[Mad Echidna]

Allowing Rare to be purchased by Microsoft was the most stupid thing Nintendo has ever done. Rare games defined the experience on SNES and N64

[Kurosan]

Allowing Rare to be purchased by Microsoft was the most stupid thing Nintendo has ever done. Rare games defined the experience on SNES and N64

Not to mention that Rare's sucked ever since. I don't think Nintendo could have realistically stopped the sale; from what I read a few years ago, so long as you have enough money, you can apparently buy just about any company, and that's clearly Microsoft's forte. Sounds a bit weird, but whatever.

[Impish]

I think what mad echidna's trying to say is that nintendo should have bought rare first, and while I am a huge Microsoft fanboy, I agree, Rare has been shitty since the sale. But the founders left rare a while ago for other ventures, so you never know.

[Clutch]

I don't think Nintendo could have realistically stopped the sale

Oh, I think they could have.

This was a busy time at Rare. We had started Grabbed by the Ghoulies straight after Banjo Tooie and we were developing it for the Gamecube. Right around this time the option for Nintendo to buy Rare outright (they owned 49%) was up, they had to buy us or sell their shares to someone else. As you all now know they decided against owning us entirely and Microsoft stepped in and bought us. There was other interested parties at the time but the MS deal looked like the best. So we had to switch Grabbed by the Ghoulies from Gamecube to XBOX pretty fast.

Regardless of whether Rare's quality would've gone down if they stayed with Nintendo or not (Aside from a few efforts like Perfect Dark Zero I've still found most of their post-buyout games at least decent), the biggest shame for me is that they lost control of Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong Racing looked like it could've been awesome, and it wasn't even a game in the main series.

But uh, in an effort to avoid de-railing another thread into Donkey Kong, I'll post something else I thought looked impressive for the hardware:


Wacky Races on the Game Boy Color

This post has been edited by Clutch: 28 April 2010 - 05:34 PM

[Jebusman]

But uh, in an effort to avoid de-railing another thread into Donkey Kong, I'll post something else I thought looked impressive for the hardware:


Wacky Races on the Game Boy Color

Holy. Sweet. Jesus.

Where was this game when I was a kid.

Seriously, I didn't think the GBC could handle anything that complicated, especially in realtime.

[Covarr]

Like this?
*SNIP - Diddy Kong Racing DS*

Dude are you fucking serious? This may be the first time I've actually wanted a DS.

They wrecked the DS version. The D-Pad is already a poor substitute for an analog stick, but they also added a bunch of REQUIRED touchscreen bullshit to the races. It really ruins the game.

[Mad Echidna]

Like this?
*SNIP - Diddy Kong Racing DS*

Dude are you fucking serious? This may be the first time I've actually wanted a DS.

They wrecked the DS version. The D-Pad is already a poor substitute for an analog stick, but they also added a bunch of REQUIRED touchscreen bullshit to the races. It really ruins the game.

ugh, typical.

[Lobotomy]

Wacky Races on the Game Boy Color

So at first I went: "The graphics are nice, but the sound is too 8-bit for GBA."

Then I went: "Holy shit, that's GBC."

[BlazeHedgehog]

Like this?
*SNIP - Diddy Kong Racing DS*

Dude are you fucking serious? This may be the first time I've actually wanted a DS.

They wrecked the DS version. The D-Pad is already a poor substitute for an analog stick, but they also added a bunch of REQUIRED touchscreen bullshit to the races. It really ruins the game.

It's more than that, I'd say. The A.I. is widely inconsistent, the game's visual and audio make-over makes it feel like budget shovelware (just like Rare's DKC GBA ports), gameplay was altered (to remove bananas, among other things) and while you could blame the game's poor controls on the lack of an analog stick, Mario Kart DS steers just fine. Let's not forget the stupid minigames you HAVE to play with the Taj (the Genie) in order to progress in Adventure Mode (No, I don't want to blow in to the mic to snuff out torches).

Diddy Kong Racing DS is just a bad game. Which is a shame, because there are a few things it gets right (online implementation, the dead simple "track creator", etc.)

It would've been one thing if they had tried to "fix" what was wrong with the original DKR (re-fighting all of the bosses was too tedious and difficult) but instead they seemed to largely ignore those and just piled on more and more bad, broken ideas.

This post has been edited by BlazeHedgehog: 26 May 2010 - 06:21 AM

[Clutch]

I didn't really find it hard to control (despite Krunch being my most used character), but I will agree that the DS features were annoyingly tacked-on (why'd the carpet rides have to replace the silver coin challenge?) and the presentation is all over the place (I can honestly say in some cases I could draw better sprites in very little time and I saw little point in re-doing all the voices with people who by large sounded worse). The DK Island tracks were great though.

I really wish I could find more videos of that Wacky Races game. It isn't just the one track that looks amazing.

This post has been edited by Clutch: 26 May 2010 - 07:17 AM

[Mad Echidna]

The main thing that I find amazing about pretty much any of the consoles is how shitty the tech demos look compared to most of the games that eventually came out. Not so much with the 32x, but look at the demos for N64 vs some of their best games.

N64:



vs some of the better games








Now for PSX



OH GOOD FOR YOU








PS2





fuckin case closed

[Sik]

1994? Huh, that N64 tech demo was made two years before the console was out then... I'm going to bet it wasn't even final hardware there.

[Clutch]

Amusing to look back on those demos now.

When N64 game textures didn't look blocky back in the day it was probably because they were extremely compressed and blurry instead, and the T-Rex's "roaring" animation looks more like he's just randomly letting his jaw drop.