Quick Look: Rare Replay - Part 2

Here we go!

Woop woop!

Good to know that the other games finally finished updating.

This would be a cool feature for the site. Taking a look back at all the games a specific developer has done

They should do a feature where they should play through all the games made by Kojima studios..

I was hoping for a pt. 2, Brad and Jeff just talking is my favorite stuff on the site. Just got to the part where Brad talks about liking the Perfect Dark menu music, his Kirkhope love keeps growing.

Finally, the dream is realized

The original 360 boot up animation gives me the fizz.

In Perfect Dark you can change the settings so the crosshair doesn't move around the screen. The autoaim will still lock onto enemies, but it's not nearly as swimmy feeling.

Is Amped 3 actually a good game? Or is it just the amazing cutscenes, which I'm sure have been fully covered on this site before?

Oh man that Perfect Dark title theme is bringing back so many memories.

Here are all the startup screens for the Xboxes.

@isomeri: YESSSS! It's a damn shame we lost boot-up screens in the generation leap :(

Also, here's N64's Perfect Dark intro. Jeff was right.

I am so glad I managed to find a physical copy of Viva Pinata for PC for just 2 bucks, as I viewed the basket I was seriously thinking of just buying 10 copies and give them out to friends.

Achievements won't work I believe because it was Games For Windows Live.

Still can not figure out why Rare is held in such high regard by so many people, even at the time their games were at best good knock offs.

I also might blame them for starting the trend of making fun of your own bad game mechanics, MAKING FUN OF BAD THINGS DOESNT MAKE THE BAD THINGS OK, IT MAKES IT WORSE!

I still remember downloading the demo for Viva Piñata on my 360, playing it for about 4 hours over and over again, showing my brother and telling him "I must go to Gamestop immediately and buy this game." This was a few years after the game was already out. I had just never heard of it or seen it before. Such a magical game. I can't wait to put a lot of time into it in this collection!

@brad It's Klungo, don't you remember? He saves the world.

Ugh, i hate the gibberish in the Banjo games. So annoying.

@kid_gloves: For me its that the Rare games that I love had a charm to them that was special. Like sure Banjo-Kazooie is a Mario 64 style collect-a-thon platformer but the music, the art style, the dialogue, the way everything has googly eyes and talks in dumb sound effects, it all has a super endearing quality that sets it apart. Though I totally get that if those things don't really do it for you then yeah the adoration people have for some Rare games could be baffling.

I agree with the making fun of your bad mechanics, but they didn't really do that. In Nuts & Bolts they repeatedly make fun of collect-a-thons and their back catalogue, but not really anything in the game itself.

Someone go to that XBox feature request site and start the ball rolling to get a better boot up screen patched in for the XBone.

Was that an Eric Andre reference during the Banjo segment? Bird up?

Could we have an UPF which is just Jeff and Brad playing Viva Piñata?

YO CHEATO, hand me my choco taco!

@mrblobby64: Fair enough. I find most of their output wordy and overwrought in the wrong places, and not until their last full on 360 AAA releases did I really see charm and art that did much of anything for me.

I mean I have to assume they hired some really good art people for viva pinata because prior to that game their art design IMO was always the fucking worst, there were nintendo characters they used that were often ok and a bunch of really bad characters they created.

Kazooie is straight up a thug.

Ha ha. @brad was on a roll in this one. Thanks for the info and the laughs.

Perfect Dark still holds up. Played a few levels and its super fun. Also, laptop gun!

I don't care for Mario 64. I played a lot of it, but Banjo was far less sterile. Some of my favourite games, and not just nostalgia. At least I know it'll get shit on in every GB video, no surprises there.

@ravelle: I had no idea this was on PC! I'm finally playing it with Rare Replay and the 360 version has an awful frame rate at times.

Oh man. I think I can die happy now. I have finally seen what "all engines" looks like. A good seven years ago the idea of a vehicle made entirely of engines was planted in my head by the Gerstmann. While I have tried to make it myself in my own game, nothing compares to the original. ALL HAIL ALL ENGINES

Tooie's actually very different from Kazooie if you play beyond the first 5 minutes. That's the problem with a QL Marathon of this part of the collection. These games take time to start up.

The two main criticisms of Tooie from informed folk boil down to two things: One it's not Kazooie and worlds can not be 100%ed in one go and you have to accept this. Two Canary Mary.

Personally I love Tooie. Fantastic game. Yes it takes about double the time investment of Kazooie but I feel it's a good investment.

Tooie's actually very different from Kazooie if you play beyond the first 5 minutes. That's the problem with a QL Marathon of this part of the collection. These games take time to start up. Oh, also if you don't know how to Talon Trot that's a problem.

The two main criticisms of Tooie from informed folk boil down to two things: One it's not Kazooie and worlds can not be 100%ed in one go and you have to accept this. Two Canary Mary.

Personally I love Tooie. Fantastic game. Yes it takes about double the time investment of Kazooie but I feel it's a good investment.

YES

Nice! First two part quick look? (at least the first called "part 2" I think)

Maan the memories i had with the Banjo and the Perfect Dark games!

Need for Speed Most Wanted was THE xbox 360 launch game.

Elder Scrolls online was a two-parter.

Egh, indeed. I guess we have to accept that this whole notion of whether a game "holds up" that's getting bandied around a lot lately, is pretty subjective.

For my part, I came back to gaming after what has been, based on Brad's exclamation at the 360's lifespan, maybe a decade? And I really get the sense that the people who stuck with the medium don't know what they've lost in the intervening time, and get angry at all the wrong things these days. Seems to be a lot of boiling frog going on.

Is the framerate in Banjo-Tooie still complete shit like it was on the N64 version?

Brad on Perfect Dark Zero: "Didn't they shoehorn in co-op and shields to make it more like Halo?".

No Brad, those were both in the original Perfect Dark too.

Wow, didn't expect to find myself defending PD Zero.

Kameo still looks so good.

When/if I get an XBox One, I will be getting Rare Replay and Kameo will be the first one I play.

That's cool that they have online multiplayer for Perfect Dark. I wonder how many old groups of friends will be joining back up for Farsight only battles.

It has been far too long for Viva Pinata to reappear on this website. Can't wait to get home from work!

@tubularluggage said:

They did add the Shock Damage system which results in a portion of your health recovering if you can avoid taking damage, this mostly seems to be included to encourage use of the dodge roll and cover systems. PDZ launched the same day as Call of Duty 2, which is the game largely responsible for bringing automatic health recovery mechanics to games featuring characters who are not super soldiers with shield systems.

So I could make the argument for Brad that the Shock Damage mechanic might have been influenced by Halo's shielding mechanic but PDZ's health system is also similar to a bunch of fighting games. He is totally dead wrong about the co-op.

Oh man the internet has ruined me, the music in that first level of Banjo just me think of this weird/great mashup with Snoop

Perfect Dark for the N64 had campaign co-op.

The comedian that Jeff said worked for Nintendo is probably Mike Drucker, he worked at IGN and now is writing for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Nuts and Bolts was amazing and ahead of its time. Only now have other developers realized how awesome it was and are making their own vehicle building games with a similar block-based mechanic. Of course this wave now finally lets us build at different scales depending on the game, some using even fewer blocks than Banjo, others making you build giant battleships from thousands of blocks.