So yesterday I choose to digitally purchase the new Rare Replay game on my Xbox One. I’m a collector who loves to have physical copies of my games, and have so far only bought digital games if no physical copy exist.. but yesterday I made a choice based on several facts:

1. First of all, the retail game was about $17 more expensive than the digital copy.
2. Secondly, even if I did purchase a retail copy the game disc wouldn’t actually contain anything but a license key, I would still have to download the entire game digitally to play it.
3. Thirdly, if I had a retail copy I would have to insert the CD each time I would want to play any of the Rare games… which is a hassle, especially since the disc reader on my Xbox is mentally disabled not understanding when I’m putting discs in it, I have to retry between 3-10 times before it reads it. (I know I can exchange my console for a new one with the guarantee, but that’s also a hassle and I would have to be without an Xbox One for over 2 weeks >_< Also I would have to re-download all the terabytes of games that have taken me ages to download!).

I’m sad that we are leaving physical copies of games, this generation of consoles might just be the last in the era of physical games. I like stacking my games neatly and alphabetically in a shelf, then I know which games I have and can easily pull them forth to play. Compared to my Xbox 360 arcade library, consisting of over 300 games, which is extremely hard to browse through… I can only sort by recently played or in alphabetical order.. when browsing it takes ages! I get to the letter “F” and I basically just start scrolling and miss half of the games that are there. It’s kind of the same on the Xbox One, except that you can pin games, but I have now pinned so many games that they start disappearing from the home screen.. once again I’m forgetting about the games I haven’t finished yet or was supposed to check out that fall behind the pin-screen..

But I guess I will just have to adapt. Learn to value my digital copies. This is the future.

So a day later I finally had Rare Replay (yes my internet is super-slow and it took HOURS to download that entire package of 30 games!) and I’ve been stuck playing it all night. It’s extremely addictive! Even though I already had almost all the games on the collection I still feel it was worth getting. Mainly because I get an incentive to play them when I can get achievements for it!! Just starting a game up grants you an achievement, for each game!! Clearing various objectives gives you at least 5 achievements, per game!! Each game also have new short special modes called snapshots, there’s 5 for each game and just clearing one gives you and achievement, for every game! There’s also an achievement for clearing all 5 snapshots, in every game! Woah.. there’s a total of 4000 achievement points to be earned..

Rare Replay menu on Xbox One

Rare Replay Snapshots menu

Rare Replay game gallery – Battletoads

Rare Replay game gallery- Cobra Triangle

Rare Replay – Atic Atac

Battletoads – Rare Replay

So far tonight I’ve only had time to focus on three games. I started with the ones I liked and wanted to try out, first up was Battletoads the Arcade version since I hadn’t played this one before. You have unlimited with continues so it’s not to hard to beat the game 🙂 And I also managed to clear all the snapshots! This game was awesome ^_^ It would probably be even more fun with friends since you can play three player co-op!

Battletoads Arcade boss – Rare Replay

Battletoads arcade ending – Rare Replay

I hate getting stomped on in this game though >__<

After this I started playing R.C. Pro-Am, I love this game! I have it for the NES as well and I played not to long ago 🙂 There’s a hard achievement where you have to go through every level of the game and there’s not unlimited continues. I made it quite far, but I will have to practice some more to beat it.. Even the final snapshot was hard! But this is a fun game so I will keep trying tomorrow ^_^

R.C. Pro-Am Snapshot 5- Rare Replay

R.C. Pro-Am – Rare Replay

The final game I tried was Jetpac, which was originally released on the ZX Spectrum. I love the graphics of this system ^_^ The colors are just so pretty together! In this game I cleared all the objectives and it felt good! I even played it some more after getting all the achievements because you also have leaderboards where you can compare your scores to your friends, and damn I get competitive when I see those ;D hahaha! So I kept trying to get the highest scores out of my friends, I managed in most of the places ^_^  Let’s see how long it lasts..

Jetpac – Rare Replay

Jetpac gameplay – Rare Replay

These enemies are the worst >_<

All in all I think that Rare has done a really good job in creating extra value in these old games. It’s still a cheap game to buy compared to new retail games, and you get a lot for that money! Loads of great games! And lots of hours of gameplay ^_^ ….. and +4000 gamerscore ;D