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Controller1.com Focus Test BANJO- -KAZOOIE Nuts and Bolts

This week we play Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts. Do we end up opening up the DS half way through? Only by listening to this podcast will you find out.

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REVIEW: BANJO KAZOOIE NUTS AND BOLTS

Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Rare. Published by Microsoft

Banjo Kazooie is one of Rare’s original megahits from the late 90′s when they could do no wrong. Now, not so much, but at the time, even a tech demo slapped onto a cart sold millions. Banjo Kazzoie and its sequel, Banjo Tooie where some of the finest 3D platformers of the 32/64 bit era. A decade later a sequel has been released to a wave of indifference and is a typical Rare product of this decade. Let’s have a squizz.

Nuts and Bolts is a game about vehicles as much of what you need to accomplish is done so with vehicles that you can build and modify at any time though the game. You collect new parts and blueprints as you progress. You might need a vehicle that is fast in one level, strong in another, one with a large carrying capacity at times, or one with passenger seats. There are races, timetrials, collection, demolition derby fetch quests etc. There’s a lot of breadth and range in what you can do in the game.

The graphics are very colourful and pretty though the framerate seems to occasionally have its mind on other things. There are lots of loading times that can be a little excessive, though installing the game to disc DRAMATICALLY cuts the length of theses down to ‘not an issue.’ Sound is typical Banjo, gibberish vocalisations rather than voices and overuse of the Hanna Barberra sound effects library. And it has fantastic music. New orchestrations of classic Banjo music abound, so good in fact that I’d love a soundtrack album.

But while its ambitious, technically impressive and has a lot of things to do, it has a problem. Its overly complex for what the target market is. Its the 360 equivalent of hooking up your PSP version of Resistance to your PS3 version of Resistance. It sounds impressive until you try and find a use for it. The visuals are overly busy to the point where its all a jumble of colour. The game is basically a mess and stops being fun very quickly, as in “this is shit,” is audible to anyone living nearby as you hurriedly eject the disc and put it back in its case while you scramble to recall where you left the receipt.

It should have been a lot of fun. Rare used to be able to make fun games but now they just make games for no audience. It looks like a game kids (or kids in their mid-30′s) would like but it plays like a game that no one can find any fun in.

Controller1.com rating 0/3 (I wanted to love this game so much. I am heartbroken)

NOW PLAYING: PRINCE OF PERSIA, BANJO KAZOOIE NUTS AND BOLTS

Well, Resistance 2 came and went without causing too much gaming happiness. In this post-Fallout 3 gaming environment, it was an incredibly disappointing game. The other two left over games on my pile have been getting a work out. First up Nuts and Bolts can be occasionally good and fun but often ends up being not fun and more frustrating than an email that says “Scarlet Johannson Nude” that ends up being a virus that destroys your PC.

Nuts and Bolts is a game that I find I can play only in small sessions of about 10 minutes. Then I get to a bit that frustrates me and I rage quit. Then the next day, I turn it on again and play happily for 10 minutes before… blood pressure rising… rage building, etc. One initial source of frustration- the interminable loading times- is dramatically reduced by installing to the HDD. Unfortunately the vehicle-based gameplay can’t be reduced. The only solution Rare has (and this shows up as a text tip during some loading screens) is to buy the original Banjo Kazooie on XBLA. I will persevere a little longer.

So after a “happy 10-minutes followed by a 30 minute cuss-fest” I popped in the new PoP game. WoW. I’m not sure If I love it but i seem to be happy with these new style platformers more than the traditional type. Time will tell. The graphics are gorgeous but god damn those voices are lame. I absolutely loved Sands of Time, particularly the voices of the Prince and Farrah. Here the Prince sounds like Nate Drake from Uncharted and Elika sounds like generic American heroine #4. The auotmated control system seems a little too automated with it almost predicting what you want to do next, even if you don’t, making for a frustrating tutorial.

I haven’t picked up Killzone2 but will do that in the next few days. It’s being spoken of very highly by my PS3 owning colleagues so I might even get some my MP fix with it (still currently being served by DoD Source on PC after work). Resistance being a colossal disappointment for me may work in Killzone 2′s favour. Or the fact that nothing is good after Fallout 3 may make me into one of those guys who writes about games but doesn’t necessarily play them, for the next few months at least.

UPDATE: Playing Prince of Persia again this morning made me think “hey I like these types of platformers,” and actually made me pop the half finished Mirror’s Edge back in the PS3. I’m fucking nuts.

NOW PLAYING: Zip, nada, bupkiss…

These past few days I have not booted up into anything at home. No real reason, I just feel like a few days air. That kind of makes for a boring videogame blog then doesn’t it? Oh well. Let me entertain you with some card tricks in the meantime. Why nowt? Well I’ve just finished an epic game and I sometimes get so wrapped up in these huge long games that after its done, I want a break. I’m writing a short review for the Fallout 3 DLC but after I beat it, I lost all interest in playing F3 any further. 40 hours was enough!

