Quick Look: Rare Replay - Part 1

The games I have any interest in are BC on Xbox One and the rest I have no nostalgia for, so this collection has little appeal for me.

Cobra Triangle the precursor to Blood Wake?

Jeff is correct, in Snake Rattle & Roll, you need to collect enough segments that when you jump on the lever, the weight of your snake is high enough to ring the bell.

Watching this for the Speccy games, UK based here (in fact I live about 10 minutes drive from Rare HQ) and everybody had a Spectrum back in the 80s. Rubber keys, external cassette deck, lovely stuff. The hours I put into Sabre Wulf, Knight Lore and Gunfright were scary. This emulation seems a bit off though, I don't recall the games being as fast as they are here. I'm willing to concede it's down to my memory being poor though.

Oh, and:

@deerokus: Did you see the the special episode of Knightmare that a guy called Stuart Ashens made on YouTube a while back? It was awesome.

They only went and got the original cast back together! And Dobby from Peep Show. <3

This collection has a gross lack of Taboo: The Sixth Sense.

Yes, I can also tell from playing a game for 4 minutes that it's monotonous.

Wow, the music from Digger T. Rock sounds a lot like something from Wizards and Warriors III. Very similar instrumentation.

Ahh, the early games reminds me of great times with game room quick looks

my copy arrives just in time for the weekend. I plan on diving deep into this. Some games I've never played, like Kameo and the second viva piñata.

Why does everything take so long to load on the xbone? there are loading screens on the menu between the 30 year old games? what the hell, man?

Also, fuck yeah Cobra Triangle. I remember that game fondly.

@phoenixdownpillow: Load times have always been noticeably longer (for me) on my XBO vs my PS4, and I'm not sure why. It shouldn't really be ram issues, unless there's larger bandwidth bottlenecks than should be.

Was Jetpac in Nuts & Bolts? I KNOW I played this game, but definitely didn't buy it separately.

Also, the player character in a few of those Spectrum games look exactly like Spelunky.

Jeff talking shit about widely beloved games is always great, even when they're ones I like. Slaughter all sacred cows, I say.

So Atic Atac is The Binding of Issac 1983 version?

@nickhead: I don't know about Nuts & Bolts, but Jetpac was definitely in Donkey Kong 64 -- was a semi-secret thing that you'd get access to somehow through Cranky Kong.

Of all the things the most interesting one for me is interview for unreleased (canned?) titles.

Anywhere I watch those? Like Brad said behind the scene video games dev stuff aren't that prevalent, and most dev would lock down and never mention canceled projects. To have even a glimpse of that even if it is filtered sounds like it could be super interesting.

The love for Blast Corps is really weirding me, out as a person who had previously never heard of it. It looks really ugly and dull. The music is pretty great though.

Is it one of those deals where it was really impressive at the time it came out?

@backstabuuu: it's very fun to play. Of course it looks ugly and dull, though, it's an N64 game.

@backstabuuu: It was impressive and is still unique. There are too few games about blowing up every building in your vicinity, and the vehicle variety and minor exploration kept it interesting.

No, Snake Rattle n Roll, I did not feast on the Nibble Pibbleys, because you just made them up.

@roy42: Welcome to GiantBomb west coast.

Never paid to much attention to what games are actually in this collection since I don't have a XBone yet, but it seems like a really neat "little" package. Definitely going to get this when I eventually break down and get a XBone.

As always when GB is looking at a lot of games in a row I really loved Jeff's commentary. Aside from that sick 60fps burn the best thing was him saying "I doubt that guy can hear you. I think you are going to be fine." to Brad after he felt bad for the Battletoads devs.

Also there needs to be a supplemental video of all the games you guys had to skip because of the patching issues.

@superkenon: Yes! That's it. DK64 was a weird game.

Wasn't impressed with Jeff's dismissal of Atic Atac (pronounced "Attic Attack" and not, er, "A Tik A Tak") - I played this game a lot when it came out on the ZX Spectrum and it's pretty challenging considering what you have to do in order to beat the game. Hopefully he'll go back to it with the manual digested so he can fully appreciate it.

