If anyone else knows what the heck he's talking about, please clarifiy.

"Will Rare return to the likes of Perfect Dark or Banjo Kazooie any time in the future?"

"Our obsession right now is how we're going to push the boundaries with Kinect."

That line should be the epitaph on Rare's tombstone. RIP Rare... we hardly knew ye.

Such a JOY that was to play.  The failure of that game to sell was a horrible indictment of the gaming public.  So many of the complaints were about things OTHER than the actual game.  It should ALWAYS* be about the actual game.

* My only exception is my refusal to play Madden instead of a 2K game, though I also don't enjoy the way Madden plays either, but I digress ...

No, it was a horrible indictment of Rare and how far they have fallen from their once untouchable perch.  The vehicle customization and experementation part of the game was fun and creative... the actual gameplay and level designs?  Not so much.  Frustrating collision detection and physics, everything being a timed race event, and virtually no platforming of any kind in a sequel to one of the biggest 3D platforming franchises in recent memory.

Nintendo may put Mario and co. in all sorts of wacky game situations from golf to racing to party games, but at least they know not to mess with the general formula when it comes to the main series.  Rare was probably tinkering around with different game ideas, decided this might be interesting, and chose to slap the Banjo-Kazooie franchise onto it figuring it would sell better that way.  Boy were they ever wrong.

yea it worked i confused you. and as for padib's comments. i'll leave that open to dabate.

this

Not true... Conker's BFD and Star Fox adventures were both great.  Everything since they left Nintendo on the other hand... not so much. 

And don't anybody say Viva Pinata was good... you just THINK it was good because everything else Rare has done since M$ bought them has ranged from mediocre to terrible.

srry wasn't my intent. i was trying to leave the forum open to see how many people thought i was mad. on one hand yes i was but on the other? i guess i just left the gate open for random analogies and comments just flew out. 

yes everything before MS was great.

Rare was a victim of its own success, and the failures of Nintendo. This developer was simply overly exploited by the likes of Nintendo. Second parties are simply not expected to match the quality and the volume of a Manufacturer, and that goes doubly for Nintendo. Yet that is what Rare was expected to do, and the reason second parties ought not do that is the costs are simply excessive. Rare was simply in a no win situation. Can we call it what it really was at the time. Nintendo shoved Rare under the bus to save its own ass.

Rare was expected to run on par with Nintendo. Without the support structure such a undertaking absolutely demands. They pulled it off short term, but in the long term it was not sustainable, and eventually ruined the developer. You can only push things so far before things begin to snap, and Rare was pushed so hard that a lot of things snapped all at the same time. No second party developer can afford to put out seventeen games in a generation, and releasing four or five games a year is only counter productive.

Yes it was great for Nintendo it bolstered their lineup, and I will commit a huge blasphemy by saying this. Rare allowed the 64 to remain viable even if it was marginal. Nintendo alone could not have salvaged that console. Only thanks to the volume produced by Rare was Nintendo even able to remotely address the losses felt on the third party front. You must understand that Rare could not run like a little Nintendo. They do not have the revenue streams they cannot partake of the hardware sales or the peripheral sales, and with that large of a staff it simply could never afford to go fallow. Which is what a new generation would have brought.

The irony of earlier comments is this. Microsoft didn't hurt Rare. They actually did the farthest thing from that. They really saved Rare from its fate. The developer was in fact in terribly bad shape. Which is why Nintendo didn't fight to keep them in spite of all that they had done. I will say another unpopular thing. Nintendo is not big on synergy. They are only big on exploitation. Which is why they do a fantastic job at pushing away third party developers. To them it was just a love them then leave them relationship. They knew they had run Rare right into the ground, and that was that.

I am not saying that Microsoft was altruistic. In the short term it actually seems to have been a rather naive move on their part. However long term it can end up being a different story. The thing about Rare now is it isn't so much a shell of its former self, but it is back to being healthy. Plus it should get even healthier without working for two masters in making games for Microsoft consoles, and Nintendo Handheld devices. I am actually high on Rare right now, because I can see that with past problems behind them. They can actually begin to move forward.