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The Rare Replay thread


Austin

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Have they said wether these are remasters, or just straight N64 roms with emulation? 'Cause this plus the 360 backwards compatibility might get me to join the dark side.

 

They are the original N64 versions of the games and not remasters, so they are probably using emulation.

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For me, it's all about Battletoads--the NES and arcade versions. This is the first time we have ever seen the arcade one released on a console! Don't get me wrong, I think most of the rest of the comp is awesome, but those are going to be my first two games played.

 

I am really glad to see Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Great game, and it makes me wonder if they will bring other XBOX Originals over at some point in time via 360 backwards compatibility. I doubt it's high on their to-do list, but I am going to guess this is how they are doing this game (backwards compatibility + backwards compatibility! Whew, what a mouthful).

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For me, it's all about Battletoads--the NES and arcade versions. This is the first time we have ever seen the arcade one released on a console! Don't get me wrong, I think most of the rest of the comp is awesome, but those are going to be my first two games played.

 

I am really glad to see Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Great game, and it makes me wonder if they will bring other XBOX Originals over at some point in time via 360 backwards compatibility. I doubt it's high on their to-do list, but I am going to guess this is how they are doing this game (backwards compatibility + backwards compatibility! Whew, what a mouthful).

 

 

Loved Ghoulies on Xbox....would be nice if they did some more Xbox originals like maybe KOTOR? :P Hey I can only wish..they actually released a patch for the PC version a few weeks back!

 

What would be cool is a remade Morrowind! :D

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All right, so I picked up my copy yesterday and put some time into it. Here are some basic thoughts for those that haven't picked it up yet:

 

The good:

- Big collection. Lots of stuff to pick from.

- Grabbed by the Ghoulies is upscaled and runs at 60fps. Looks very nice.

- "Behind the Scenes Interviews" are really nice. Apparently there are still a bunch of people working at Rare now that were there when games like Battletoads were created. Cool stuff.

- Games play well for the most part.

- Jet Force Gemini appears to be upscaled during cutscenes only. I'm not sure why this is so, but it's interesting to note.

 

The bad:

- Installation was cumbersome and took quite a while. "Day One Patches" as well for some of the N64 games.

- Input lag on the NES games. There is probably lag/delay on the N64 and Spectrum games as well, but they don't require pinpoint precision like Battletoads does so I didn't notice it there. I was unable to complete Battletoads however and don't think I will be able to beat the Clinger Winger, stage 11 because it's so bad (I can normally do it without dying on the NES original). I probably wouldn't have been the Rat Race either, but thanks to the rewind function I was able to do the level skip (knock the rat off the screen after you complete a section).

- Many titles are XBOX 360 backwards-compatible titles. It takes a good amount of time to get into those games because it has to load up the 360 dashboard, then load the game, etc. Rare Replay just seems like a wrapper in this case and adds time to get to these games. You might be better just accessing them from your Xbone dashboard, assuming you can do that (you have to download them as Xbone apps, so I am guessing you can--you just won't get the "Stamps" in Rare Replay if you run them outside of that).

- Videos require you to play to unlock them. Kind of annoying.

 

All in all, it's a solid collection but there are some issues that I hope they will fix (most notably the input delay/lag on certain games). It would have also been great to see the N64 games upscaled, or at least an option to allow you to do so. Jet Force Jemini looks GREAT in the cutscenes, but when it goes back to normal gameplay it looks kind of bad. It would have also been nice to see the 360 titles simply ported over and upscaled like Grabbed by the Ghoulies was. I know that was probably more effort than it was worth and the current implementation is a way to show off Backwards Compatibility, but with Ghoulies looking so nice, it makes me wonder what they could have done with the 360 games.

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I picked up a copy yesterday and I'm about to fire it up. To be honest, not a big Rare fan, as I was always an Atari and Sega gamer back in the day when they were a 2nd party developer for Nintendo. I did play some RC Pro AM on my buddies NES back in my teenage days..lol. Their only Microsoft developed game that I played of theirs was Conker: Live and Reloaded on the OG Xbox and I never even finished the single player game and mainly just played the multiplayer on Xbox Live, which was great. I think most Xbox gamers back then ignored the single player portion of Conker and mainly focused on the multiplayer, which was ace and always stayed in the Top 10 on the Xbox Live charts back then.

 

I mainly picked it up for the remastered Grabbed by the Ghoulies, which looks great and always looked interesting to me and Jet Force Gemini, which I also always thought looked interesting. I'll also probably play some Jetpack, Kameo, Perfect Dark and some of the old computer games like Knight Lore and Gunfright look interesting.

