Topic: Rare's New Xbox360 game revealed!!

[BlackNMild2k1]

Viva PiƱata <-- original language

Viva PiƱata <-- Translated
The site is in dutch, so you might want to translate it, but it is definately aimed at a younger audience.  

[Arbok]

Actually looks pretty good in terms of graphics, wonder how it will play, though...

[Spak-Spang]

Once again Rare is showing the world that Nintendo was completely justified and right to get rid of them.  

This game although graphically appealing, just looks so BLAH.  

Rare has completely lost its touch...perhaps it never had its touch and Nintendo's assistance is really what made the older games great.

[Bill Aurion]

I'm definitely interested in the game, but I can't help but laugh at GAF, who is lauding this when they consistently call Nintendo "you know what"...

[capamerica]

looks pretty lame if you ask me, sure the graphics are nice but it looks crappy to me.
Thou they do get points from making me want to hit everything it that world with a large bat. But that can be taken as a good and bad thing.

I wonder how many more mediocre games will Microsoft allow Rare to make before they just dissolve the company in and sell off their assets to recop the money the lost buying them. I'm pretty sure MS has yet to make their money back on them. I'm also surprized that MS isn't forcing them to make a game that they know would sell like 'Perfect Dark Zero 2'

[BlackNMild2k1]

Quote
Originally posted by: capamerica
I'm also surprized that MS isn't forcing them to make a game that they know would sell like 'Donkey Kong 360 or Star Fox Adventures 2'

Is Perfect Dark Zero even selling now? Why would they want a sequel so soon?

[capamerica]

Donkey Kong 360 and Star Fox Adventures 2 would be great games for Rare to make... To bad their Nintnedo's. Kind of shows that Rare didn't own any real hit series and that they are only good at working with other people's franchises.

Not sure how well Perfect Dark Zero is selling, Its no Halo I'll tell you that much.
Reason they should start working on a sequal now for Perfect Dark Zero is because it will take them at least 2 years to get it done. =P

[Ian Sane]

I can't get the translation to work.  Anyone want to give me the heads up on what the game is about?  Looks pretty neato from the screenshots.

Even if you think Rare isn't anything special now I still consider their leaving as a loss to Nintendo.  Maybe Rare required Nintendo to make those classic games but that doesn't change anything.  That partnership is gone and it benefited Nintendo.  Rare's only Gamecube game sucked (and part of it was because Nintendo shoehorned Star Fox into it) and everyone thinks that Rare's useless.  We'll just ignore the fact that Conker's Bad Fur Day was awesome as was Perfect Dark.  So Rare was making great games in 2000 and 2001 but in 2002 they released one game and it was a stinker so then Rare sucked and was worth losing.  To me that sounds more like Nintendo fanboys making up excuses to justify an iffy move on the part of Nintendo.  I definately fail to see how Nintendo is better off now without Rare.

At the very least if Rare was still with Nintendo we would have gotten a few other games out of it that could have been good.  We didn't get any more games from them leaving so no matter what Nintendo is worse off.  You can rag on Rare's MS efforts but for all you know those games with a bit of Nintendo polish could have been classics.  And it's not like Kuju and N-Space are busting out anything better.

[ShyGuy]

Hey Ian, have you tried Kameo at a Xbox 360 Kiosk?

[Ian Sane]

"Hey Ian, have you tried Kameo at a Xbox 360 Kiosk?"

No.  All the kiosks I see always have some boring army game running on them.  Or a boring racing game.  It's your pick.

If Kameo sucks it doesn't mean losing Rare was good.  Nintendo's advantage was their partnership with Rare.  They created great games by working together.  That collaboration is gone and I think Nintendo is worse off as a result.  You can't say "well their Xbox games suck so it's a good thing Nintendo dropped them" because those games under the guidance of Nintendo would be different.

[jasonditz]

So Rare's announced a new game... think it'll be out in time forr the Xbox 720, or will we have to wait until the Xbox 1080 for it to be finished?

[jasonditz]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
"Hey Ian, have you tried Kameo at a Xbox 360 Kiosk?"

No.  All the kiosks I see always have some boring army game running on them.  Or a boring racing game.  It's your pick.

If Kameo sucks it doesn't mean losing Rare was good.  Nintendo's advantage was their partnership with Rare.  They created great games by working together.  That collaboration is gone and I think Nintendo is worse off as a result.  You can't say "well their Xbox games suck so it's a good thing Nintendo dropped them" because those games under the guidance of Nintendo would be different.

In all fairness it's not as though they were just "lost", Nintendo got hundreds of millions of dollars out of the deal. Hopefully they did so with an eye at starting some more first party studios, or hooking up with some other second party studios that hadn't lost the bulk of the programming talent that made their most successful games.

