Ten of the Worst Features in Rareware Games

For over fifteen years, I have had the privilege to play over 20 games developed by Rareware. Even when the quality of their games began to go downhill following the move to Microsoft, they could still create fairly solid titles. While the Rare games that I have played have been largely strong as a whole, there are some bad features that I could have done without. Some of them are relatively minor, while others can ruin the entire game. Today, I shall take ten of those features and list them in no particular order, explaining why I felt that they should not have been included or could have been tweaked a little. This list is as follows...

Donkey Kong Country 2:Having to Pay in Order to Save: This is really the only bad thing about this game, one of Rare's greatest masterpieces. When you unlock a Kong Kollege on an area map, you can save for free the first time around in most cases. However, subsequent saves will cost you two coins. Granted, coins are relatively simple to get, and you can revisit already completed stages as many times as possible to collect all the coins that you need. Even so, you should not have to fork over some coins just to record your progress. A minor complaint at best, but still a bit of a pain.

Conker's Pocket Tales: Box Puzzles Galore: What could have been a solid starring debut for Conker, in the days before he became a more mature squirrel, was brought down by many bad features. One of the most prominent of the bunch are the vast amount of box puzzles. At first, they pop up only on occasion, but in the last three worlds of the game, you encounter a lot more of them. Whether for lack of time or ideas, Rare just decided to throw in lots of these puzzles in lieu of mini games, fetch quests, or other types of puzzles. Some people might struggle with the puzzles, and will not look forward to solving any more of them. To me, the puzzles are mostly not hard...just boring, and show how rushed the game really is.

Donkey Kong Country (Game Boy Color version):Multiple Difficulty Settings: I think that having a lot of difficulty settings in a game is a good thing in general, as it challenges players to beat the game under more challenging conditions. However, Rare implemented this system in a bad way in this first hand held version of the Super NES classic. The three difficulties-Normal, DK Barrels Off, and Star Barrels Off-would not be so bad if the poor hit detection system and artificially hard portions did not break the game in the first place. Worst of all is that you must beat all three modes just to get the highest percentage possible. Surely, Rare could have come up with a Lost World or something else to add to the game's length, but they went with a rather poor decision instead, and that is a shame.

Banjo-Pilot: Bottles: I have nothing against Bottles the near-sighted mole, but as a pilot, he virtually breaks the game. His fast speed and excellent handling make it virtually impossible to lose a race, and even the harder races become far too trivial. Also, when Bottles is controlled by the computer, his stats are not handicapped, making it nearly impossible to beat him. It is great to have a very fast pilot to unlock, but not in the way Rare did it in the worst Banjo game I have ever played.

Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge: Back in Time...?: The concept of time travel in a Banjo-Kazooie game is full of possibilities: being able to meet younger versions of various characters and visiting past locations would be pretty neat. However, although this game takes place in the past, there is actually little to suggest that our heroes have gone back in time. Bottles' ancestor, Bozzeye; and a handful of younger characters-namely, Mumbo Jumbo, Honey B., Master Jiggywiggy, and Captain Blubber-are present, but that's about it. There is not even really an urgency to save history, as not a lot of things has or might be changed to affect the future for the worst. The race to save history can be pulled off well in games, but Rare dropped the ball here.

Donkey Kong Country 3 (Game Boy Advance version): The Vehicle Mini Games: Many of the mini games featured in the hand held versions of the Donkey Kong Country trilogy were actually pretty fun, but Funky's challenges in the port of the final game were more frustrating than exciting. These four games suffered from slippery controls and making it far too easy to take damage, even if you lightly hit a wall. The Destroy mini game is particularly nasty, giving you a limited time to destroy ten Kremling boats and making you lose automatically if you cross a finish line without killing enough Kremlings. That is only the first challenge, as well. Worst of all is that completing these challenges is needed to gain 103% completion, so be ready for lots of frustration.

Mickey's Speedway USA: Battle Mode: This game was highly derivative of Mario Kart 64, so I suppose it is only fitting that its battle mode was virtually copied and pasted from the latter title. For one thing, it uses the same damage system: you have three balloons, each of which is lost if you get hit. Lose all three balloons, and you are out. Additionally, the arenas are largely uninteresting, the steamboat being the lone exception because it at least has plenty of room to roam and can actually be more frantic than boring. As a whole, however, the battle mode leaves a lot to be desired.

Star Fox Adventures: The Linear Path: There are more than enough negative features from this game, from tacked-on Arwing missions to multiple plot holes to the nonexistent battle with General Scales, but one of its worst was having you remain on a strict path for pretty much the whole game. There are few chances to complete tasks in any order, and thus you need to finish a specific task in a certain way. Going off the beaten path only offers you mediocre secrets and side quests, and these are too far and few between. Many of the Zelda games give you plenty of chances to perform rewarding side quests to your heart's content, and it is disappointing that Star Fox Adventures did not offer the same great feature.

Jet Force Gemini: The Deaths of Tribals: Having to save all 282 Tribals can be a pain in several ways. One such way is the fact that they are not invincible and can be killed by anyone, even you. At times, Tribals are set up so that you may accidentally destroy them, forcing you to restart the level. Since you must rescue all the Tribals on a level before you lose all three continues, and every last one of them must be saved to even finish the game, this is especially frustrating. Locating all of the Tribals is difficult enough, so why did Rare make it more frustrating by making them easy to kill?

Donkey Kong Country 2 (Game Boy Advance): Stuck Forever: The ability to use Funky's copter to travel to already unlocked worlds is excellent...provided you do not mess up the opportunity to do so early on. There is a glitch in that, if you fail Funky's first mission for whatever reason, he will not let you use his copter, making it impossible to backtrack to other worlds. If you are trying to find everything to gain 102% of the game, chances are you will not be able to do so and will therefore have to restart the entire game. Getting stuck in this way is quite an inconvenience, especially if you realize the fact much later on, and Rare should have (and maybe they did in later versions) corrected it before releasing the game.

As you can see, not even Rare is perfect, and they can add features that can make a game frustrating or boring in the worst ways imaginable. Whether it involves paying to save your game, killing creatures that are key to finishing the game, or having to go through multiple difficulties just to attain the highest percentage, they were mistakes that should have been fixed before the games were released. Granted, not all of them ruin a game to some extent, but they were still unnecessary. Rare's next project is yet to be officially announced, but when and if it is, hopefully it will not include any features like the ones listed above. The last thing we need are aspects that can really bring a game down.