Jetpac is not good. Neither is Killer Instinct, Kameo, or Captain Skyhawk. While we’re on the subject, you should also know that Perfect Dark is bad. Battletoads sucks. There. I said it. Rare makes bad games. They have always made bad games. Playing Rare’s games reminds me of having to sit next to the kid who always crapped his pants in kindergarten. You feel bad for them, you may even think they’re pretty funny, but that doesn’t mean you want to play with them.
Banjo Kazooie 3 and Viva Piñata 2 will most likely also be bad.
I do have some fond memories of their games. Like everyone else in 1997 with an N64 and a handful of friends, I poured more than a few hours into Goldeneye. And I still find myself firing up the original Donkey Kong Country whenever I make it back to my parents’ house, looking for a light 16-bit fix under the auspices of cleaning my garbage out of their basement. But on the whole, I’ve never understood the adulation heaped on the studio. They have, for the most part, spent the last twenty-five years making gaudy, unwieldy games marked by finicky controls, shallow goal structures, and some of the ugliest characters the medium’s ever seen. Their final N64 game, Jet Force Gemini, is a classic example. While the game is quite colorful, your time is spent wandering empty environments, collecting knickknacks for no clearly specified reason, and driving freak protagonists around like tanks. Seriously. Look at these poor bastards.
Even more so than the inexplicable reverence though, I have never understood why Microsoft dropped $377 million on the company in 2002. It’s not exactly an investment that’s yielded positive results. Rare has released five titles for Microsoft’s consoles in six years, all of them commercial and critical failures (Viva Piñata being the only exception. Critics loved it, no one else cared.) Take a look at these fresh screens for Banjo 3 and VP 2. Will they break the trend and be masterpieces? I doubt it. But tell me what you think.