It’s easy to forget how many classics Rare is responsible for over its history of more than three decades making games, but a new collection has made it easier to understand the studio’s place.
Microsoft’s big August release for the Xbox One is Rare Replay, a collection of classics from the that developer. It features 30 games that span from 1983’s Jetpac to 2008’s Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Sure, it’s missing some important games, like Donkey Kong Country, Star Fox Adventures, and GoldenEye 007, but those all still belong to Nintendo. We’re not gonna get those on an Xbox.
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Despite the holes, this is easily one of the best collections ever released as one game. And I think gamers old enough to remember Rare’s golden years and everyone that has picked up a controller since will definitely find something to love about Rare Replay.
But you should know a few things first.
Some of the older games have rewind and visual filters
Many of the games in the collection have a few bonus features that make playing them easier or more familiar. Most of Rare’s pre-Nintendo 64 stuff comes with the choice to rewind the games for around 15 seconds and to add a special filter that makes it look like you’re playing on a CRT television set.
I turned on the CRT filter and didn’t look back for R.C. Pro-Am and the other retro hits, and the rewind made the learning curve a lot more tolerable as well. It’s cheating — but it’s the kind of cheating I can get behind.
The Snapshot challenges and video featurettes are excellent
Of course, Rare Replay isn’t just 30 games. It’s also a ton of bonus content about Rare and its history. This includes several videos about the making of each game and about Rare as a whole. These are of high production quality, and they reveal a lot about the studio.
At the same time, if you just want to play the games, the Snapshots are an especially interesting feature. This lets you quickly partake in specific challenges to help you get something out of the game instantly. For me, I used these to help me get an idea about the older games I had never played before. Slalom is old and outdated, but the Snapshots still helped me get some enjoyment from it.
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Multiplayer is mostly local only
This is something of a bummer. In the video above, GamesBeat writer Mike Minotti and I (Jeff Grubb) booted up our respective copies of Rare Replay with the hopes of playing Battletoads Arcade online.
But Battletoads doesn’t have online multiplayer. That’s true of most games in this collection. The exceptions are any Xbox 360 games that still have Xbox Live support from their original releases … like Perfect Dark.
For everything else, you’re going to need to invite some friends over. Especially if you want to get the most out of Killer Instinct Gold.
The Xbox 360 games install direct to your Xbox One game list
A number of the Rare Replay games are from the Xbox 360, and these do not really work through Rare Replay like some of the other classics. Instead, Microsoft used its recently announced Xbox One-to-360 backward compatibility to simply install these games as if you already owned them. This is true of the HD versions of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie as well.
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This is both good and bad. It’s kind of annoying if you just want to jump into a game for five minutes and it kicks you out of Rare Replay to load up the 360 interface. But this is also nice because maybe you already own Banjo-Tooie and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts as digital downloads on your Xbox 360. If that’s the case, you can just go ahead and play them on your Xbox One without having to purchase Rare Replay. Microsoft could’ve blocked backward compatibility for the games in this collection to help boost sales, but it didn’t.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts suffers from framerate issues
One of the highlights of Rare Replay is easily the third main entry in the Banjo-Kazooie franchise. But this Xbox 360 release has some problems on Xbox One. Its framerate make portions of the game nearly unplayable — at least in the hub world. Thankfully, the smaller stages don’t have quite the same problem, but it definitely makes the game look and feel cheap when you’re trying to get from one stage to another.