Nintendo plus anybody is going to be at least a pretty good game. Look at Geist. Ok, it wasn't some magical experience, but considering the company that made it was best known for making Olsen Twins games before that, it was quite a leap forward.

[Pale]

The sad part is that it appears to have a lot of kid friendly charm that we love in our Nintendo games and that most X-Box gamers won't touch with a 10-foot pole.

[Ian Sane]

"In all fairness it's not as though they were just "lost", Nintendo got hundreds of millions of dollars out of the deal."

And how do we gamers benefit from that?  How is the Cube in a better position because of that?  In the console market Nintendo's in a big pit and are a footnote when people talk about the console market.  Maybe things would be different if they still had Rare.  At least Rare would have contributed something.  At least they would provide something different to Nintendo's lineup then another Mario spinoff.  It's the old profit vs marketshare debate again.  I don't see anything you can point at and say "this is what Nintendo did with their Rare sale money and their console benefitted from it."

The Rare sale is like Nintendo dumping a high salary by trading a player to another team.  The player didn't do too well on the Microsoft team but that team made the playoffs regardless and Nintendo didn't.

[KDR_11k]

I think some time ago MS said they want to get the kid market (and the parent with children market) interested in their console and praised the number of kid-friendly games on the system (I think they managed to scrape together 12 games including crossplatform releases). Perhaps MS is trying to take a bit of Nintendo's userbase with Rare's games. Doesn't seem to work, Rare doesn't make good games anymore.

[capamerica]

The Reason Nintendo droped Rare was because they were a money pit. The ate up lots of funding and produced very little. Rare was suposet to have 3 launch titles for the GameCube, they only got 1 out and that was almost a year after the launch and on top of that it wasn't that great. Then they go and come out all big chested saying they will create 5 games in 3 years for the Xbox. What did MS get? 2 games and one was a bad port of a N64 game and the other was just crap. And don't get me started on Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo. Perfect Dark Zero at Best is a par FPS, there is nothing great about it. And Kameo... I can't say anything good about it.

Rare really seemed to have started going down hill around the time of Banjo-Tooie. I really blame it on the fact that they lost most of their good staff to Free Radical. IF you take out Perfect Dark after Banjo-Kazooie there really weren't any good Rare games. I mean sure Conker's Bad Fur Day was funny as hell but overall it wasn't that great of a game and the jokes became very dated with the Xbox version.  

Between the Release of Killer Instinct Gold - 1996 (Their First N64 Game) and Perfect Dark Zero/Kameo - 2005 (Xbox360) Rare has created 24 games among 6 consoles. Maybe at most 4 of them were decent games.

[Kairon]

Let me go on record that Perfect Dark was tolerable, but that the only Rare game I ever loved was the critically-skeptical sales-failure Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong 64, Star Fox Adventures, and yes, even Jet Force Gemini and Blast corp to lesser extents, all convinced me as a Nintendo fan that Rare was overhyped by fanboys and that they were nothing special. Kameo sounded dead-in-the-water from the moment I read about it in Nintendo power, and my perception hasn't changed now that it's been released 4-5 years later and hundreds of thousands of dollars later.

Seriously, I found their platforming endeavors to be vastly inferior to Mario 64, I found their FPS' to be merely sensible though in a genre normally crippled, KI was a throwback, DK64 was horrific, and Jet Force Gemini convinced Miyamoto himself that 3rd person shooters were not feasable.

The only time I ever loved a Rare game was Conker's BFD, a game where they finally ditched the facade of gameplay and instead poured on their british humour, sensibilities, and imagination. Ironically, this game was met with lukewarm critics and lackluster sales. Only when Rare fully exploits that true sense of itself as seen in Conker will I be convinced that they are anything but another developer, luckily boosted by hanging onto Nintendo's coattails.

Seriously, I don't know what anyone saw in DKR or BK to begin with.

...Now back on topic!

I will say this for Pinata: the concept sounds decent (unlike Kameo's paper-thin concept) and the visual style they're employing is heads and shoulders above what Kameo impressed upon me. For that alone, I'm willing to take a wait-and-see-approach.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[Stimutacs Addict]

stunning visual style; I want to get my hands on this one

[jasonditz]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
"In all fairness it's not as though they were just "lost", Nintendo got hundreds of millions of dollars out of the deal."

And how do we gamers benefit from that?  How is the Cube in a better position because of that?  In the console market Nintendo's in a big pit and are a footnote when people talk about the console market.  Maybe things would be different if they still had Rare.  At least Rare would have contributed something.  At least they would provide something different to Nintendo's lineup then another Mario spinoff.  It's the old profit vs marketshare debate again.  I don't see anything you can point at and say "this is what Nintendo did with their Rare sale money and their console benefitted from it."

