Rare Replay is a compilation of 30 games developed by Rare and its predecessor, Ultimate Play the Game, over their 30-year history across platforms from the ZX Spectrum to the Xbox 360[3] (1983 to 2008), up until Rare's Kinect Sports series.[4] The 30 games span multiple genres, including fighting, first-person shooter, simulation, 3D platforming, racing, and skiing.[5] The compilation opens with a musical number featuring Rare characters. Each game has a landing page with a variation on its theme music.[4] While the core gameplay remains unedited, Rare added extra features to the older releases. The player can toggle the visual appearance of scanlines[6] and "rewind" up to ten seconds of gameplay in pre-Nintendo 64 games.[4] The older games can be saved at will and autosave progress upon the player's exit.[7] Rare also added an infinite lives cheat setting for some older games[7] and fixed a game-breaking bug in Battletoads.[8] The "Snapshots" feature presents small segments of the older games as challenges for the player, such as collecting a target number of points within a time limit in a set scenario, similar in function to the NES Remix series.[6] Some Snapshots are connected sequentially as a playlist.[9]
The ZX Spectrum emulation retains the technical idiosyncrasies of the original hardware. For instance, their graphics fluctuate in render speed depending on the number of items the computer has to process on-screen. The Nintendo 64 emulation upgrades the games' polygon rendering and frame rate.[4] The nine Xbox 360 releases install directly to the Xbox One dashboard separately from the Rare Replay compilation[9] and require online activation before they can be played offline.[5] The Xbox 360 games share player saved game and Achievement progress between the consoles via Xbox Live's cloud sync features.[10] Rare Replay uses the prior Xbox 360 ports of Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Perfect Dark rather than emulating their originals. However, Rare chose to emulate the original Conker's Bad Fur Day rather than using its Xbox remake.[5] Grabbed by the Ghoulies runs natively on the Xbox One, as a port upgraded its display resolution and frame rate.[4][11] Rare Replay retains the local and online multiplayer modes of the original games,[6] and includes all of their downloadable content add-ons.[12] Multiple classic Rare titles, such as the Donkey Kong Country series and GoldenEye 007, are not included in the compilation due to licensing issues.[6]
A bonus feature section, "Rare Revealed", contains over an hour of behind-the-scenes footage focusing on Rare's major and unreleased games.[6] The player completes in-game challenges to collect stamps, which increase the player's rank and unlock the bonus features;[7] to collect all the stamps, the player has to finish every game and Snapshot. The compilation automatically grants stamps for prior progress in the package's Xbox 360 games.[4] Current and former Rare employees, such as Grant Kirkhope, feature in the documentary clips, though studio founders Tim and Chris Stamper do not appear.[4] "Rare Revealed" unveils gameplay footage from several unreleased games: for example, in the open world adventure game Black Widow, the player controls a spider-like robot equipped with missiles. The spider was expected to be recycled in Kameo 2, an unreleased sequel to Kameo which was designed with a darker tone than the original. Rare also worked on The Fast and the Furriest, a spiritual successor to Diddy Kong Racing with vehicle customization and track alterations. The company's other planned intellectual properties included the survival game prototype Sundown and the airplane-based Tailwind. Other "Rare Revealed" videos include unused music tracks[13] and trivia behind some game design decisions such as Blast Corps' character design, the fate of Banjo-Kazooie's Stop 'n' Swop features, and audio overrides built into Killer Instinct.[14] Additional "Rare Revealed" featurettes not present in Rare Replay have been released since the game's launch via the company's official YouTube channel.
