I've played about an hour or so of Banjo-Kazooie for Xbox Live Arcade, which will be released in November.
I actually saw it for the first time at a review event for Nuts & Bolts, the long-awaited sequel to Rare's animal-kingdom platform games, and my first immediate impression was that it looked really nice. It's clear that Rare hasn't just dumped their 1998 Nintendo 64 game onto XBLA and called it a day. It's running in widescreen, the developers said it's 60 frames per second -- in short, while it's clearly a last-last-gen game, it's been given a substantial upgrade.
Of course, since it's exactly like the N64 title in terms of the design, that part is still dated. Banjo-Kazooie is in great part how Rare got its reputation as a producer of "collectathons," games where a good part of the player's time is spent doing busywork, walking around and picking up all kinds of doodads. Rare, at this time, seemed to want to copy Nintendo's success with games like Super Mario 64, but while the company excelled at copying the external form, they never nailed the function.
Banjo is a platform game, but -- based on the first level, which is all
I've played thus far -- the athletic, challenging, goal-based structure of Mario 64 is replaced in Banjo by items that are just scattered hither and yon. The entirety of the first level is based on just running around to every point on the map and picking up everything, and there is a whole lot to pick up. None of these things are actually challenging to obtain; they're just... there.
I mean, seriously, look at all this stuff:
Super Mario 64 elegantly turned collectible items into gameplay: Every time you accomplished an objective in the game, you got a star, and new levels opened up to you based on how many stars you had acquired. But Banjo needlessly complicates and cheapens this: To open doors in the hub world, you need Notes, which are just lying all over the place. But to unlock new levels, you need Jiggies, which are sometimes a reward for completing an objective, but are also just lying all over the place.
Rare's penchant for filling its games with all sorts of pointless doodads was famously parodied by Penny Arcade at the time that it released Star Fox Adventures for GameCube, which not entirely coincidentally was when Nintendo sold its share in the developer to Microsoft. Since then, things have not gone well, with ex-Xbox boss Peter Moore saying that the games industry had "passed Rare by."
So the question for you guys -- I assume several of you have played Banjo to completion -- is, do I go on? Is the game going to get better over the next few levels and introduce more challenge, or is what I experienced in the game's first world representative of the full game?
Images: Wired.com
