January 18th, 2012 by Devin Durock

The demo for Kingdom of Amular: Reckoning is now available for download over Xbox Live. Doing so will net you some free goodies for Mass Effect 3 and even more if you actually icomplete/i the demo.

But what does this have to do with Rare? Well, the music was actually composed by former Rare composer Grant Kirkhope. You know… The guy behind musical scores in Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Pinata, and Donkey Kong 64 to name a few. I played a bit of the demo yesterday afternoon and it definitely has a Banjoish vibe to. Just dont expect anything with cute and googly eyes… Expect the likes of iblood and gore./i Go get em!

January 18th, 2012 by Devin Durock

I guess the world really is going to end this year… we’re updating again! So let’s have at it…

Chris Seavor, the man best known as the lead designer behind the crude, vulgar and hilarious Conker’s Bad Fur Day, has sat down for rather long interview with folks over at Gamikia. There’s a ton of interesting information to be had, including when and how he was hired by his former employers, what led to the development of Conker and what he had in store for its sequel!

Interview here

November 10th, 2010 by Devin Durock

Every-so-often, someone, somewhere, decides to write a history on Rare. Praises to them, I say! While I personally don’t think Rare has gone completely down the wayside, it is still a bit saddening though when reading such articles that places Rare in a time when they were one of the most well-thought of developers in gaming. Unfortunately, not so much now to most =/ Well anyway, if you’re up for some good reading, NowGamer’s feature awaits thee!

November 4th, 2010 by Devin Durock

Portion of an Activision Interview with GamingNexus…

GN: Conversely, time seems to sand the rough edges off games in the mind of gamers, what flaws in the original game did you find that you fixed in the new game?

JL: The N64 version of GoldenEye was a truly fantastic game, however there were plenty of opportunities to modernize the GoldenEye experience to meet the expectations of today’s gamer. We honestly didn’t think, and still don’t, that creating a step-by-step recreation of the N64 version would have given people the experience they were hoping for. There is an inherent thrill in discovering things for the first time. Because of this, the whole game has been conceived, designed, and built from the ground-up. It’s an entirely new ‘GoldenEye’ experience with nods to the original game, although putting the need to deliver a AAA Wii shooter experience before anything else. As this is a reimagining, rather than a remake, this means that there was nothing to fix, really. The underlying mechanics are designed for the current gaming audience. Needless to say, the graphics have been brought up to 2010 standards. I think you will be hard pressed to find anything that looks this good on the Wii. It is amazing.

Full Interview Here

November 2nd, 2010 by Devin Durock

For those of you who may not be aware, before Rare became a second party to Nintendo in the 1990s, many of their titles were published by other parties. One such company was LJN, who published some of Rare’s NES wrestling titles and their movie-based Nightmare on Elm Street.

There’s a lot of history behind LJN and Nintendo’s treatment of them and other 3rd party publishers during the NES era. Gamespite has an excellent article that goes in-depth on this subject. Definitely worth a read.