Aren't they only "Rare" by name at this point?
Time for the
Ship of Theseus conversation, I suppose.
They're Rare. They have some of the same staff, some new staff. Like just about all development houses, they've seen lots of change-over over the years. No developer is comprised of the same development teams 15 years later.
Have they lost their core identity as a company in the change-overs (the Theseus philosophical discussion)? We won't know that until we see more of their products. Kinect games fucking sucked. Yet before those Kinect games, you'd be hard-pressed to convince people that we didn't see the Rare we know and love shining through projects like Kameo and Viva Pinata. Those were Rare games through and through, though missing a few things here and there that would have made them perfect.
To this day, I believe a Kameo 2 with some of the quirks worked out could have been Microsoft's Zelda (action RPG) franchise. It had the look, the personality, the universal visual appeal. Just need some tweaks to the control and more diversity that better rewarded rotating between elements to accomplish goals.
The 360 was absolutely reviled and hated up until Sony confirmed the US price for the PS3 at E3 2006. Perfect Dark was absolutely trampled on certain forums because of "WallGuy" and it not being as good as Halo. It was a decent game.
It sold surprisingly well too. I remember the PDZ 2 Million thread.
PDZ got shit on because Microsoft only gave reviewers 24 hours to spend with the game and write reviews. In the rush to be first, most reviews gave a much higher review to the game than they would have if they had more time. Big-name reviewers like Gamespot and IGN infamously gave PDZ artificially high scores. The game was very mediocre and the controls were awful. In retrospect, a lot about that game was poor. It was a 65/100 - 75/100 launch title that got 90+ scoring that it should not have received.
And yea PlayStation fanboys enjoyed calling it the Xbox 1.5 for several months. Until their own PS3 games came out and sucked hot asshole juice. Heavenly Sword, Lair, and UT3 were terribad. Motorstorm heavily lacked features. Resistance lacked a lot of basic things like in-game chat at launch and had terrible audio fx design. It also wasn't half the game Halo was.