Edited by Major Havoc 2049
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I just bought the console for this today. Perfect Dark has always been one of my favorites. Unfortunately I don't have the internet besides my phone right now so I can't get the system past the welcome screen. How well done are the behind the scenes videos? I'm always a sucker for "making of" type videos for games.

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ZOMFG Solar Jetman 2nd Level.

 

 

Hey, I am NOT the guy who just can't get enough of that Lunar Lander/Gravitar Thrusty game mechanic. I get why it exists, and it is fun in short bursts, but let me fly my ship already. So when someone tried to tell me Solar Jetman was one of his top NES games, I looked it up and realized it fit in that family. At first, I thought "hey, they've made this fun!" But then I got to level 2. WHY OH WHY did you make it hard to lift things with the ship. Maybe this is a good idea for one of the later levels after I'm already fully enjoying your game, but confronting a level right in the first hour where I'm holding thrust and going nowhere is just a bad idea. No one likes to play a game where you can't move the character - right? So make this easier or put it somewhere else in the game.

I finally looked it up and discovered that the object I was trying to lift (for like 2 hours while I explored the entire cavern assuming I was "missing" something) IS A BOOST that actually helps you lift things. Thanks for kicking me when I'm down JetJerk.

I finally got out of level 2 and the gravity isn't as bad in the next level, but I've got to walk away for a while (maybe forever).

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Wait until you see later in the game. Level 2 is nothing.

 

Solar Jetman is probably one of those games I will never beat.

Level 2 wasn't particularly "hard." It just suffered from that early game problem where you aren't sure you are even playing it right. This happened all the time with 80's games, but it was particularly frustrating on the NES because most of the games came with such a nice polish on them that you were surprised to find game elements that didn't work. They were also quite expensive compared to the experience of trading computer software back and forth, and I returned 2 or 3 games back to the store back then because the price was too high for crap like this.

 

If I'm holding the move button and my character doesn't move, I look around for a reason why. I don't just keep trying blindly hoping it will work (basically how I got past this part). It isn't particularly hard to succeed at something like this, you just have to either get lucky or have an unusually strong supply of patience (or the internet). Compare this to very difficult sequences where the enemies are pouring in or there is a very narrow cavern to navigate - you may never defeat the enemies but at least that is intended to be a challenge to your dexterity (not your patience).

 

 

Anyway - Rare Replay is pretty great. My surprise favorite so far is the oldest game in the collection - the original JetPac. I've also played quite of few rounds of RC I & II. Slalom was the kind of NES shovelware that scared computer users off. I've got multiple games in my computer collection with tons of Olympic events. Why would I take a step back and play a cartoon version of just ONE of the events? I'd have to be nuts to agree to pay $45 for THAT.

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This kind of stinks.

 

I held out for years in the hope of a retail release for the XBLA remasters of Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, and Perfect Dark. And now that my patience has finally been rewarded, albeit a console generation later than I had hoped, apparently they still have to be downloaded since they're technically now Xbox 360 titles.

 

:(

 

Have they said wether these are remasters, or just straight N64 roms with emulation? 'Cause this plus the 360 backwards compatibility might get me to join the dark side.

 

I'd say that the two Banjo games and Perfect Dark qualify as remasters. Their HD conversions for the Xbox 360, which is what is emulated here for those three titles, was quite a significant overhaul.

 

The other N64 titles are, as Austin said, emulated on here in their native N64 form.

- Grabbed by the Ghoulies is upscaled and runs at 60fps. Looks very nice.

 

This one is actually ported, the only title in that collection that is. So it's actually running natively in 1080p, along with the doubling of the frame rate from 30 to 60fps. Not just mere upscaling. :)

 

- Many titles are XBOX 360 backwards-compatible titles. It takes a good amount of time to get into those games because it has to load up the 360 dashboard, then load the game, etc. Rare Replay just seems like a wrapper in this case and adds time to get to these games. You might be better just accessing them from your Xbone dashboard, assuming you can do that (you have to download them as Xbone apps, so I am guessing you can--you just won't get the "Stamps" in Rare Replay if you run them outside of that).

 

Sounds like it works just like Namco Museum: Vintage Arcade did on the 360, where it was partially composed of a selection of arcade games that were ran directly from within Namco Museum, while the included XBLA content booted you out and started the XBLA title independently.

 

The XBLA titles even show up in your game list as normal XBLA downloads when the disc is present in the drive (Like Rare Replay presumably does, as you said).