Really happy to play Nuts and Bolts for the first time through Rare Replay - the first five minutes of that did the same self-referential stuff that Saints Row 3 did but three years before it came out!

Ghetto bird at 1:35:42.

Did they skip over the N64 version of Perfect Dark??? WHY???

I lost a whole summer to that game when I was eight.

The "do you want sound effects or music?" was specifically an Amiga thing, because of the way it's Paula sound chip worked. Before hackers managed to get more out of it than it was intended for, it could only play four sound channels simultaneously, two for the left speaker and two for right, and since it used digitized samples instead of waveforms like the C64 or the contemporary consoles did, having sounds or entire channels of music cut off as another sound effect played became pretty noticeable. Not to mention that many musicians wanted to make use of as many sound channels as possible.

Some ports of Amiga games to other systems (mostly Genesis) also included the "sound effects or music" thing because the originals had been coded that way, but not out of technical reasons, since many other platforms had separate synthesizer and PCM channels.

I love the presentation, and if this had gotten a PC release I'd have been in there like a shot. Alas, Microsoft continues to reject their own platform.

"There are 30 games here Brad, We're gonna play all of them!"

Doesn't play almost 30% of the games

That Banjo download would've been finished in 5 minutes. Come on you guys.

You pretty much didn't play the only games I actually wanted to see you play.

I can't say I get the love for the ZX Spectrum era of games. Compared to the Atari 2600, which was several years earlier, while the games are technically better looking they seem way less fun. And to think Super Mario Bros. would come just 2 years later it really blew this stuff out of the water. Is it just a UK thing and I will never understand?

Yo Digger T. Rock was hot to death, and was also the middle evolutionary stage between Spelunker and Spelunky. That music, too.

They have their own platform, its called the Xbox. Also: Rare as a developer is primarily a console developer.

I understand why people want Microsoft's games to come out on the PC. But they have to keep stuff for the Xbox.

@hippie_genocide: Yep. Also we played our ZX Spectrum games on really terrible CRTs. (Not really)

N64 Rare was best Rare

I can't believe Brad forgot that Rare made the DKC games... That really blew my mind

Holy cow, Cobra Triangle really is awesome.

Same

Tried redownloading, still won't play. :(

It really took some endurance to run through these games.

Edit: spelling

motherfuckin BLAST CORPS

Also the downloads where pretty much all finished when they ended it..

Funny that Jeff mentions Voodoo Vince in the Grabbed by the Ghoulies part. I got my original xbox back in the day in a bundle-in with Voodoo Vince and Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Bloody played the shit outta the two games, Voodoo Vince especially. In regards to Blinkz/Blinkx? however the fuck it was spelt I was thoroughly disappointed as a kid.

This was a fantastic Quick Look. I may end up buying an Xbox One just for this collection.

Wow, seeing that pro racer 2 thing again was weird. We had arcade machines of it everywhere in Norway in the 90s, and I remember it looking like the cartoon splash screen. Quite the reality check!

I might get this pack just for Blast Corps.

Some of the more tougher games in the collection (the early Spectrum stuff) actually feel a bit more enjoyable with liberal use of the rewind function. In some cases, games like Underwurlde - which are horrifically unfair - are probably best completed this way. Saddens me that I used to good at those Spectrum games when they were first released. Getting old sucks.

great quick look, guys.

FUCK BATTLETOADS

lol brad called it on battletoads being in a fighting game.

ARMORINES: Project S.W.A.R.M.! Now THAT was a good N64 game!

Wait. Wait. Wait. They actually Photoshop'd out Conker's cigar for the picture frame around the game? First Tychus loses his cigar in Heroes now Conker! I don't like this world we live in anymore.

I kind of agree. Blast Corps was one of those games I always saw in the Blockbuster rental section, but never got it.