Rare & Friends

A little late on this, but glad to finally get it posted.

It’s been a long road to this E3, we had been teased for a while that this was a big year for Rare and that if there ever was a time to put aside your cynicism and be excited, it was now.

I was not able to attend E3 in person, but that didn’t hamper my excitement watching Microsoft’s conference. After every person left the stage, my heart would jump as thought, “Okay, Rare has to be next.” Then, finally the room went dark, and that first Perfect Dark banner unfurled on the screen, and you knew that finally, this was it, Rare was back.

After a few more classic Rare banners, there it was, the new logo. Reimagined, but back to the classic blue and gold, back to something that returned that sense of quality and wonder every time it emerged before a title. In a matter of minutes everything just seemed so right with the world once again.

But with that sentimental nonsense out of the way, let’s talk games.

Rare Replay is something I wanted for a long time, but I never thought it would be this extensive. At most, I hoped for a Banjo collection or Perfect Dark collection. I never believed we would get this much. So many of these games are so hard to play on modern TV’s, even if you have the original games and hardware, you will still end up with a distorted noisy 240p image blown up on you HD set that looks nothing like you remember back in the day.

Rare Replay changes all that. This game makes the greatest games of all time play flawlessly on our current equipment. No more distorted, noisy image, no more settling for a glitch filled PC emulator, and no more trolling eBay for super expensive RGB output mods of classic consoles.

Oh, and its just 30 bucks. That’s such a steal I’m thinking about buying two copies so I don’t feel guilty.

As for Sea of Thieves, well, we didn’t see much of it, but I’m still very excited to see legendary game designer Gregg Mayles back in control of a project.

I have utmost confidence in Gregg’s ability’s, and I will be buying this game regardless of what the naysayers say or what it turns out to be. That being said, since there is not a lot of information on how it works, I thought I’d do a little wish list for the game of how I’d personally like to see the game function.

1. Offline Mode.

This is by far the most important thing to me. Not because online games are bad, in fact they are quite good, but because games that are dependent on servers to play have a shelf life. I still play games that Rare released 30 years ago. I don’t want Sea of Thieves to be something that is ripped from me someday when the servers are shut down.

2. Offline AI that is replaced by matchmaking when online.

Let’s say I want to go adventuring, but I’m feeling a little anti-social. I start the game to offline mode, hop on a pirate ship and am immediately assigned a crew of AI sims to man my ship. Half way through, I decide I want to play with some randoms. I switch to online mode, and the game immediately starts searching for players who don’t have their own ship yet to drop in to my crew.

This way gives the best of both worlds, and lets the game be playable 30 years from now on Rare’s 60^th anniversary.

3. Lot’s of references.

This game needs cameos of Captain Blackeye and Spinal, and maybe even the ability to visit islands based off of past Rare games. Imagine visiting islands that look the isle of hags or even the one featured in Kinect Sports Rivals. Each island would be vague as to its original origin and be pirate themed now of course, but they could contain characters and activates that give nods for fans of Rare’s past titles.

4. More Pants
I don’t care how Mr. Pants is in the game. But all games need more pants. I’d take even just an insignia of him on a pirate hat.

5. Visual variety

Rare is always great about this, but it was one of the big problems with AC4: Black Flag. Ton’s of places to go, but they all kind of looked the same after a while. Since Sea of Thieves is a little more cartoony, I don’t see why we couldn’t have volcano lava themed locations, snow themed locations, swamps, woods, and other classic Rare variety as well as the expected Caribbean islands.

Well, that’s all I have right now. Needless to say, this E3 set off a spark inside me that has made excited for the greatest game company of all time all over again.

Here’s to the next 30 years of Rare!

Cheers!