The Rare sale is like Nintendo dumping a high salary by trading a player to another team.  The player didn't do too well on the Microsoft team but that team made the playoffs regardless and Nintendo didn't.

To follow that analogy, lets say Nintendo spends the money they saved on some young prospects who eventually pan out. We might not have seem the dividends from it yet, but we didn't have to sit through Grabbed by the Ghoulies either.

Lets say Nintendo kept Rare and Kameo and PD0 came out for the Cube instead of the 360... what would it have changed? Those games obviously could've been made for the Cube (trimmed down graphics aside), would they have sold systems? Would they have made the Cube a contender?

We're not the New York Yankees, we can't afford to overpay for high priced, dubious talent just to keep them off our division rivals' teams.  

[Ian Sane]

"Lets say Nintendo kept Rare and Kameo and PD0 came out for the Cube instead of the 360... what would it have changed? Those games obviously could've been made for the Cube (trimmed down graphics aside), would they have sold systems? Would they have made the Cube a contender?"

Nintendo's input would probably have helped both titles so they arguably would have been better.  Would they have sold systems?  Probably not since they wouldn't have come out prior to Christmas 2002 and by then Nintendo had made such a lousy impression with the Cube that pretty much nothing would have sold systems.  But they could have sold some.  At least they could have filled in a dead spot in the lineup or provided some variety.  The lack of variety is Nintendo's big problem and they didn't address it when they sold Rare.  Rare provided variety to the N64 lineup.  Once they left Nintendo went sequel crazy and fed us a bunch of Mario spinoffs.  As they've lost other developers (Silicon Knights, Factor 5) their lineup has become more of the same.

I would feel better about the Rare sale if Nintendo had made an effort to address the gap in their lineup that Rare's departure created.  But they didn't.  They either didn't recognize the positive contributions Rare did bring to them or they just didn't care.  They still haven't replaced Rare and Nintendo's console offerings are the most uninteresting they've ever been.  At least if Rare was still around I'd have more to choose from than Mario sports games.

"We're not the New York Yankees, we can't afford to overpay for high priced, dubious talent just to keep them off our division rivals' teams."

I wasn't thinking of keeping Rare away from others but rather using them as an asset due to their typically good chemistry with Nintendo.

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

I'll say that Kameo was a different, more interesting game, by design, when I played it (plus what the trailers "promised") at E3 2001 in contrast to what we see today.  I wanted it (past tense).  

[Smash_Brother]

I liked Banjo-Kazooie. Banjo-Tooie focused WAY too much on collecting crap and DK64 was a monstrosity: collect crap with FIVE DIFFERENT MONKEYS!!!!11!!!! OMFG!!!!11

Other than that, I thought Golden-Eye was overrated, JFG was pretty awful, but I thought that StarFox Adventures was just fine: it was a decent Zelda clone with pretty visuals but not terribly memorable.

Having played PD0 all the way through, I have to say that it's pretty bad. The game is par, meaning that any decent FPS will be better but that it passes for being a FPS. From what little I played of Kameo, it was cliched and sh*tty. Grabbed by the Ghoulies was laughably bad.

Rare had a few decent games out, but all in all, they ARE an over-hyped company. Why do you think that, when they advertised Grabbed by the Ghoulies, the commercial proudly proclaimed "From the makers of Donkey Kong Country!"?

I though the first DKC was pretty good, but the sequels were just beating a dead horse...

EDIT: Oh, and as for this newest game: it looks like some shader equation went awry, the texture team noticed that the result made the graphic look like a piƱata, and they decided to just run with it.

This, like Grabbed by the Ghoulies before it, is not the type of game which will sell well on a console aimed almost strictly at a "mature" demographic.

[Bill Aurion]

EDIT: Oh, and as for this newest game: it looks like some shader equation went awry, the texture team noticed that the result made the graphic look like a piƱata, and they decided to just run with it.

I believe the game was originally going to be for the N64...Uh oh!

And hey, I still love Rare in their current mediocrity, but seriously, it was NOT a huge loss for Nintendo...They've put out nothing but mediocre games for Microsoft and that's not what Ninty wanted...

For me, Retro is the new Rare...And you can't forget other additions that were made post-Rare like Tokyo EAD...Ninty didn't lose anything...

[Infernal Monkey]

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And how do we gamers benefit from that?

Free Radical.

[Kairon]

Actually, reading about Viva Pinata, it sounds pretty okay as far as concepts go. It'll be almost an ecology simulation, with food sources, predators, and counter-predators players will want to attract to chase off undesirables.

And I'm not about to underestimate what happens when you blitzkrieg 7 year old kids with a game, a cartoon, AND merchandising. I mean...god, just like at Bey Blade! It's TOPs for gods sake! They're making children think TOPS are hip and edgy and the chosen weapons of anime heroes everywhere!

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com