 

It would have also been great to see the N64 games upscaled, or at least an option to allow you to do so. Jet Force Jemini looks GREAT in the cutscenes, but when it goes back to normal gameplay it looks kind of bad.

That's odd. Every non 360 remastered N64 title here is supposed to be rendered in HD, like one can do with a homebrew PC emulator.

 

I wonder if the visual quality divide that you're noticing between cutscenes and gameplay is just something that carried forward from the original? I have the cartridge, but other than a brief trial, I've never sat down and really played it.

 

I know other games have done tricks like that before, such as prettying up the replays in a racing game while dropping the frame rate from 60 during gameplay to 30fps, Since in-engine cutscenes are strictly controlled with no variables possible from one viewing to the next, they can push them right to the edge of the frame rate that they want to maintain. During gameplay though, they obviously have to account for any possibility if they want to maintain a fluid frame rate when the gamer is the one controlling the action.

 

There should be a patch for Jet Force Gemini soon, adding dual analog controls to the title. Maybe they'll fix this problem at the same time?

Edited by Atariboy
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Just had a thought. I don't know why this would be the case, but I wonder if the problem is 16:9? Rare Replay is enabling the widescreen option for JFG (One of the earliest 16:9 releases on a console).

 

I think that you can switch it back to 4:3. Would be interesting to see if you still notice a significant disparity between cutscenes and gameplay then.

Edited by Atariboy
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That's odd. Every non 360 remastered N64 title here is supposed to be rendered in HD, like one can do with a homebrew PC emulator.

 

In-game, I don't think it the game is upscaled. It looks terrible, as does Conker and KI Gold.

I wonder if the visual quality divide that you're noticing between cutscenes and gameplay is just something that carried forward from the original? I have the cartridge, but other than a brief trial, I've never sat down and really played it.

 

No, they definitely did something with the cutscenes. I understand the original had widescreen cutscenes as well, but the resolution was still capped somewhere around 640x480. What we have here in Rare Replay has clearly been upscaled (or as you mentioned with Ghoulies, potentially ported). The edges are super crisp in the cutscenes, it's clearly 720p or 1080p. When it goes back to the 4X3 bordered screen for gameplay, it looks like someone took dog **** and rubbed it all over the screen. :)

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Here's Eurogamer's analysis of the N64 games on this collection. They're usually pretty good at figuring out the technical details, so this may shed some light on things.

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-rare-replay-n64-games-run-at-1080p

 

About to go read it myself.

When it goes back to the 4X3 bordered screen for gameplay, it looks like someone took dog **** and rubbed it all over the screen. :)

 

 

The cutscenes are the only part in widescreen?

 

:(

Edited by Atariboy
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In-game, I don't think it the game is upscaled. It looks terrible, as does Conker and KI Gold.

 

No, they definitely did something with the cutscenes. I understand the original had widescreen cutscenes as well, but the resolution was still capped somewhere around 640x480. What we have here in Rare Replay has clearly been upscaled (or as you mentioned with Ghoulies, potentially ported). The edges are super crisp in the cutscenes, it's clearly 720p or 1080p. When it goes back to the 4X3 bordered screen for gameplay, it looks like someone took dog **** and rubbed it all over the screen. :)

 

 

That really makes me want it less. It's a lot of the N64 titles that I was in for. I really loved the Banjo games but never actually owned them so I was looking forward to that. Depending on how any download improvements go I may just send the dough for some krikzz work instead.

 

Edit: oh, I see those are remastered. hm.

Edited by omegadot
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That really makes me want it less. It's a lot of the N64 titles that I was in for. I really loved the Banjo games but never actually owned them so I was looking forward to that. Depending on how any download improvements go I may just send the dough for some krikzz work instead.

 

For Conker, KI Gold and Jet Force Jemini, you are basically looking at faithful versions of the N64 games (minus the HD cutscenes in JFJ). The Banjo games and the first Perfect Dark are the remasters that were released on the 360 years back. Still great ways to play those games though.

 

If you plan on playing a lot of 64 titles, the Everdrive is not a bad investment at all. I'm glad I shelled out the money for mine.

 

The cutscenes are the only part in widescreen?

 

Yep. Then it gets scrunched back to 4X3 with a border and looks like your standard N64 fare.

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I checked out the Eurogamer article and it was pretty interesting. They say the N64 games are indeed upscaled, but I don't recall seeing, say, the 3D backgrounds in KI Gold being extra sharp. I'll have to give it another go when I get a chance. The screen caps they took do show sharper polygons than what you would get on a standard N64 console.

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