I played a few indie games, all of Rare’s catalogue from their Nintendo years, and a whole bunch of Mario RPGs (I didn’t finish the RPGs).
In 2022, I got a whole pile of indie games during a couple of fundraisers for Ukraine aid. When I finally played a few, I started with the very short ones first.
In Guppy, you try to eat flies without getting eaten by larger fish. The gimmick is: you can only move by darting, sort of twitching the mouse in a fishlike way. Good basic movement, although the rest of the game was an unfinished skeleton that was too hard for me to rack up more than a few points.
Basketbelle is a puzzle platformer phrased as a basketball game. While it’s more complete than others here, it doesn’t quite stand on its own as a complete game. Some clever ideas and gimmicks, but the implementation was a little flat. Lack of polish is deadly in a puzzle game, where it means getting stuck despite having a clear idea of the solution.
Sun Dogs is interactive science fiction with no clear goal, and as such, made an interesting toy. There are gestures at inventory, quest and lives system but they’re either unfinished or else meant to suggest without committing to specifics.
Sun Dogs was packed with interesting concepts, but I would have preferred more exploration of them. The writing is extremely sparse.
Off-Peak is a cool, surreal world structured around a single, small place and event. The event might have been “catching a train at a train station”, but I can’t remember. I think the aim was “dream of a video game”; if so, it was successful, because I’ve certainly had similar dreams.
Spark of One is a completely unfinished prototype aimed at capturing the feeling of a protest. I can see where it’s going and I liked it: as you move with the crowd you can kind of influence the direction it’s moving.
Jupitron 13-in-1 is 13 arcade-shaped prototypes. Pick up and play is the motivating principle for most of them. A good number were bad, a few were good; a few were references to the classics and a few were 99 cent iPhone games. I had some fun but I’m not an aficionado.
Rusty Lake Hotel is a creepy escape room game told as an animal fable. It was slow going till my kid started playing with me. He has a taste for horror, and loved it. The puzzles were just the right difficulty — for me, at least. (So if you’re an expert room escaper, probably a bit easy.)
I wanted to answer the question: was Donkey Kong ever good? Or, more broadly, was Rare ever good? My view of Rare was thoroughly soured by Kameo and Banjo Kazooie’s Nuts and Bolts in the XBox era. So I wanted to revisit their Nintendo era to see if my younger self was right to like Donkey Kong Country.
Note: I added years for each game here to make it easier to track how crammed together they are.
Donkey Kong Country, is, in retrospect, Nintendo’s attempt at a Sonic clone. Was it good? Yeah, it’s OK. It’s fine with obvious problems. Better than other Sonic clones (and, in my opinion, Sonic). The graphics that amazed me when I was a teenager still look good, and the 3D-projected-to-2D style was ground-breaking at the time. It even has modern descendants like Dead Cells, although the Super Nintendo resolution is too low to really make it shine. It often looks much muddier than good pixel art.
Donkey Kong Country 2 is .. pretty good! I think the level design has improved. The game relies less on gimmicks than the first, and bumps up the complexity a tiny bit instead. It’s easier to see what’s coming, maybe because the sprites are slightly smaller, or maybe overall movement speed is slower.
Donkey Kong Country 3 is OK. Not great. The level design swings between trite and punitive. The graphics sometime look amazing — I think the artists must have had more experience with adapting the 3D renders to the Super Nintendo’s limits. But sometimes it looks drab, like they simplified too much, or just decided to hand-draw some backgrounds perhaps.
Donkey Kong Land 1, 2 and 3 are, technically, stupefying. It’s like they’re running on different hardware than other Gameboy games. Donkey Kong Land 1 is a pixel-for-pixel port of the original engine and graphics, with new levels. Which is, of course, unplayable. There’s only enough room for Donkey Kong and one other thing on the screen. But it’s technically amazing. It’s even worse on real hardware: the graphics are even muddier there because the LCD response time makes fast-moving, heavily-shaded graphics into one-giant smear.
Donkey Kong Land 2 and 3 are, somehow, even more impressive. They shrink the original art and lighten it to make it work (better) on the Gameboy LCD, making them convincing, playable expansions of the original games. Slightly simplified, but not much. These must be the most technically advanced games on the hardware.
Blast Corps is basically an arcade game about smashing buildings with trucks. It’s janky, and obviously the first attempt at 3D for Rare. But it’s a good first attempt: a simple concept and simple implementation. The dump truck mode, which is the game to me because of the complexity of the drifting, could still have been a 2D game. It feels like transitional design.
If GoldenEye 007 is a second, more native, attempt at 3D, that probably explains why it’s so complex, yet primitive-feeling. So, yes, it’s more recognisably designed as a 3D game than Blast Corps. But, as a result, it feels like it makes every 3D mistake possible and makes every choice differently from modern FPSes. (Aside: Doom and System Shock were three years old at this point. I suspect some of the complexity comes from trying to port the feel of these games to console.)
I’m sure if you played this as a child then you might have the dexterity to get to the meat of the game. I didn’t, so I gave up pretty early.
Wow! Diddy Kong Racing is really good. It is a super simple racing game. It’s easy to pick up and play, and then its game loop encourages the disinterested player (me) with simple, achievable goals. I guess third time is the charm when learning 3D.
Banjo-Kazooie feels exactly like a Mario clone in the way that Donkey Kong Country feels like a Mario clone. Like, it’s competing with Mario 64’s competitors, with Nintendo paying to dominate the entire platformer market, top to bottom. In that, I think it succeeds. But it’s nothing to Mario. Primarily, the pacing is a bit plodding, perhaps because the collectathon is too much of a focus. Still, it looks good in comparison to the next few years of Rare’s games.
