Oldschool Rare(ware) Appreciation Thread

[Pike]

So who else grew up with these guys?

[Del Murder]

The DKC games were pretty awesome and were the best non-Mario platformers of that era.

Not many companies can evolve to 3D well (...Sega) but the Banjo and Conker games were pretty good as well and again only a shade below Nintendo's Mario 64.

And Goldeneye was the best game for the N64. Perfect Dark was as good as a follow-up could have been for them, too.

[Aulayna]

I lost so much of my early teenage years to sleepovers where we'd stay up all night playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Good times.

I remember DK64 royally pissing me off in places too!

[Sephex]

One of the first games I got when I got a NES was R.C. Pro-AM, a very simple racing game:

R.C. Pro-Am - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia





This is a simple, but very fun game. I obviously like the more mainstream games that the company is well know for these days, but R.C. Pro-Am is the first Rare game that I immensely enjoyed as a kid. It was fun and challenging to get all the NINTENDO letters on the track to upgrade the vehicles.

[Slothy]

I remember DK64 royally pissing me off in places too!

That's probably because DK64 is an awful game.

Now take a seat and hold on folks because I'm about to make a lot of people angry.
- The Donkey Kong Country games were good, but not great. Just because I'm playing as gorilla's doesn't mean that controls so sluggish it feels like I'm controlling an actual gorilla are a great idea.
- The Killer Instinct games are pretty awful fighting games
- The Banjo games were mind numbingly boring platformers. I used to wonder if they could cram a little more fetch questing in there, but then they made DK64 so obviously they felt the need to answer that question in the affirmative.
- Didn't like Diddy Kong Racing either. It was like a Mario Kart with worse characters that didn't control as well.
- I've never played Jet Force Gemini oddly enough, despite it looking like a Rare game from that era that wouldn't enrage me.

On the plus side, Goldeneye 007 is still an example of a great FPS in all respects except controls, and Perfect Dark was even better and managed to fix some things that didn't work in Goldeneye while expanding tremendously on what did. It also had multiplayer options that haven't been matched by any FPS I know of since outside of the PC realm (and even then, the options available in most PC games come at the cost of ease of use). The later Timesplitters games may have topped it, but I didn't own any after the first which was a mixed bag so my knowledge of their options is somewhat limited. It wouldn't surprise me though since the only people at Rare capable of making good games left to start Free Radical.

[Agent Proto]

Are we talking the time when Rare wasn't working for Microsoft? If so, yes, I love them. <3

[Laddy]

Rare was the trout.

[Pike]

- The Donkey Kong Country games were good, but not great. Just because I'm playing as gorilla's doesn't mean that controls so sluggish it feels like I'm controlling an actual gorilla are a great idea.

DKC2 was the best of the DKC games and one of the best platformers on the system I think. The others were good but not great (as you said)

- The Killer Instinct games are pretty awful fighting games

Killer Instinct wasn't the best fighting game by all means but it was fun.

- The Banjo games were mind numbingly boring platformers. I used to wonder if they could cram a little more fetch questing in there, but then they made DK64 so obviously they felt the need to answer that question in the affirmative.

This one I truly don't understand, the Banjo games were probably the best traditional 3D platformers of all time IMO. DK64, though, now that game was pretty poor. I think it might have been Rare's worst outing on the N64. It just took fetch questing to the far extreme and it wasn't fun.

- Didn't like Diddy Kong Racing either. It was like a Mario Kart with worse characters that didn't control as well.

It wasn't as good as Mario 64 but it was still very solid and the airplanes were fun. The hovercrafts not so much.

- I've never played Jet Force Gemini oddly enough, despite it looking like a Rare game from that era that wouldn't enrage me.

Interestingly enough Jet Force Gemini was a very flawed game in many respects (including being unable to progress past a certain point without literally going back and fetchquesting through every single prior level you had completed), I had a lot of fun with it nonetheless though.

[Værn]

I lost so much of my early teenage years to sleepovers where we'd stay up all night playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Good times.

I might say the same thing, if "sleepover" didn't imply sleeping.

[Jowy]

eekum bokum!

I'm gonna go play Banjo-Kazooie right now.

[Shauna]

I have only ever played Donkey Kong Country out of these games. It was pretty fun. :3 I guess I also played GoldenEye multiplayer once and couldn't get behind the control scheme, but that doesn't count really as "playing" the game. xD

[black orb]

>>> Thats oldschool?..

Im a total geezer now..

[G13]

I would say I'm a Rare fan, but I've only played the DKC games and the 64 games. But I like what I've seen!

Banjo Kazooie was great, though I can see where Vivi's coming from. Fetch questing is not for everybody. I enjoy DK64, but only every five years or so. It's definitely not their best game, but at least it's above the recent Banjo Kazooie disaster! Diddy Kong Racing was awful. I just... I hate that game. I have yet to finish Conker's Bad Fur Day or Jet Force Gemini, but I enjoyed what I played. I am the Great Mighty Poo.

[Aulayna]

I lost so much of my early teenage years to sleepovers where we'd stay up all night playing Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Good times.

I might say the same thing, if "sleepover" didn't imply sleeping.

Well, sleep was very rarely involved. Usually it was stay up all night, go home about 11am, pass-out for a few hours then wake up and get lectured at by the parents for being irresponsible.