The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Backlog #5: Banjo Kazooie

Back in the day when Rare still made videogames (how long have they been working on Perfect Dark Zero now?) they made this whole slew of very similar platform games, starting with the Donkey Kong Country series on SNES and continuing with Banjo Kazooie on N64.
In fact, it's safe to say the Rare was pretty much the only company, next to Nintendo itself, that made decent games for the N64 and still makes it worth owning the damn machine in the first place.

So what can be expected from a game like this then? Well, everything they've already done before and after. That is, running and jumping through big levels, collecting lots of stuff and defeating lots of baddies that look like regular household objects with very big eyes.

Once again, a trend that is started by Mario is taken up by another company and being drained of every singly drop of juice it has left.
But I'm going to have to be honest here, if there's one company that can pull it off and make a game that is close to, if not equal to or better than the original Mario games, it's Rare. Or at least, it used to be.

Take Banjo Kazooie for instance. Huge Levels. Very pretty graphics, lots of stuff to do. Juxtapose that to Mario 64 which had Average sized levels, decent graphics, kinda eventless stages and it gets boring long before the 15th and final stage.
I've been accused of blasphemy before, but I really didn't think Mario 64 was all that great.
As a huge fan of the old games, especially Mario Bros 3 and Mario World, I thought Mario 64 lacked the fun and variety of the old 2D games, and, despite what almost every review on the internet says, it doesn't retain the original gameplay AT ALL.

So in that respect, I feel very much enclined to say that Rare's Banjo games are better than Mario 64, even if you consider the fact that Mario was pretty much the blueprint for these games. It's common for the Japanese to steal an idea and improve on it. Sometimes it can happen the other way round.

That's not to say that Banjo Kazooie is so fantastically good. No. This is Rare we are talking about and they have the tendency to make their games INCREDIBLY frustrating. Cast your mind back, if you will, to my Donkey Kong 64 review, and you'll know what I mean.
Fortunately there are no highly annoying sub-games this time. No, instead the frustration is incorporated into the main game itself! Oh Joy.
Actually, it's not that bad for the majority of levels, but once you reach Rusty Harbor you'll be pulling EVERYTHING that can be pulled out of your body.
Well, at least that earned me a very cheap circumcision. Ouch.

The biggest problem though is this: You have to collect music notes.
Every game has its collectibles, be it coins, rings, crystals or Golden Frog Statues, and this game has music notes. Typically you need these notes to open up doors to other levels, and of course at the end there's this big secret door where you have to collect practically every note in the game, and that's good and all, but there's 100 notes in each level. That's hard enough already, but to make things worse, when you die, YOU LOOSE ALL OF THEM!
That's right, every note you collected in that level (fortunately not in the entire game) will be lost, and you have to get them ALL back again until you manage to get out alive. This is really really REALLY terribly incredibly frustrating.
The game would have been so much better if they'd done this right.

Thanks Rare!
So because of that I'm giving this game the same score as that other frustrating Rare game: an 8.0

posted by Ingen! @ 11:49 AM