I played much Resistance 2 last weekend and have found it an OK game. Its playable, but not great. I’m about 40-50% of the way thrugh the single player but the fact I haven’t felts compelled to play this or Banjo (my two current games) means one of two things. Post RPG gaming malaise (which I also felt after beating both Knights of the Old Republic games and Mass Effect) or those game just aren’t that good. I feel compelled to give my games a good going over before I consign them to the shelf. But my metric might seem a bit mercenary, it does help me keep a lit on my backlog. If I’m being frustrated by it and I’ve met my value metric (an hour for each $10 the game cost me), then I feel ok in ending the game. Mirror’s Edge cost me $30 so when I shelved at the 5-6 hour mark, I felt OK about it. Not sure I want to finish it. R2 cost $50 and I’m about 5-6 hours in. So who knows whether I’ll play any more. Banjo is still only around the 90 minute mark so I’m kinda stuck giving that more time. That and I won’t start Prince of Persian, which has sad gathering dust underneath my TV since Christmas, until I feel Banjo has been beaten. Some, less charitable than myself, might say RARE has already done that.

So what about Killzone 2? If I bought it this weekend, it would be purely so we can Focus Test it. Even the most enthusiastic games need the odd week or two when they don’t feel compelled to play. It makes them appreciate games more when the feeling returns. Games you love helps. Meh just doesn’t cut it

NOW PLAYING: Banjo, Resistance 2, Fallout 3 DLC

Now that Fallout’s done, itrs time to try and finish the remainder of the 2008 games that I never got around to. I was a huge Banjo Kazooie fan back in the day. I found the first game to be more fun than Mario 64 (I was LTTP with both games). I was not a fan of the first Resistance game. It defined blinkered fanboy over appreciation of launch titles and smelt nearly as bad as Perfect Dark Zero (which I found unplayable).

We’ll start with Banjo Kazooie. What the fuck is going on here? This game is busier than a brothel across the street from Blizzcon (First time caller, long time watcher). When you first boot thing game up it offers such a visual assault on your senses that you need some aspirin to continue. It does settle down after a bit though anytime you move five steps you get a stonking great “SAVING- DO NOT SWITCH OFF” message. But Rare, you use to make games you could just switch on and play. Why do you insist on making kid-friendly games so complicated? You’d think this was trying to use your PSP to do something weird and esoteric with your PS3. Viva Pinata and Kameo are both in the same boat. When the 360 launched I tried to play cameo with some colleagues and we spent ages wondering what the hell we were meant to be doing before giving up and playing Perfect Dark Zero, which we then gave up on because it was so atrocious. Oh Rare! I am slowly coming to grips with getting some fun out of the game. The building of the cars is quite interesting- so long as your vehicle design is quantized. But I still for the life of me can’t work out how to access my made up car outside of the garage. I kinda wished this was just Banjo 3 with 700 types of collectibles. Oh wait.

Resistance 2 is a hard one to describe. I didn’t like the first one at all. This one is both good and bad as far as I’m concerned. The gameplay is ok, if rather by the numbers but its not a spectacularly good looking game, merely good. Nor is the sound that great compared to say Metal Gear or Uncharted. But the single player has been growing on me somewhat and I’m determined to give it a good stab, if not completing it before Killzone 2 turns up in a week or two. The multiplayer is interesting. I played a one 40-player map and did quite well considering I didn’t really know what to do (apart from shoot the guys with a red arrow over their heads). But the giant map meant half the time I was wandering around trying to find something to shoot at. Big maps with lots of people don’t really work, especially if there are no vehicles. That’s why Team Deathmatch doesn’t work in a Battlefield game, you need focal points otherwise the game’s a mess.

The Fallout 3 DLC Operation Anchorage is now getting a spin. Its the first time I’ve bought SP-only DLC (unless you count Guitar Hero songs). It definitely is more action oriented but I’m having a hard time making up my mind whether I like it or not. I will see it through a bit more but it definitely doesn’t feel as great as the rest of the game. It also feels more scripted. We will be recording a focus test soon covering this DLC. Clint has just started the game on PC so the theory was this would be a good way to do the game without spoiling it for Clint. I’m not so sure its indicative of the rest of the game.

NOW PLAYING: GEARS OF WAR 2, Demoes

Say what you like about Fable II (which I will do shortly when our review is posted), but Gears of War 2 is out and this is the 360 game you NEED to own this year if you have a remote interest in shooting games featuring bald space marines. Except Marcus Fenix has hair under his bandana.

