Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Screenshots
Focusing on both traditional platforming and a variety of vehicle-based challenges, complete with vehicle customization, Nuts & Bolts arrives on November 14.
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Will the be the game that justifies the 350 million price tag?
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Just keeping Rare properties off the other consoles, even if they never produced a single game, is worth what they paid (whatever it really was). The casual cred associated with the properties created by Rare for Xbox, also worth it. Likely Rare will never make another game that you will like as they are mostly light hearted affairs that are kid friendly. I had endless fun with the Viva stuff and my kid although I would never play it by myself. I was never really a banjo fan although I did try to get into them when released on emulators. This new game does look like a bit of fun but hard to nail down exactly what it's trying to do. It's bright and pretty and has loads of character so as long as it doesn't totally suck I'm sure it will be bought and maybe even move a few more systems.
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They already have.
People don't get what the purpose of a first party developer is. Hint: It's not about selling millions of games.
Rare's sole job has been to produce games that sell like crap, essentially. The xbox appeals to fans of shooters, racers, and sports games, but not to the European style platformers and more casual games. Of COURSE you're not going to be succesful (from a sales perspective) making those kinds of games for a platform like the xbox, but unless MS forks out the cash to "prime" that demographic, nobody who likes that kind of games would buy the xbox, and that means no third party developers (who DO have to make money off their games) would target it.
Rare's job isn't to make money off of game sales, it's job is to broaden the selection of titles to lure over fans of those kinds of games, so that eventually third parties will produce those kinds of games too and a positive feedback spiral will kick off.
Plus, remember that Rare is instrumental in MS' "new" xbox experience initiative, and the fact that they've produced tech for other MS games like Forza 2.
Rare's justified their price tag long ago.