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 Ten long years have passed since Rare unleashed their honey bear and annoying bird combination upon the world in the Nintendo 64 classic, Banjo-Kazooie. Since then, Halo and World of Warcraft have reinvented the way people play video games together. Grand Theft Auto established countless video game mechanics as industry standards, the Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy series reminded us that a good plot can more or less become the centerpiece of a title, and the arcades have since been waiting patiently on their official obituary. SEGA dropped as gracefully as a dead cow out of the hardware industry. Sony took over the reigns as the leader of the market – and Nintendo made a solid comeback. Yeah, it's been a crazy decade.
If you were to tell the 11-year-old Cliff ten years ago that, in a decade, I would be downloading the $60 Banjo-Kazooie cartridge on something called Xbox Live...well, I would truly think something sick crept into your head and took over. Now that Rare is one of Microsoft's best tools for targeting the younger audience of gamers, the idea seems nothing less than genius. Banjo-Kazooie was one of my favorite games as a kid. Hell, I thought it kicked Mario's fat tush right off his throne, sitting atop all other platform games. I'd go as far as to say it was my second- or third-favorite Nintendo 64 game. Let's be real about something, though: gaming tastes have changed. Excusable (even welcomed) game mechanics of the past have been thrown by the wayside for newer ideas that – in the minds, eyes, and hands of today's gamers – work much more effectively. In particulary, platform games haven't aged well. Kids do not necessarily want to hop-and-bop their enemies, they want chainsaw bayonets and Battle Rifles – at least, ten minutes with my 11-year-old brother tells me so.
So where does that leave Rare's faithful re-make of Banjo's first adventure? Gruntilda jabbers and likes to rhyme, perhaps I should try it just this time. Click the link to make the jump, or Grunty will kick your big gamer rump!
In 1998, platform games didn't need a story. Racing and sports games definitely didn't, they were there for mindless entertainment. It seems like, today, every video game needs some kind of gripping character development and gut-wrenching plot twist to appeal to people. To hell with that, I say – Banjo-Kazooie gives you plenty of motivation for chasing down the fat, rhyming witch Gruntilda. Banjo's sister Tooie is kidnapped by the cackling menace, taken to her lair, and put into a machine that will eventually steal her good looks and apply them to Grunty's warty face. For whatever reason, Banjo and Kazooie learn special moves from a talking mole named Bottles, search for glimmering gold puzzle pieces in nine levels, and collect a whole lot of other things to open the magical doors and tricky pathways that go deeper into Grunty's lair.
The graphics are much, much sharper than before.
The act of collecting things is basically the guts and gears of Banjo-Kazooie. This is a perfectionist's nightmare, honestly: there are 100 Jigsaw Pieces, 900 Musical Notes, 45 Jinjos spread throughout the nine levels, countless red feathers, bouncy blue eggs, valuable gold invincibility feathers, shiny Mumbo Jumbo tokens for transforming into different creatures, and more level- and challenge-specific items to find and collect. If you are like me; one of the gamers that feels the urge to collect and find absolutely everything possible, this game is going to make you an anxious wreck. There is stuff laying around everywhere, and the only way to get through 100% of the game is to find it all. Ugh.
At least the game's challenges are still fun; most of them retain their entertainment value ten years later. In each level, Banjo and Kazooie have to correct Grunty's wrong-doings upon the locals in order to earn Jigsaw Pieces (Jiggies). Some of the results of these actions have an impact on the appearance and functions of the game world, which was very appealing to me ten years ago and is still pretty cool these days. The levels are essentially giant playgrounds for Banjo and Kazooie to use all their special moves. They are filled with enemies scattered around for occasional engagement and special obstacles for using specific powers. Unlike Super Mario 64 and current platform games, there are no obvious clues that immediately point you in the direction of each Jiggy. The levels naturally direct and give you hints, and some of the characters found in each level will tell you what they need when you stumble upon them. For example, in Rusty Bucket Bay, you will discover a dolphin needing rescued from being crushed underneath a ship's anchor by hearing its incessant cries. In Treasure Trove Cove, after learning how to fly, you would naturally want to scope out the level from the very top – and that happens to be exactly where one of the Jiggies rests. There are five different-colored Jinjo creatures scattered around each level, and rescuing all of them grants you another Jiggy. The challenges are usually move-specific, time-specific, or collection-specific, but some Jiggies are just laying around in out-of-reach places.
