That's what I tried to address in my post: the final build of the game looks like the one in the video you posted (essentially, like Mario Kart Super Circuit, and how screens of the game looked back when it was Diddy Kong Pilot), and is much less impressive. A shame, since visuals are usually a strong aspect in Rare games, but a lot of their GBA library didn't really show it.
That is done with ALL the power of the 32X. Is when you start adding things to the engine (objects, enemies, the player, etc) when the game starts to lag. Like what happened to Banjo-Pilot, I think. The Saturn is able to take the graphics AND all the other things in an engine.
Conker Live & Reloaded's Bad Fur Day part is incredible. Even today it blows away a crapton of recent games, visually speaking. I remember playing Crazy Taxi on the Advance. T'was indeed an unique experience. There was another game I had that kind of surprised me. Asterix & Obelix XXL Let's not forget Payback, the GTA clone also available for the Advance. Oh how I miss the Advance.
I always thought the pinnacle of "impressive GBA 3D" was Payback. It not only featured a top-down, fully polygonal world, but it even emulated shader effects like lightbloom. On the GBA.
the Kingdom Hearts games had amazing 3d for the GBA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l9_8AHcoow BTW the Youtube embed Button doesn't work on the blue "Retro" theme.
I was gonna bring up CoM, but I think they were talking about in-game 3D. But as for the 3D scenes in CoM, they are compressed PS2 files.
Dude, diddy kong racing ds came out aaaages ago! But it doesnt have any rare characters like banjo or conker, instead it has more donkey kong family characters.
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.
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.
Oh, I think they could have. 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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
