March 9th, 2009 by Tyrant_Reborn

Rare at one point was one of the greatest developers to create games on the Nintendo game consoles. Rare bled creativity with a solid release lineup with hit after hit, with classics such as Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2 Diddy’s Kong Quest, Donkey Kong Country 3 Dixie’s Double Trouble, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, GoldenEye, Battletoads, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, etc…

Rare has also managed to pull in some major accomplishments. To name a few:

Rare reinvented Donkey Kong, they gave one of gaming’s most iconic characters a brand new look with a along with new attitude to skyrocket DK into the worlds most recogized characters with the new look still going strong.

Rare was one of the first developers to bring First Person Shooters to consoles properly. GoldenEye was one of the first First Person Shooters to arrive on the consoles and control extremely well while being one of greatest console muliplayer experiences ever.

Rare continued what it had started with GoldenEye by bringing fans Perfect Dark a few years later, Perfect Dark was one of the first and only titles to carry voice

But the question is what’s happened to Rare recently? The answer is Rare has lost its way, while they still bleed creativity, they seem to have forgotten that a game needs to be fun from the start and built upon that. Most games as of recently look amazing and overall have great idea’s but none seem to have that spark seen in Rare’s N64/SNES classics. The games lack the most important part of games in general, pure unhinged fun. Banjo Kazooie being rereleased on Xbox Live reminded me how much fun the original game was, even today the game is extremely fun to pick up and play. Thinking back there’s not a single Rare game since Conker on the N64 that’s been really memorable. Its not that they were bad games it’s just that all of the titles since then are missing the mainstream appeal, the fun factor is not the pickup and play of the original games, the problem is Rare has gone too far with making games too complicated.

One aspect I absolutely despise recently is that old franchises seem to be coming back, yet they are reinvented alienating the fans that actually want the games and still failing to capture a new fanbase. Rare can definately fix their falts and come back strong it’s just a matter of when they figure out what needs to change and changing it.

October 12th, 2008 by Tyrant_Reborn

It was about a year and a half ago when Rare-Elite’s forums were still running on PHPBB. While it was a great forum software, it was very limited and wasn’t really as user friendly as we all wanted it to be. The software wasn’t too customizable and many of the features found in commercial forum software were simply not in PHPBB, so we began a search for something easier to use with high levels of customization. We found SMF which was the answer we were looking for; the software is fully customizable, easy to use with an intuitive interface, and has mods galore.

After several months of tweaking, new additions, and crying to myself quietly as I solved some annoying glitches, the forum is finally very polished and ready to be filled with posts. Now I know some people have not even seen the forums since the PHPBB days and to those people I say check out the updated forums, your old account carried over so no new registration required.

As I said previously, a lot has been added to the forums with users now able to make their own personal blogs, the ability to tag messages for easy searches based on those keywords, completely customizable profiles, and another addition to profiles is the ability to show off your gamercards and share your friend codes. There’s been so much added that I can’t list it all here and along with new additions we have decided to open the forum to guest posts so anyone can post a reply even if they don’t want to register; but remember, by becoming a member of the forum, you will have access to every feature the forum can provide.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s get this forum active and show Rare that the fan community is still a pretty vocal bunch.