When Rare Replay was announced at E3, there were plenty of reasons to be excited. The compilation of 30 games featured some of the best Rare titles including Battletoads, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Banjo Kazooie. Not only did you get all of the classic games, but the price was surprisingly reasonable at just 29.99 US dollars.
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Rare was a dominant video game force, specifically in the mid-90s to the early 2000s when the company’s partnership with Nintendo helped produce some of the most iconic games for the Nintendo 64 platform. If you had a N64, than you almost definitely had a game made by Rare. The two collaborated and made GoldenEye 007, Star Fox Adventures, Donkey Kong Country and Diddy Kong Racing, among the many titles in the long list of games they’ve developed.
While the collection is a complete bargain considering its cost and the games included in the bundle, you may be disappointed to learn that many of Rare’s iconic titles aren’t included with it. Since Nintendo still owns many of the rights and characters, you won’t see Donkey Kong or James Bond make an appearance in this collection. However, that shouldn’t prevent you from picking up this game.
There’s a game for everybody of all ages in this package. It includes different games from the 80s which are playable, including Jetpac (1983), Slalom (1986) and Cobra Triangle (1989). In a time where games are overloaded with realistic graphics and open-world settings, these games are mindless yet enjoyable. The objectives are easy and the games aren’t complex, yet they still manage to be a ton of fun.
The games from the 90s are some of Rare’s best.
Battletoads (1991) has received cult status in the video game world since its release for bombastic characters and a high difficulty level. The game is included in the package and is sure to be one of the most-played from the collection. Beating Battletoads is arguably the compilation’s biggest challenge.
If you want to play a colorful, action-adventure platformer, than perhaps Rare’s most iconic game, Banjo-Kazooie (1998), is for you. The game still holds up extremely well and is fun for all-ages.
While the late 2000s represented a decline for Rare, the early half of the decade was quite successful for the company. Included from that era is Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001), a vulgar platformer about Conker the Squirrel which many consider to be Rare’s magnum opus.
While the game isn’t my cup of tea, Perfect Dark (2000) is playable — and if you’re disappointed GoldenEye isn’t on the list, the first-person shooter uses the game’s engine. Some of the other offerings are all of Rare’s mid-2000 games, a period when the company partnered with Microsoft. Those games include Kameo (2005), Viva Pinata (2006), and the latest game in the collection, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (2008). It’s best for the collection to be capped off with those games, as the remaining games are mostly Kinect titles nobody wants to play, which represents the companies’ sharp decline.
While there isn’t anything new being offered in this collection, aside from some challenges and Xbox One integrations, based off of nostalgia, the group of games, and the incredible price alone, I would highly recommend picking up this game. No, not all the games are tremendous — does anybody remember Killer Instinct Gold? — but there’s so much here that you can easily skip the duds. Rare Replay is a total win for a company that desperately needed one.
