Rare Replay - Maxi-Geek Review

If you had of told me last year that we would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of Rare with one of the best game collections, I would not have believed you, but here we are, Rare Replay celebrates everything that makes Rare, well Rare even down to their kooky nature.

From the outset, when you load into game you are witness to one of the strangest game openings ever created, but at the same time its uniquely Rare, which is something that you will come to understand time and time again throughout the collection. Navigating through the menus is pretty easy, the centre option are the games, with the left being all about Rare and the right are the Rare remixes and each of them is presented like posters for attractions coming soon.

Of course the big deal here is the games, of which there are 30 and those are contained with the gold frame, right in the middle. The games range from Jetpac, Rare’s first release back in 1983, all the way to latest Banjo-Kazooie game, while most people will recognize the later efforts, the earlier ones like Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman might be to obscure for most people to get. Once you select your game, it loads up and you are in, for the older games, a lot of the buttons are not used or actions are duplicated, which is nice. In fact the amount of options you have to customise just how the older games look by adding scan likes, akin to how they would have looked on the TV’s of the time.

Of course, loading up to the newer games will reduce those options as the games were made for newer screens, but the fun you can get is still there. Blast Corp is one game I have fond memories of and it is not a game most people know came from Rare, so its nice to see it included here. Jet Force Gemini and Blast Corp are odd games as they are the only Nintendo 64 games that have not been remastered, as the other had been done last console generation, playing those games and then Banjo-Kazooie and seeing the difference in quality is a massive let down. Though that is really minor compared to the loading of the Xbox 360 releases.

Whenever you load into the remastered Nintendo 64 games, or any of the Xbox 360 titles, the game will take you out of Rare Replay and load you into that game, when you leave, you need press and hold the menu button and it will quit out and then reload Rare Replay, which takes a lot of time. But that being said it really is only a small gripe, which thankfully does not impact the gameplay. What did impact the gameplay for me is the control issues I had with the older games, stuck triggers and button presses not registering caused many deaths, last place results and such.

Thankfully, as strange as it sounds the games are only half of the fun that is found here, as you play through the games and achieve milestones, you will actually unlock videos that go behind the scenes on games and Rare as a whole. The earlier videos are all about the games you know, but as you level up and earn more stamps, the videos will be about games you may not have known about, like the sequel to Kameo and even music created for games as well. These videos are filled with people that created the games you love, with some of the speakers no longer at Rare, some of the comments have less of a rose coloured look to them.

But there is still something that is even cooler than those videos in the game and that is the snapshots, bit sized portions of the classic games, that will remix things up enough to provide new challenges. In a Jetpac Snapshot, one the stages had disabled the gun, meaning that there was no defense to the aliens, but you had to fuel up the rocket and escape, within a set time to beat the challenge. RC Pro Am will have you collecting all the stars on a track, while coming first in a race. The challenges are varied enough that should you tire of the game as a whole, these bite size chunks are a great way to experience the game a new. The other half to that equation is the are the playlists, which will give you a specific theme that is tied between a series of games, like survive the longest, collect the diamonds and such. These are another fun way to play the game, but they can be a real challenge, so be forewarned.

The entire package is brought together by the theatre look, posters advertising games are hidden around the place, the loading screens are them as well, even the transition between areas is a curtain that will fall down to hide the changing of the scenes. When you are in a games menu, there are cutouts of those game characters moving about, giving the whole game a production feeling, which from the opening number is a good thing. The games score, which is again used in the opening number, happily plays in the background as you move around, only swapping to another track when you go into a game menu.

Rare Replay is great value if you are a fan of the company and while it is a stretch to say 30 classics are on display here, some of the earlier games are very rough and very dated, even though, the more recent additions are worthy of your attention. Add to this the wonderful videos and diverse challenges, there is more than enough to entertain you for a long time to come.

Thanks to Xbox Australia for supplying the game for review