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30 games from one of the world's most celebrated developers packed into a collection for just £19.99 - Rare Replay represents remarkable value, with a range of titles spanning early Spectrum hits such as Jetpac and Sabrewulf to modern releases such as Perfect Dark Zero and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. One of the key selling points of the package is the inclusion of the majority of Rare's N64 line-up, with the likes of Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini available on console for the first time since their launch in 1997. But the big takeaway is this: Rare has delivered each and every one of its N64 offerings at full 1080p resolution, though overall results are a little mixed.Rare's strategy in bringing its N64 back catalogue to Xbox One follows two distinct approaches: where there is an existing Xbox 360 remaster, that's the version included in Replay, operating under the backwards compatibility virtual machine revealed at E3. Where there is no existing Xbox 360 work, the firm appears to have deployed an N64 emulator, running the games 'as is', albeit with a massively improved native rendering resolution.
The classic Perfect Dark and the two N64 Banjo-Kazooie titles adopt the former approach, with all three handled via 360 backwards compatibility mode. Each game gets a separate icon on the dashboard outside of Rare Replay (though they can be accessed through the collection, too), while the quality of the conversion work is identical to the original Xbox Live Arcade releases. This means we get native 1080p visuals for all three games including full widescreen support and 4x multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA). Already we see an upgrade over the first release of the Xbox 360 virtual machine - there we saw native 1080p games downscaled to 720p, then upscaled back to full HD again. Thankfully, Microsoft now appears to have corrected this oversight.
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