu of actually making another game. Color me disenfranchised.
My almost extreme dislike for Rare nowadays actually started way back in 1999, with DK64. Now, I’m not like most people who demonize the game, but I thought it had a “been there, played that” feel to it. What I didn’t know was that some forms of the code from DK64 to B-K were almost identical, even that Ice Key’s data was in DK64 (or so the Rare Witch project [website] reports.) Even some of the music sounded similar. It was almost as if this was B-K in a DK skin. While that may not be a penultimate evil, it does lead to the conclusion that there seems to be a formula from which they made all of their games (save GE, JFG, Blastcorps) from B-K to even parts of StarFox Adventures. You would think they would cook up something new every once in a while.
Rare did something else that made me dislike them, but what they did is almost despicable. They lied to their fans through Scribes. It was one of the Summer 2002 scribes stating (paraphrase) “We are wrapping up Kameo’s development right about now.” Oh really? Ever since then, All I have heard about from Rare internally (From the Fatbabies.com forums) is that they lie to their employees, promising payrises to new employees who bust their butts, and giving them very small payrises instead, and they have shady hiring practices. Now I feel bad for the employees.
About Rare’s profitability to Nintendo being 1.5% in 2k1, they could have easily rectified that number in 2001-early2002. According to their letters page on Scribes in late2k1-early2k2, their first GBA projects (Diddy Pilot, B-K, SabreWulf) were COMPLETE. Not “for the most part complete” or “almost finished” but complete, sitting and waiting to be published. Now either they were lying, which is bad enough, or they WERE complete, and chose not to release them in 2k2, which is worse. Now you could say that Nintendo was to blame for not publishing B-K and Diddy Pilot, but SabreWulf was was a Rare-only game. What stopped them?
I have a few complaints and grievances about Rare left… Conker’s Bad Fur Day was an above average platformer with British humor and popculture references all over the place. After the jokes get old (which they do) the game really doesn’t shine much. The game took 4 years to make, changing designs almost every year, and the result is the equivalent of a slightly substance-filled spoof movie. Yahoo. That’s just what I thought, because I thought the original design of Conker had much more character. And that’s not the last time Rare forsook character design. Dinosaur Planet had one of the most interesting character designs I have ever seen, then they cheaped out and threw StarFox in the mix for absolutely no reason. I originally thought Nintendo asked them to Put StarFox in there, but I remember that Nintendo didn’t interfere with Conker and PD and to a lesser extent Banjo-Tooie (very risqué comments) in any way. And in the end, I saw a formulaic Zelda-ish game with no… like… soul. That’s the only way I can describe it.
I know this is a lengthy read but in my mind I have been doting on this issue for the past year. I just had to get it off my chest…
P.S. I notice that the GbtG box says “from the makers of DKC and B-K”, and the demo reel in the Xbox kiosk disc says “from the makers of GE007 and PD.” Are they gonna milk their entire heritage for Ghoulies?
Topic: Rare: A Year Later (Read 12861 times)
