Rare is still a good developer. Kameo, PDZ, and Viva Pinanta all had decent to good reviews.

Another reason why Nintendo shouldn't have sold Rare is there are no classic Rare games on the Wii VC. No Banjo Kazooie, Conker's Quest etc.

Selling Rare especially to Microsoft was a bad move on Nintendo's part in my opinion.

I know. What was Nintendo thinking back then? Does anybody know what was the real score?

I think their press release can be paraphrased as "Rare games are starting to suck big time so we are ditching them." The quality had sunk consistently towards the end, and most of the talent jumped ship to Nintendo proper near the end.

except Rare is still making games for Nintendo.

Muahahaha

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddy_Kong_Racing_DS

I hear Viva Pinata is coming out for DS too

Selling off a 2nd party company to the enemy, then have the enemy make games for you? That is a win for Nintendo in my book.

Odd to think that Rare was crazy good in the N64 days. They actually rivaled Nintendo in terms of quality and quantity of games. Ever since they left, Nintendo softwares sales have just been Nintendo 1st party at 50%, and crap for the other 50%. Rare sucks now but thats because they were sold off. If Nintendo never sold them they would still probably have a lot of their good developers and they would be putting out Nintendo quality games.

Uuhhhh. I'd like proof of that statement. Did you mean videos games that included everything?  Like handhelds, video games sales?  Or just talking about profit in concern to consoles only?

I'm almost certain that Nintendo owned 49% of Rare and Microsoft bought the other 51%, essentially leaving Nintendo with a developer they had no control over. Thus selling it was a sensible option.

Wii fanboys=Spin doctors for everything not beneficial to Nintendo.

From Wikipedia:

Up from the end of 2000, people from Activision and Microsoft visited Rare. In November 2001, Microsoft trademarked the name It's Mr. Pants, the name of a game which was released three years later. In September 2002, the Stamper brothers sold their 51% interest in Rare to Microsoft; following this, Nintendo sold their 49% stake in the company as well. Microsoft paid a total of $377 million for the company. Because of this, Rare is now a first-party developer for Microsoft's Xbox and its successors. This left Donkey Kong Racing, which was due to be released for the Nintendo Gamecube, unreleased, though how much more had been completed of the game than the pre-released video is not in the public domain. The trademarks of the characters from the games that Rare made for Nintendo consoles (such as Conker of Conker's Bad Fur Day and Banjo from the Banjo-Kazooie series) were retained by Rare (apart from intellectual properties originally developed by Nintendo, i.e. Donkey Kong and Star Fox). Despite the acquisition, Rare still developed games for Game Boy Advance, and now develops for the Nintendo DS, as Microsoft is currently not participating in the hand-held video game console market. Rare has never developed for Sony platforms.

Rare has always been icing on the cake. Problem is, you need a cake first. On the SNES, Rare was amazing because Nintendo had a huge cake. It was shaped like Final Fantasy and Ghouls and Ghosts and R-Type. In the N64 days, Nintendo's cake was anemic and shaped like Turok. So there was plenty of icing, but no cake.

GameCube and Xbox were in similar positions, cake-wise. *sigh,* yes, the cake was a lie. Out of the way, moving on.

The 360 has a much more robust cake, so I expect Rare to flourish later on in this generation. They'd have done the same at Nintendo at this point. Game-wise, both have sustainable amounts of cake for Rare's icing.

OK, I've lost where I was going, but I think I got my point across... and the point is that I shouldn't post when I'm hungry.