I liked Gears 1. I didn’t love Gears 1 like so many. As someone who enjoys lots of shooters, I found the gunplay in Gears to be not as good as it could have been and, as I occasionally do these days, played that game on Casual mode (ie easy). I’ve started playing Gears 2 (on normal) and its far better balanced. I recently attempted a playthough of Gears 1 again in anticipation of the sequel, but apart from the fact the difficulty still sucked, I came up against a glitch that didn’t affect me on my original playtrhough (the push car getting stuck). This frustrated me enough for me to say, fuck it, I remember why I didn’t like Gears 1 as much as I probably should.

Its still early days in 2, but I’m far more impressed with it than I was at the same point in the original. It just seems so much more interesting from the get go and not as shallow. The story is also more interesting that the first game. Yes, these game’s stories are all interchanghable but there’s doing something to death well and there’s doing something to death badly. And this one seems to get it right.

At some point I will hunt down Resistance 2 and play that (I wasn’t impressed at all by the original) but I see that Gears will be my shooter de jour for at least the next few weeks.

Also played, a few of the recent Demoes released for some of the season’s big hitters.

Firstly: Tomb Raider Underworld. I played this for 2 mins. I realised I was probably going to pick this up down the track when it was cheap so I gave up pretty quickly. It looks great, plays as well as Tomb Raider Legend (the first Tomb Raider game I ever enjoyed) and this time looks to have been built with 360/PS3 in mind.

Secondly: Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Hmmmmmm. I’m not sure. This thing I took away most from the demo was how busy it looked. What you saw on screen wasn’t just crammed with detail, it was cluttered more than a level 70 mage’s bedroom is cluttered with diet coke cans.

I think Banjo shows the great thing about Rare. They don’t just make a game that conforms to a genre, or something that is easy to describe. It is also one of Rare’s major failings in that without knowing what to expect, its all too easy to be disappointed by the ambition sometimes not being realised. I can’t make my mind up whether I like this demo so I will still pick up the game soonish. Its not a particularly expensive game so that will help soothe the wallet sting if its not all that great.

It’s only partially a platformer the same way Uncharted is only very slightly a tomb raider style game.

Lastly, Mirror’s Edge. This is a platformer and bravely DICE have made this in first person, traditionally, the very worst way to make a platformer. The last game I played that attempted to make a first person game with decent jumping was Call of Juarez.
And that wasn’t the best bit of that game. Mirror’s Edge is all about parkour, that free running shit that is all the rage with the kids who are destined to be arthritic 30-somethings. The demo was quite good, but I don’t think that DICE have solved all of the problems but I’m up for somthing different. Hey, EA lost a bit of money just as they were starting to get out of making the same old same old all the time. Better get in on their good games now before they revert to licenses and sequels (as if there isn’t going to be Mirror’s Edge 2…)

Games of November

November is more than pale guys trying to grow handlebar moustaches, its also the month in which publishers decide to release their big games. This November is a corker. Let’s go through the biggies.

Gears of War 2
Gears of War is Xbox 360′s trump card this year. Fable II was great and Banjo looks to be of similar quality, but neither has that holy-fucking-shitness that Gears 2 has. I liked Gears 1 but wasn’t in-love with it the same way I loved Halo 3 and CoD games, but I’m still highly hyped to be playing Gears 2.
Will multi be better than the first game? maybe. Will the single player be better? Looks to be the case. Can we get more hyperbolic? 1000 times yes!

Resistance 2
You can tell who was an early adopter of PS3. They have two easy to spot traits. They are still eating noodles after they knock off from their second job and they say Resistance was the best game ever. I played it as a long as I could. While it was decent enough, it felt like a PS2 game. It played like one.
Resistance 2 is supposed to be the second coming. I will play it, but I’m not going to rush in to play it.

Quantum of Solace
Decent reviews. But not great reviews. This means this game goes in the post Christmas cheapie pile. I would like to play it at some stage, but not today.

Banjo Kazooie
I am a bit of fan of the original game and its sequel so I’m hanging out for this. I don’t really car about the building aspect, I just want a Rare game I can recognise as a game.

Little Big Planet
No next gen platformers for ages and t hen two come along at once. Will be picking this one apart when I get a chance. It was an October game until it good pushed back to November.

Mirror’s Edge
The demo is downloading as I type. Its such a busy season I don’t really know how I’m possibly going to play this before Christmas

Left For Dead
More cool games? Jesus.

Guitar Hero World Tour
Oh for fucks sake, I just got married and you’re trying to get me to leave my wife for
more games so cool my ass has gotten frostbite

Call of Duty World at War
YOU BASTARDS!!!! DAMN YOU, YOU BASTARDS!!!!!!

As you can see, I have some work ahead of me. I suggest you do what I do. Buy them all straight away at full price and watch half of them hit the bargain bins before you get a chance to unwrap them.
Oh, the pain. The pain, the pain.

I still haven’t finished Fable II let alone started on Fallout 3 or Rock Band.
Its probably for the best that December is actually quite bare and there’s really not much scheduled for January worth bothering about at this stage…