Aiming blue egg shots is still a little difficult, but it gets the job done here - just like old times.
Unfortunately, not all of the challenges have aged so well. Even considering the fact that Rare more or less fixed the controls by moving (some) of the camera control to the right analog stick, there are some Jiggies that I wanted to give up on because the game didn't work well enough. Sometimes, an unnecessary, abrupt camera shift would send me falling into lava and there seemed to be little to nothing that I could do about it. The same annoying camera shifts might happen when you are running toward a timed door or object, and it throws you off course – resulting in a frustrating retry. Some of the challenges are less forgiving, with one-hit-kill hazards or pitfalls. At least 15 of the Jiggies in this game were nothing less than a hassle to get, and I wouldn't have gotten them if my personal obsession with getting all the Whats-its didn't have to be fulfilled. Specific examples of bad challenges include collecting a Jiggy behind the propellers of the ship in Rusty Bucket Bay, collecting the caterpillars and acorns in Click Clock Wood, and competing in an eating mini-game against an alligator in Bubble Gloop Swamp. It's too bad that sometimes the game makes you feel like you are doing chores or fighting against the camera rather than taking part in an entertaining virtual experience.
Rare made the graphics a little more spiffy for 2008 by improving some of the textures and prepping up the resolution for 720p. The result is a game that looks even more like a cartoon, mostly because of its sharpness and bright colors. Banjo-Kazooie was nothing less than an explosion of color. The animation was pretty smooth for a Nintendo 64 game, but some of the clipping and pop-up problems are a joke today. As a side note, I noticed a strange slow-down problem that only occurred if I set my Xbox 360 to display in 1080i, so heads-up to people using that setting. Overall, I was satisfied with the visual uplifting done to the game, but I wished for a little more. Seeing Spiral Mountain in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and comparing it to the original is like taking your best work of art and putting it beside your work as a toddler.
Oh, Rusty Bucket Bay and your Boom Boxes. In this shot, Kazooie says: "ER-ER-EET!" Stuff it, bird.
The music is as memorable as ever, and that is a great thing. I truly loved the Banjo-Kazooie soundtrack as a kid, and hearing the Rusty Bucket Bay theme again was nothing short of Trip-Down-Memory Lane-awesome. The sound effects are recreated well, but I will let you be the judge of how great that actually is – Kazooie will forever go down as one of the most annoying characters in my gaming history, so hearing every last squak and squeak from her again was annoying to the point of ear-gouging. As useful as the Talon Trot move is for getting around quickly, it comes with the expense of your sanity – hearing that “wah wah wah wah” over and over (don't forget the “BREE!!” every time you jump) was nothing less than miserable to me. Mute the sound effects, turn up the music – then you've got yourself a solid audio experience from an old-school game.
So, what is my final verdict? Simple. If you loved Banjo-Kazooie as a kid, downloading the Xbox Live Arcade version is far from a bad choice. In fact, re-living some of those challenges was a lot of fun – and looking back, as much as I swore at my television and wondered why the game was so much more difficult than I remembered, it wasn't all that bad. In fact, I loved it – but seriously, I never remembered being so frustrated with it as a kid, even with the C-button camera controls and the super-blurry N64 graphics. Banjo-Kazooie is one of the better games to purchase on XBLA, even solely for the fact that it takes more than 10 hours to see all it has to offer. It took me more than 10 hours, and I was quite good at the original. In fact, I remembered the locations for almost everything. Newcomers will likely scoff at the collecting, but if they want a taste of old-school platform adventure gameplay, there is no better place on XBLA to look than here.
Final Score: B
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