Rare Replay is impressive.

While most publishers release compilations with half a dozen ROMs in a rather lazy menu, Rare has gone much further here.

There are THIRTY games, ranging from the ZX Spectrum to the Xbox 360 (which was still in production when the game was made). Some of them even have graphical enhancements (Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie and Perfect Dark) or gameplay improvements (Jet Force Gemini).

The presentation is incredible. Extremely polished. I still consider it to be the best ever made for a compilation to date, beating even the recent Atari 50.

Rare Replay is cool in concept but as you explore Rare's catalogue you'll start to see just how rough most of their portfolio is. Yeah, the Banjo games are cool, Viva Piñata and Kameo are alright, Perfect Dark is decent, but the rest of the offerings on here are middling at best. Games like Conker's Bad Fur Day and Battletoads are grossly overrated, and most of their old computer and NES titles are confusing and often unfair. The more you look at Rare's history, the more you see that they just got really lucky with the Donkey Kong Country and Banjo series of games, and the rest just can't hold up for the most part. There's value in this package with the few good titles here and there, but don't expect to get a ton out of each game featured here.

Also make sure to get it digitally so you can get Goldeneye for free. Physical copies don't get it and it can't be bought as DLC. Physical owners either need to buy the digital version or subscribe to GamePass to access it.

Just a random collection of thoughts here, since I think this thing kinda defies any kinda of rational, linear essay you can pin it down to:

- At its best, feels like a retrospective at a museum that you walk around and use as a siphon for 40 years of gaming history. I called time on the experience after getting 3+ milestones on every game, and I think that's probably what Rare and Microsoft expected from most people - a brisk jog through time with occassional deep detours for games you particularly enjoy. To complete everything here would take years, even for the Backloggd sickos who can breeze through twenty Nancy Drew games in a fortnight or whatever. You'd have to be legitimately off your rocker to sit down and get a 100% stat on Snake Rattle 'n' Roll or those horrid little ZX Spectrum games called Johnny's Big Wet Honk or whatever.

- At its worst, this is a horrible little British thing. That vaudeville intro with the characters all singing off-key showtunes and farting and shit is just so nauseautingly Rareware that I can barely even bear to play the game after seeing it. It's perfect.

- There's a huge gaping crater in the middle of the discography here - Doney Kong Country/Land 1-3, Diddy Kong Racing, Goldeneye, etc. are so conspicuously absent that it can kinda give the collection an air of sadness at times. It must fucking suck to have a decade or two of your company's history rendered null and void by a corporate merger that was designed to shift more units of the original fuckin Duke Xbox. If Microsoft can share Banjo with Nintendo for Smash Ultimate, Nintendo should reciprocate in kind by letting Rare have a bunch of ROMs for games that people won't pay money for any more - who cares about intellectual property rights? It's a monkey with a tie for fuck's sake. It took Nintendo like three years to add Donkey Kong Country to their own emulator service, though, so I won't be holding my breath for any peace in our time.

- The documentaries included with the collection can't help but ackowledge these aforementioned forbidden games, and it's very funny to see various Rare devs grit their teeth and dart their eyes before whispering stuff like "when I worked on Donkey Kong Country 2", lol. The Rare devs are so unbelieveably down to earth and dorky that even the videos about video games I don't much care for are a total delight.

- Each game in the collection awards stamps for clearing milestones, and it was kinda eerie and emotional and impressive that the Rare Replay UI stepped in and gave me 20 Banjo-Kazooie stamps and 20 Perfect Dark stamps and 20 Nuts and Bolts stamps for free because it scanned my achievement list and found that I 100%'d those games in 2009 on my Xbox 360. A 12-year delayed payoff for being a Rareware Freak - cool!

- I spent a lot of the mid-2010s as a Microsoft Partner developer, designing and programming Windows 8/8.1/Phone Universal Apps for my company's doomed-from-the-start "move everyone and everything to Windows 8" iniative. As a result, I can smell a Windows 8 UWP a mile off - and this is definitely one of them. The janky state-changes; the weird sometimes-Windows sometimes-native integration; the random inability to safely resume from a suspended state: Rare Replay is 100% a Windows 8 UWP that Microsoft no doubt strong-armed Rare into making (or Rare just outsourced to Xbox Studios/Microsoft I guess). Those fuckers at Microsoft could easily port this thing to PC in like, a day if they really wanted to. As I mentioned in my Going Under review, the most uncanny thing about playing modern Xbox games is how much it feels like you're at work on a PC. Horrible.

- While it's mostly impressive how this thing juggles like 6 different emulators across 40 years, it does seem to give the XBox Series a real headache at times - especially for 360 games. I kinda gave up plumbing through Banjo-Tooie because Quick Resume just had no fuckin idea what to do with it. Oh well. No huge loss.

