Ten More Bad Features in Rareware Games

Rare has come up with some great and not so great features in past games, and if fan reaction is to be believed, there may be plenty of both, but more of the latter, for the recently announced Kinect Sports, which is being considered to be a new low for the once great company. I, too, am disappointed to hear about Rare's latest offering, so much so that I have decided to create another list of some of the features that were anything but ideal. Some of these features may be so bad, they would make Kinect Sports as a whole sound incredibly appealing. Let me tell you more about each and every single one of them...

Mickey's Racing Adventure: Pluto's Mini Games:
While many of the game's mini games were easy to manage even as they became more difficult, Pluto's mini games were a notable exception. The objective is to collect every bone or defeat Pluto's archenemy Butch and make it to the exit before time expires. However, this would often be easier said than done. Pluto was hard to control on account that he dug so fast, and it was all too easy to run into enemies, have objects fall on top of the poor dog, or mess up a puzzle, all resorting in the player being forced to restart the level. What was worse in that in order to access the final race, most of the mini games had to be cleared. I feel that the game should have focused more on racing and less on mini games, especially when we have poorly-designed ones such as this.

Donkey Kong Land 3: Paying in Order to Travel Back to Previous Worlds:
As with every Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Land game, you could go back to a previously completed world in order to find secrets that you may have missed, stock up on lives, or replay stages for fun. Doing this, however, required you to pay a whopping five bear coins at a Sheepy Shop, and you often needed to complete a few stages in a world before you could reach a shop. The five-coin fee had to be paid every time you wanted to go back, regardless of how many times you used the same teleporter, and bear coins could be hard to come by. I would have preferred to travel back to other worlds for free, or for a smaller fee, than to do so while spending a lot of my hard-earned coins.

Jet Force Gemini: Not Being Able to Skip Cut Scenes:
Throughout this game, you will need to travel back to various worlds in order to rescue all of the Tribals and collect the spaceship parts needed to help you reach the final world. This is all well and good, except that when you select a world to travel to, you must watch a cut scene that shows your character's spaceship landing on the planet. The problem is, these cut scenes cannot be skipped at all. You cannot skip them the first time you watch them, nor can you skip them the tenth time you view them. It becomes annoying pretty quickly, and thus Rare should have given you the option to skip the cut scenes. I would not even minded if you were forced to watch them once and then skip them on subsequent viewings. Alas, Rare failed to save us from this unnecessary grief for whatever reason.

Donkey Kong Land: Falling To Your Death As a Result of Limited Technology:
It is a given that Game Boy technology was limited compared to that of the Super NES, and those limitations extended to an artificial means of losing a life in Donkey Kong Land. In some areas, you can fall down and assume you will land safely on a platform down below. However, due to the Game Boy's limitations, the camera does not follow you down far enough, and what should have been a harmless fall results in you losing a life. This can be frustrating, and while it was not as much of a problem in subsequent games, it is still a pain to deal with. Rare should have taken more time to master the capabilities of the Game Boy and not subject players to such needless pain.

Star Fox Adventures: The Point of No Return:
Games should allow us to continue exploring the areas even after we complete them in order to discover secrets that we missed or which were not present before. Such was not the case with what should have been Rare's grand swan song for Nintendo's systems. After you enter the Krazoa Shrine in the Walled City, and you save at any point after that, you will be unable to go back to previous areas and explore just for fun. Instead, you will be on a one-way path to the end of the game. It gets worst when, if you save during the final boss fight, you will fight the boss again when you continue from that save file, even after you beat the game, as it does not save following the final confrontation. If Rare did not rush to get the game out before moving to Microsoft, we could have had the chance to explore Dinosaur Planet even after beating the game. Not being able to do so is a crying shame.

Conker's Pocket Tales: Being Forced toCollect Every Present Before Leaving a World:
Presents are to Conker what jigsaw puzzle pieces are to Banjo and Kazooie: items that must be collected in order to unlock new worlds. However, when Conker enters a world for the first time, he is unable to leave it until he collects all eight presents. This can be a pain, especially when you get to a difficult task and all you want to do is travel to another world and return later to deal with the challenge. After you pick up every present in a world, you can enter and exit it as you please, but until you do, you are stuck there. In Banjo-Kazooie, it was not necessary to pick up every jigsaw in a world before traveling to the next one, so why did Rare force Conker to grab all the presents in a world before he could even leave and move on to another level?

Donkey Kong Country 3 (Game Boy Advance version): Wrinkly's Retreat:
The hand held version of the Super NES classic eliminated Wrinkly's Save Caves in favor of having you save your progress at any time on the world maps. This is a good thing, but what happens to Wrinkly is anything but ideal. She moves to her special retreat so that she can meditate and watch over any Banana Birds that Dixie and Kiddy rescues, but in the process, she becomes more of a bit player than she ever was. Most of the time when you visit her, she says random things taken straight out of the SNES version, some of which are no longer relevant to the action. For example, Wrinkly may ask you to tell Cranky to stop wasting his money on Swanky's mini game, but Cranky does not play the mini game in this version. It is not until the very end of the game that the retreat becomes important, when you go there to have the birds take you to where their queen has been imprisoned, but otherwise it seems like a waste of game space and a means to reduce Wrinkly's role significantly.

Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge: N. Kreditz Arcade:
In Spiller's Harbor, you will find an arcade machine in which you can unlock mini games by collecting coins. The coins in question can be acquired during the end credits, when you go down a slide and pick up coins while doing your best to avoid obstacles. However, the mini games that are unlocked are the same ones that you encountered in the main game, which is a shame since the games are pretty lackluster at best. Unfortunately, this is the only real secret in the game...there is not even a reference to Stop and Swap to be found. I would have preferred something like that than to unlock mediocre games that can be played at my leisure.

Banjo-Pilot: Endurance Grand Prix:
This special Grand Prix race is reminiscent of the All Cup Tour in Mario Kart:Double Dash in that you race through sixteen courses and try to obtain up to 160 points in order to become the champion. The problem is that the Endurance Grand Prix is much the same as racing through the first four circuits in order. No matter how many times you attempt this mode, the order of race courses is always the same. At least the All Cup Tour mode had the courses in a mostly random order to make it more interesting, but in this game, having the courses presented in the same order every time results in the mode being quite boring.

Donkey Kong Country (Game Boy Color version): The Animal Token System:
By collecting three tokens of one animal, you are sent to a bonus stage in which you must try and collect as many tokens as possible to earn extra lives. The problem that I have with this system has nothing to do with the stages themselves, but what happens after you exit them. When you leave these stages, you restart the level from the beginning or the Star Barrel, even if you collect the third token in a bonus area. The original SNES version had you exiting from the bonus area if you collected a token there, but this was changed for the Game Boy Color version for whatever reason. You would have to redo a lot of progress, and it became especially frustrating when you were trying to beat the stages with the Star Barrels turned off and thus found yourself always restarting from the beginning of the stage. If Rare could not allow you to restart from where you picked up your last token, then this system should have been eliminated altogether.

These features could have been either eliminated or fixed so that they would not be a pain, or at least not as much of a pain, to deal with, but Rare was unable to do so before releasing these games. Whether they ran out of time before they could fix these features or they felt that they were a good idea, they decided that players would have to deal with them whether they liked it or not. Rare has made mistakes in the past and they may continue to make them in the future...features found in Kinect Sports could end up being a perfect fit for a future list if the fears that fans have prove to come true when that game is released in late 2010. If you choose to play any of these games, be wary of these features, as they are ideas that should have never seen the light of day the way that they did.