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.
- 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.