The sheer, hysterical irony of it all.

So, over a year ago, Rareware and Nintendo sadly parted ways. Nintendo sold the tremendous amount of stock they had in the company, and Rare became a third-party developer...for about 30 seconds. Microsoft quickly bought the team out, making them their wholly owned subsidiary, never to produce games for anyone but them ever again.

So, we skip forward to the present. Rare has yet to produce anything for M$, and has basically spent the last 16 months or so twiddling their thumbs and picking their wedgies. The last game Rareware even produced was Starfox Adventures, for the Gamecube.

So, does anyone else find it fucking hysterical that their first game in over a year is for a Nintendo console? Well, a Nintendo handheld technically, the Gameboy Advance specifically. Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge was released yesterday, and to rather positive feedback. The game takes the mechanics, graphical presentation and atmospere of the previous two games and converts it into a 2D (3/4 view) platformer that apparently is a damn near perfect representation of the Banjo-Kazooie continuity in a largely different perspective. Way to go Rare!