Wow! Conker’s Pocket Tales is really bad. I think it’s an adventure game built on a Zelda-like engine. (Watch out, this is going to be a new trend for Rare.) It’s honestly hard to tell, because I couldn’t figure out how to proceed in the game.
Jet Force Gemini is a third-person shooter with an arcadey feel. But it’s unfinished, a heap of parts awkwardly sitting on top of each other. The basic idea is a good, early console 3PS, but there’s no polish whatsoever.
Donkey Kong 64 is the most finished of Rare’s 1997 output (3 unfinished games!). It’s still not done, though. It’s just a string of untested platforming challenges with adventure-game-reject tasks stuck in between. Rare games started taking a long time to get started by 1999, so maybe DK64 throws a curve ball after the 2nd hour when I quit playing. Unlikely.
Banjo-Tooie is yet another adventure game built on a platformer engine. Unlike the previous two, Banjo-Tooie is not bad. Partly this is because the platforming qua platforming is passable. It plods so slowly, though. Backtracking was already annoying in adventure games of the time; here it’s even slower and it’s possible to fall and restart the level. Some of the individual puzzles are still unpolished platformer challenges too.
Banjo-Tooie is where Rare’s racism and sexism are hardest to ignore for me. Like, from the start of these games, they injected sexism in the form of cartoony objectification. And Banjo-Kazooie has a cartoony shaman character. But Banjo-Tooie adds an American shaman, who is also a cartoonishly objectified woman. It so easy to recognise even I couldn’t ignore it.
Perfect Dark is very much a sequel to GoldenEye. It has the same aspirations at complexity, but at this time Rare gets much closer to our modern conception of the [console] FPS: so much so that most of the controls are now recognisable, but all backward.
The levels I played are all pretty straightforward and linear, but the set dressing is more effective than GoldenEye at fooling the eye into thinking it’s in a real place.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day is an adventure game built on a platformer engine. This time Rare seems to know this! The whole world is compact and doesn’t have (much) platforming skill required. They also noticed their racism and sexism. It’s still there but they’re playing it for laughs now.
Star Fox Adventure is an adventure game built on a 3D Zelda engine. Before I began this whole journey, I thought I would be ending with Star Fox-as-action platformer or maybe action RPG. Nope! It’s an action-adventure, with heavy emphasis on the adventure, right down to the extremely bad Action Racing Segment. I had enough of that in Space Quest, so I quit.
The part that I played was astonishingly un-Star Fox-themed as well, but that’s not surprising given that the brand was slapped on afterward.
I just checked the list on Wikipedia and that’s not even all of Rare’s voluminous output in the late 90s! I skipped Killer Instinct and a couple more racing games.
The ones I enjoyed the most were the Donkey Kong Country/Land 2D platformers, Blast Corps, and Banjo-Kazooie. I’d like to say it’s not just nostalgia, but that those are the highest quality. 2D platformers were, I assume, a known quantity by the mid-90s, and Banjo-Kazooie had the most time dedicated to development. Importantly, all of them had a clear design to copy: Mario. I don’t know why Blast Corps is so good. Maybe Rare was good at small arcadey games before they were asked to start making AA games for Nintendo.
My guess is that Rare was not prepared for the increased costs of 3D development and didn’t change their breakneck pace until 1997 burned them. Even then, they didn’t really slow down until 2001, at which point I can understand why Nintendo wouldn’t want to pay them to make games anymore.
To answer my original question: No, Rare’s 90s output is not worth revisiting except for nostalgia. Their good games are derivative and their original games are bad.
At this point, I was on a roll. Why not answer another question that has haunted me? Why didn’t I like Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door? I answered this by playing Mario RPG, the Paper Mario series (most), and the Mario & Luigi series (a few).
I mis-remembered Mario RPG as quite plodding and hard. Two things changed my mind: lowered expectations based on its age and genre. And: I’m way better at timing than when I was a teenager.
Mario RPG actually rollicks along with a light-ish story that feels like a natural part of Square’s wild experimentation on JRPGs during the 90s. It does feel a bit like other Square games, Final Fantasy 6 and Crono Trigger, notably. But its emphasis on timing in turn-based battles would grow into later games’ experimentation with more and more actions.
Nintendo must have noticed that Mario RPG sold well, so it took it first-party and had Intelligent Systems make Paper Mario. This was a bad idea. Previously, Intelligent Systems worked on Fire Emblem and Famicom Wars—the skill honed making serious-faced, tactical games is about the opposite of what you need for a Mario RPG, where you want simple mechanics and comedy. So Paper Mario ends with mechanics that are simple, but also easy, and the comedy is just flat. And it never improves. I tried all the Paper Marios through Color Splash. (Super Paper Mario does swap oversimplified battle mechanics for oversimplified platforming, but it’s no better.)
One strength of Intelligent Systems that does translate: the graphics and artwork are top-notch. Paper Mario, especially, almost looks like 3D pixel art.
Mario & Luigi is so much better! Comedy! Simple mechanics with timing that’s hard to master! Tight pacing! Why? I think the key is that the director of Mario RPG went on to work on Mario & Luigi. This series is the clear Mario RPG successor, not Paper Mario.
Note that Superstar Saga is good, but the low framerate on the GBA is not a good fit for the timing-based combat. I’d try the remake next time.
So I learned why I didn’t like Paper Mario. It’s a failed copy of Mario RPG, when the real successor is the Mario & Luigi games.