Lets take a look at Rare's N64 & Cube games:
1996 Killer Instinct Gold - good fighting game, but (correct me if I'm wrong), had been in the arcade for a while, and as far as I noticed, it used most of the same move sets from the original KI... it just had some updated media (audio, graphics, a little added to control...)
1997: Blast Corps - Ok, most underrated game EVER
Diddy Kong Racing - a pretty damn good racing game.... but not the best out there.
Goldeneye 007 - what can I say? This game MADE the FPS genre on consoles. Everything before GE sold horribly, and usually was horrible.
1998 Banjo-Kazooie - cheesy platformer... here's where the collect-a-thon pattern begins!
1999 Donkey Kong 64 - BK clone.... collect a thon #2!
Jetforce Gemini - An action game similar in many ways to SFA: Flashy, but boring... from what I remember, I got bored, and the control sucked, as well. (That's what I remember).
2000 Banjo-Tooie - BK clone, but not quite as good as the original.
Perfect Dark - Stupid one player mode, and a horrendously unbalanced weapons system. This game was just made to be a cash cow, being "the New FPS from the makers of GE!"
2001 Conker's Bad Fur Day - urgh.... just a big movie parody... collect a thon shows again... kind of sloppy controls. Once you get past the toilet humor and spoofs of movies, you have a bland, unimpressive, sub-par platformer. This game had been in development since the beginning of the N64, I believe... and this is what Rare could come up with?
2002 StarFox Adventures - . YAY. A GAME WE STARTED FOUR YEARS AGO: A BORING ZELDA CLONE! This game had good control, sound, graphics, etc.... but there was one area that was the game's downfall. This game just wasn't FUN to play. Traces of the collect-a-thon style, perfected by Rare, show up AGAIN in this game.
Rare started off nice... (even though DKR can't hold a candle to Mario Kart 64, and KI:Gold wasn't the most polished fighter), but come circa 1998 AD, things took a turn for the worse. They started using the basic collect-a-thon formula in EVERY GAME THEY MADE... it even exists in Goldeneye (some items you collected for a purpose, but there were also some that I couldn't find ANY reason for nabbing when I looked at the pre-mission briefings and checked to see if they had any functions. ) and DKR (collect x number of balloons to open stage R, nab the 8 coins to nab the one balloon to increase your balloon total by one! repeat for the next mission! oh, and here's a mirror mode to do it all over again!)
The point is, Rare DID make some decent titles six or seven years ago, but since 1998, most of their titles have sucked, even with longer development cycles and more resources. That was five years ago. Rare has never been the same since it released Goldeneye and Banjo Kazooie. Yes, they were once a great company... but not anymore. People need to open their eyes: This is 2003, and rare isn't as good as they were half a decade ago.
Oh, and also, While Retro Studios may have only made one game, but they were VERY small.... not even 50 people, I believe. With a team as small as that, you HAVE to be focused on only one game. And the case with Eternal Darkness? It took around two years to actually develop.... the problem was, it moved from PS, to N64, to GC, being rebuilt from scratch on the GC (took them two years to make the game from scratch on the cube) Rare's games, on the other hand, weren't delayed (except for SFA) to be moved to other systems. There's no excuse a single game (Conker) should take six years to develop for ONE console, with the resulting product being less than satisfying. The quality of Rare's games is simply not enough considering the ridiculous amount of time they spend on the games.
Topic: Rare: A Year Later (Read 17979 times)
