The Biggest Game Project on this Planet

Banjo Tooie

This has to be the worst-named sequel EVER.
Rare, being the British ass-holes that they are, never shun the atrocious pun or two and they even went so far as to put it on the box as their title.
Fortunately, I played the Japanese version, which is called "Banjo and Kazooie's Great Adventure 2" which is a little less imaginative, but doesn't make you want to claw your own brain out.
Thank God the Japanese don't know what a pun is. They probably think you can eat it.

Good. So this is Backlog #6 coming in very soon after number 5, cos they're so similar. Well actually not that similar.
For, you see, this game is in fact really really GOOD.
Everything that was so incredibly annoying about Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 is NOT in here! No frustrating mini-games, and a very user-friendly system.
You don't have lives, so when you die, you're just sent back to the beginning of the level or area and you don't loose anything, which is very very GOOD.
Camera still sucks though, but hey, we're in 2005 now, and consoles can pull of some really amazing stuff but we're still getting crappy camera systems on a regular basis.

I suppose some things'll never change.

If there's anything negative I can say about Banjo Tooie, and of course there is, it's that it's just more of the same. You've played games like this before (and after) and if you're sick of the whole 'collect this-and-that' scheme, then you're going to want to skip on this one. If you're looking for a very fine platformer though, then there's definitely merit to playing this.

The game is absolutely friggin' HUGE, it's amazing this all fits on one humble N64 cartridge. Levels are insanely big which is the other complaint I have; they're just TOO big for their own good sometimes. It's easy to lose track of what you were doing or where you were going because of the sheer size of everything. There are warps in the levels though, which help a lot, but navigating through gigantic worlds can start to get tiresome at some point. And there's so much to do that hardly anything you do actually means anything.
Like the prequel, you have to find 100 notes and 10 Jigsaw-pieces per level, and there's lots of side quests and secrets to find this time too, so it often happens that you pull of this amazing feat and you'll be like "Yeah, gimme that Jiggy, baby!" or something less scary, and instead you'll get something really lousy, or you'll find out you've just performed one small bit of a long chain of events that you need to go through to get one of those shitty little puzzle bits.

Still, there's been lots of games like this on the new generation consoles and very few of them reach the standards set by this game, so it can still hold its own in this day and age and even the graphics still look impressive.
I recommend this to anyone who like platformers: 9.0




Quote of the Week:
In a rare moment, Dennis said what was probably one of the funniest things I've ever heard him say, while getting his ass royally kicked during Street Fighter:
"Hah, I'm blocking all your moves! With my face."

posted by Ingen! @ 11:51 AM