There are a few companies that have been around for what seems like ages, Rare is one of those companies. When Rare announced that they would be releasing a 30 game compilation of their titles for $30 on Xbox One at E3, people nearly passed out. With over 700 hours of gameplay for such a low price, it is hard to find an excuse not to purchase this. Rare has some amazing titles and most of the titles included in this MONSTER compilation are well worth the $30 price tag.
There is such a broad list of titles, you can’t please everyone. Not all the games are amazing hits, some are simply there for historical purposes such as JetPec with its single screen and basic gameplay. Some games are power house titles such as Battletoads and Conker’s Bad Fur Day. This is why some gamers will absolutely love titles from the early 80’s or other gamers will simply not want to touch Jetpac with a 10 foot pole and head straight for Jet Force Gemei.
As you play through the games, you will unlock some behind the scene videos and artwork; the behind the scene videos are amazing, any fan of Rare will enjoy watching these videos, the only downside is you have to acquire “stamps” to unlock them, which may involve playing a game you really don’t like. It would had been better to lock certain extras for a game instead of important documentaries.
For those of you who already had achievements for the Xbox 360 titles, you’ll be happy to know that the stamps (used to unlock the video documentaries) automatically unlock if you have the Achievement in your gamertag profile! So don’t worry if you already finished Kameo, you won’t have to play through it again.
The titles before Nintendo 64 have an auto-save and 3 manual save slots for you to use, this helps out when you have to shut off the console and get back to the real world, nice touch! You can also add “vertical” scan lines like those bad arcade monitors used to have, while interesting, I didn’t leave that feature on for long. There are also “rewind” features for the older titles as well, mess up a jump? Rewind 10 seconds and try again!
For those of you who like “quick bites” of games, Rare has included a Snapshots mode: You simply choose a game and you can play a “best part” of a game, you can even choose which ones you want to play in a pre-set play list or manually choose them yourself.
The Xbox 360 titles will require you have an Xbox 360 gamertag, I know this may sound strange…but if you started with an Xbox One as your first gaming console, it involves a login and creation of the profile on your Xbox One, no biggie. If your gamer tag is coming from an Xbox 360, there is simply a progress bar that will import it for your Xbox 360 titles that you launch.
Many gamers now purchase digital titles now, all without getting up from the sofa. In the case of Rare Replay, you might want to put on your shoes and bring your wallet to your local game store to buy a disc copy of the game. Unless you have a gigabit connection to your home AND unlimited download limit. The base of the game (the front end menu and behind the scene videos) is about 12 GB, the Xbox 360 titles are a whopping 38 GB; the older 8 bit titles aren’t as large. If you are keeping count, that’s over 50 GB you’ll have to download.
There are also updates for most of the Xbox 360 titles, some are quite large such as Perfect Dark at over 800 megabytes. Then there’s the issue of the space on your Xbox One hard drive, luckily you can delete and re-download/reinstall Xbox 360 titles individually if you aren’t playing them at the moment. The only title that would make this game score even higher is the inclusion of Golden Eye.
So, why are you still reading this? Get out to your local game shop and buy Rare Replay!
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