- The decision to have some of the N64 games play on an N64 emulator and some of the N64 games play on an Xbox 360 emulating an N64 is super frustrating and raises a bunch of questions about video game preservation... Is it really worth sacrificing gaming history for cheevos and slightly up-rezzed textures...

- On the flip-side of all that griping, the Windows 8-ness of it all reminded me of when I worked on-site at Microsoft's British headquarters. They had gourmet chefs who prepared really fuckin good free food and servers who would bring it to you while you played Xbox One in the rec rooms. I was far too ashamed to EVER have someone bring me stuff while I played video games at work, but I did help myself to very generous portions of free food every day. So I really shouldn't be complaining about Microsoft at all.

It's called "Rare" Replay because of all the rare achievements you'll get for merely starting each game once. Who bought this collection, yet still couldn't be bothered to sample the entire catalogue? Some people, I swear.

I had to break in my new Xbox Series X with a no-brainer: A collection that released on for the previous Xbox system, comprised of games that released anywhere between 1-4 decades ago. A handful of these are games that I've been meaning to play for years now, along with others where I feel like I might as well try them, since they all come bundled together. "Thirty games" is a bit misleading, seeing as the earlier third or so could be classified as, well, I think the British term for it is "rubbish." I appreciate that these titles have been preserved here, but most of them aren't fun for very long. They try to redeem that with "Snapshots", simple challenges with their own leaderboards. They're a fun distraction that can't distract me from the older games' archaic nature, I'm afraid.

The rest of the catalogue is so damn meaty that I have less reason to complain. Completing objectives in each game gradually provides you with a wealth of bonus content, including interviews, promotional materials, and even looks at cancelled projects. It's a really nice gesture for people who are interested in this company's history and lasting legacy.

The obvious complaint with this collection probably the lack of anything Donkey Kong. We don't ask who Rare was working for from 1994 to 2002 around here. It's a bit funny (and sad) to see their original N64 offerings with Xbox buttons injected into their graphics, along with removing any mention of Nintendo in general. Kinda surprised that they didn't include both versions of Conker, even if most purists would probably pick the N64 version any day. Some people have preferences, and others will probably cry "preservation." What's also bittersweet is how their history abruptly ends at Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. No comment on that game's quality (I'll give it a fair shake sometime soon), but it's definitely a downer to end their legacy on. No mention that they were enslaved into making Kinect games and Xbox Avatars after the fact, either. Maybe that one's for the best though.

I kinda don't really know what to think of this collection. It has its ups and its downs, but let's start with its ups.

They brought back a lot of the old Rareware N64 games, like Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Plus, with Banjo-Kazooie, they improved a few things. For example, they made it HD and fixed the aspect ratio.

Now for the bad stuff.

It's missing Diddy Kong Racing and the Donkey Kong games. While they fixed the aspect ratio for Banjo-Kazooie, they did not do the same with Conker's Bad Fur Day, which you can still only play in a 4:3 ratio. Even Project64 allows you to change the aspect ratio. They still made it HD, but still.

Also, Conker's shooting controls on the N64 are really bad. There’s only one analog stick, so to aim, you have to hold down the R button and move that stick and that also means that can't walk around while you aim. Did they fix that in the Xbox One version? No they didn't. Even though Conker: Live & Reloaded had already perfected the shooting controls. And the fact that an Xbox One controller has two analog sticks and it's easy to use the wrong one by accident makes the Xbox One version's shooting controls abysmal to play. It got so bad to the point where I tried to use the "VERYEASY" cheat code to make the game easier and I still got my ass pounded. Eventually, I just gave up and instead used the cheat code "WELDERSBENCH" to unlock all of the chapters so I could just skip the entire "It's War" section.

Rare Replay is a good collection of classic games from a notable developer. I'm not going to sit on my high horse and say that other collections like Atari 50 wouldn't have been released without it, but at the very least, it showed an interest in future releases in its vein.

Why good and not fantastic? Simply put, Rare Replay is a superb piece of preservation for some games—but not all. All of the games are on the disc, even the ones that need to be downloaded. But the ones that need to be downloaded require an online connection to be activated, lest the user pirate a digital copy of a game that they acquired from an official, Microsoft-endorsed physical one.

Right now, this is a fantastic deal. Twenty years from now, I don't know if those activation servers will still be up. Should that happen, the worst emulation in any three of the Midway Arcade Treasures games will have more value than a game you have installed but will never be allowed to play.

The hostile takeover from owning the games you play to owning glorified rentals is going to have severe consequences for preservation in the long haul. In fact, you can already start to see some of those consequences in action. Piracy is not a good solution; it requires a lot of the right pieces to be in place in order to function, and if any of them get scattered, it's entirely possible that the hard work of an entire team over long stretches of time will be lost to time.

Rare Replay will still be mostly playable when, or if, that happens, but it will never be a complete package.