| hsrob said: My feelings about Rare is that they were rarely original, but then again who is these days. They were good at taking other's ideas and polishing the hell out of them and injecting their own characters, style and sense of humour. In some instances i think they outshined their inspirations, in others they didn't. I never played KI much and i felt DK 64 failed to match Banjo but the other games on that list were grade A. In most instances the only games that were better than Rare's were Nintendo's own and Rare had the advantage of addressing genres that the Big N didn't. |
This pretty much sums up Rare for me: when they missed the mark it's usually because they went too far with it--DK64 and Jetforce Gemini being a key examples of just not knowing when to quit. I would also submit that they really only came into their own with the N64 (their short-lived golden age, as it were), as besides a title or two (no, Battletoads is/was/will never be a good game) they weren't particuarly stand-out in any way (cue rabid Spectrum fans calling for my head).
I will say that I always thought the Donkey Kong Country games were vastly, vastly over-rated (moreso than any other games they've ever done by a country mile). They were aurally and visually neat-o, but the actual gameplay was leagues beneath the best of breed 16-bit platformers (mainly because the level design was sorely lacking).
They also have the very rare (cough) game where it's completely their idea and they took and ran with it to great effect (see: Blast Corps, RC Pro Am) but, on the whole, their whole schtick--when talking about their 'legendary' SNES/N64 output--was to take inspiration from somewhere else (usually Nintendo titles) and do their best to rival the masters of the craft. Sometimes this worked (Banjo) and sometimes it didn't (StarFox Adventures).
