I think you need to take off the fanboy goggles. The Stamper brothers' groundbreaking graphics technology in Donkey Kong Country is one of the main reasons Nintendo secured victory in the 16-bit era. So much so that Nintendo even put pressure on Miyamoto to make Super Mario World 2 more like Donkey Kong Country.

Unfortunately for fans of Rare, the Stamper brothers jumped ship after MS bought them out, and the programmers responsible for Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are also long gone (mostly at Free Radical), so the BK3 team are the last hope for Rare recapturing their glory days.

Viva pinata: party animals! was not made by rare.

No because output of games isn't alone what makes a good developer. EA makes heaps of games every generation and most of them are shit, they are not a great developer.

To get their groove back they need to start making quality games again, they need to be getting 90%+ scores.

Rare seems much better fitted for Nintendo because their games seem to attract more of Nintendos audience. Even though I'll buy BK3, I would still rather have it on the Wii. Mircosofts audience is mostly technically advanced games and BK3 just isn't that.

@Onyxmeth

That is a peculiar way to look at the situation. Developers aren't extended families it is a quaint notion, but hardly the way the real world works. When someone leaves a developer the developer fills the vacancy. When a team pulls up stakes and sets forth to create their own independent studio. The developer reconstitutes a new team. Were this not the case no developer would last longer then five years. They would eventually run out of staff and run out of teams.

There is no reason to suspect that Rare hasn't filled those vacancies, and there is no reason to suspect they have fewer teams working now then they had working eight years ago. To the contrary it is far more likely with the Microsoft acquisition that the staff has probably increased as they cleared the backlog of portable titles. To make room for Xbox development.

I agree whole heartedly with the latter half of your thought. I think it would be wonderful if Rare moved the bulk of their portable development to providing live games, or to even producing compilations in that vein for the console.