*Looks at game collection* 

What was wrong with the Rare games on the 360?

  I think he's comparing them to what they were when they were on Nintendo systems

That's too bad.

Seeing as how he doesn't have any of the 360 ones or a 360 period. ANd if his game collection is anything to go by he doesn't even have a N64. I doubt that

Ohno. Poor rare. In my opinion they shouldnt have sold their soul too ms. Look what happened.

no, you guys are wrong, i've enjoyed banjo kazooie: nuts and bolts, and liked Perfect Dark: Zero for what it was, as well as Kameo. But they keep canceling project after project, and focusing on casual stuff like avatars and natal, and people who made RARE what it was in the 1990's leave 1 after another. Microsoft is known to kill studios, and RARE seems like their next victim :(.

What do you mean? Why keep a studio around if it doesn't make any money? Ensemble hadn't made any games for the longest time, and Smith and tinker released a half finished game. Rare worked on NXE, and they have the rights to avatars. So they are making quite a nice piece of change from costumes

Microsoft didn’t kill Rare, and you could argue that they were the victim in the situation ...

In the late 90s, Rare's success caused every major studio and publisher to attempt to poach Rare's talent away from them; and in general, they were highly successful. As this continued, Rare's games were seeing longer and longer delays and (it could be argued) were lower and lower quality; and Nintendo was spening more and more time managing Rare to get products out the door. The Stamper Bros wanted to retire off of the equity in Rare and offered to sell the studio to Nintendo, who didn't believe that it was worth what they were asking and declined.

Microsoft needed a well known first party studio and foolishly bought the controlling interest in Rare from the Stamper Bros. and then Nintendo sold their stake in Rare to Microsoft as well. Since then, Rare has only released a handful of games and very few of them have been particularly good or sold well.

The best analogy to the situation is that Microsoft bought a used sports car and found out it was a Lemon upon delivery

Whatever happened to that rumored Wii Sports knockoff with Avatars? Maybe this was it? But I remember hearing about it back when avatars were first revealed...

Wow.  That was really well put and a perspective that not only makes sense but has not been a commonly held belief.  Thanks!

As for the OP, I don't understand how they came to this conclusion:  "alone, not in conjunction with Microsoft Game Studios".  Does this mean its a DS game or something?  Since they're owned by Microsoft, how could it exist outside of MGS?