Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Where have Rare gone? The men in Devon who brought Donkey Kong into three dimensions, the heroic developers who created Conker and his quest to become the most offensive videogame protagonist in history, seem to have died down in recent years, mostly likely due to their move from Nintendo to Microsoft. Their only recent stellar title has been Viva Pinata and its console offspring (as the handheld version was developed externally), and I think it’s time we took a retrospective look at the wonders of the ape-folk in southern England.

Personally, I think my first Rare experience was GoldenEye. That game was seriously fantastic, and I’m betting PineWood Studios must’ve felt a bit shifty considering their film was, in my opinion, nowhere near the level of entertainment of the first truly brilliant console FPS. The multiplayer was fantastic. Proximity mines, rocket launcher fights, and my personal favourite, using Oddjob as a character for the added advantage of a smaller target. I remember being in my early teens and having someone equip their Oddjob avatar with  rocket launcher, and run screaming into the room to blow themselves, and their enemies, to hell. One kill down, then three kills up. It was genius, and hilariously fun and engaging for a title that could have been so barren, so boringly stuck to the action/adventure bullshit that the Bond films constantly use to try and pull the cinematic wool over our eyes.

What about Perfect Dark? Don’t talk about the sequel, because I sure as hell don’t want to. I played Zero when a friend from Singapore stayed with me and left a 360 at my house for a week, shortly after its release. Zero was one of the games in the stack, so I stuck it in, and regretted it instantly.

The thing about Perfect Dark was that it was essentially a sequel to the soul of GoldenEye. Rare knew they weren’t going to get to make an actual sequel, so they did the next best thing: took the first title, removed all of the British fripperies, the constraints put in place by the film itself, and then restructured it into something better. Joanna Dark was a brilliant protagonist. Cocky as hell, and in my opinion a far better example of the “strong woman” in video games than the pseudo-pornographic Lara Croft. Dark was a secret agent. She had a base, with training excercises, a rivalry, and some very unsual friendships, Elvis the Roswell-inspired alien being a very good example.

The laptop gun was just inspired. Lob it onto a wall, and voila, a sentry gun that doesn’t show up on the radar, and that, occasionally, will actually shoot through walls. Combine this with multiplayer and your access to a lot of very well programmed AI opponents, and you had a good hour or so of chuckles as they attempted to flank what they were sure was an enemy, but was actually just a really angry Samsonite with a fully automatic weapon tacked onto it.

They had something good there, not to mention Jet Force Gemini, admiteddly a bit less first person, but still fantastically original. How many dogs do you know with rockets on their feet, and guns? The antagonists – insectile enemies that were conveniently humanoid and yet still so alien - were another example of Rare’s genius: the ability to take what’s been done before - Bond, Star Wars, Starship Troopers – and remake them into something new and interesting, if not more so than their original inspirational or direct source material.

Obviously there’s the Donkey Kong franchise, and you can’t ignore it. DK64 brought with it the Expansion Pak, the first ever hardware upgrade for its home console. I remember getting it out of the box and only then realising that my N64 even had a Jumper Pak to begin with. The graphics were impressive, the pointy polygons so well-associated with rare, and of course, the DK rap. But as time went on, you did realise this was essentially a collect-em-up. It was infuriating, but I still played it for hours. In fact, it was the first game I ever walked away from out of sheer frustration.

I was young, I don’t remember how young, but it was just before the new millenium. I was playing as Tiny Kong, and I hated it already. She was smaller, weaker, terrible at combat and simply annoying. Much like Diddy Kong, really. But I had to use her infuriatingly tempermental ability to helicopter-hover in a boss fight against a Jack-in-the-box. The aim was to beat him, and get a key to the next world. It was so simple. An eight-by-eight (note, sixty four, chuckle chuckle) grid of platforms that you hopped around on and stomped on in order to defeat the massive toy antagonist. The problem came when, after dying for days on end, I beat the bastard boss and waited for my key.

I couldn’t move. I’d died, at the same time as the boss.

“Nuts to this,” I thought, yanked the power, and walked off in frustration, never to complete the game. And yet I still played it every once in a while, if only for the fantastic music. Rare games have that magical quality about them: it’s music you’d hear in a Disney Pixar film, just with that melodramatic whiff of John Williams about it.

Donkey Kong is dead now. There, I said it. The moment that Rare jumped to Microsoft, DK died.

As is StarFox, though it died  before Rare’s departure, in my opinion. You had StarFox’s oh-so-fun piloting games, then the fantastically deep and graphically stunning StarFox Adventures, and then… StarFox Assault on the GameCube in 2005. It was blasphemy. I didn’t want to jump out of my damn ship and attack someone in a tank, or worse, on foot with a rocket launcher. I wanted to stay in my god-damn ship and kill everything from there. The controls were horrendous, the storyline barely existent, and it was big sign that Rare’s days at Nintendo were full of slogging through boring ideas and worthless code after so many of their staff had left to work on other projects, especially as (thank you NitPicker for pointing this out) that they’d given creative control of the Fox and his high-flying cohorts over to Namco.

And yet with Microsoft, have things really got any better? Surely we can argue that the unbeaten Viva Pinata franchise is brilliant, but at the same time, what about the franchise they carried over? What about Banjo Kazooie?

Any game that advises you to check out the first title in the series if you don’t like the one you’re playing, while waiting for a level to load, is a game made by people who know they’re committing a heinous act or two. It was disgusting. There were Jiggies, and Banjo and his feathered girlfriend (it’s true, get over it) were there, but Rare just… wasn’t. Achievements don’t fit in Rare titles. Sure, every game they’ve ever made was a collection frenzy, be it jigsaw pieces, keys or bananas; but was it done on the Nintendo consoles for gamerscore, or for love of the game itself?

I feel disenfranchised with all of it. I want Donkey Kong back in all of his mighty ape glory. I want a next-gen update of Diddy Kong Racing, and I mean literally an update: change nothing bar the graphics. Hell, just port the damn thing, it was a better racer than most karting games in my opinion, simply because of the existence of a hubworld where I would fly around for hours just thinking about what races I could shorten my already inhuman times on.

Good Rare titles are very rare indeed, these days.