• Welcome, Guest. Please login.
 
March 28, 2024, 08:51:25 AM

News:

Visit our IRC channel, #TrinityMUGEN on irc.sorcery.net!


Banjo-Kazooie

Started by Double, March 25, 2009, 07:30:27 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Double

Time to take out the trash.

Intro: With the success of Mario 64, it was no doubt that somebody would come along and BLATANTLY copy the game with a few changes, that my friends is Banjo-Kazooie.

Gameplay: GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS:

-10 Jiggies
-100 Notes
-5 Jingos
-A certain amount of "Mumbo Tokens"
-A switch you must trigger to make a Jiggy appear in the overworld.

And any other bullshit item you have to find in a level like oranges, gold bars, presents and that's just the tip of shitberg. Jiggies are your standard MacGuffin, you use them to solve puzzles to go to the next level and by solve I mean press buttons until you go to the next level there is not thought process whatsoever. Throughout the game there are note doors which only open if the total number of notes you have collected is greater than the number of the door, an easy concept... but notes are handled weird. When you leave a level by the exit it records the number of notes you collected as your record... if you go back you have to collect them all over again... and so begins a long painful quest to collect notes. I cannot emphasis how retarded this is, the only thing more retarded I've seen in a platformer is DK64's colored banana bull crap but even then they STAYED collected when you got them. You also get moves powered by items, YAY MORE SHIT TO COLLECT.

Which is a nice segue for the next section, in this game you start knowing pretty much jack shit and have to learn things along the way, which is an ok concept by itself but it makes the game a bit more linear and results in some backtracking.

This would all be ok if the underlying game was a good platfomer, but it's basic at best the game is really focused on collecting shit so much that the platforming seems to suffer, pits are rare, enemies all seem to follow similar patterns, and the puzzles seem to be for the most part easy. It just makes the game seem pretty tedious overall.

You might wonder what the mumbo tokens mentioned earlier are for, they let you transform into animals... so you can get a Jiggy or two... which makes them pretty much collected for the sole purpose of getting a few Jiggies, I am aware in a few cases you can use them to get cheats and one section where you need to use one to change the water level in a section of the overworld. Besides that they strike me as cop-outs to justify more item fetching.

But in all this shit there is a silver lining, the games hub is fucking huge but can actually be bothered to give you shortcuts, which makes the fact it's so fucking huge less of a big deal. The hub even has enemies, albeit they aren't of much threat and you're more likely to die from a platforming section which the game could be assed enough to put in the overworld. This wouldn't be that big of a deal, but compared to hub worlds from other 3d platformers this is quite different and it alone is worthy of a mention. Sadly a mention will not save it from me docking half the games points.
10 out of 20

Music: This was before Rare made DK64 and apparently suffered massive brain trauma causing the people who did their music to start sucking horribly. What I'm getting at is the music is fairly decent, I really can't hate the game for its music, it might be unmemorable but it isn't outright horrible except maybe a few isolated incidents... However someone decided it would be funny or some shit for all the characters to make annoying sound effects when they talk, it is the most annoying shit ever after Baby Mario from Yoshi's Island I can understand not having voice acting but half assing it with shitty sound effects? That's just even worse!
10 out of 15

Translation: As far as I can tell nothing is outright wrong.
10 out of 10

Length: At first glance the game is shorter than Mario 64 by having 20 less MacGuffins... but BK makes up for it in spades with the notes and Mumbo Tokens*, if you want to 100 % this game prepare for a tedious adventure of note hunting... though even then it might come up a bit short.
12 out of 15

*Given how many Mumbo Tokens it is to a transformations in the latter part of the game one could make an arguable case that the Mumbo Tokens are used to counteract the lack of those 20 MacGuffins.

Rehash Factor: Besides blatantly stealing it's control scheme from Mario 64, it gets without stealing much.
14 out of 15

Plot: BANJOS SISTER HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED BY A WITCH! ARE YOU TWO A BAD ENOUGH BIRD AND BEAR TO SAVE HER FROM THE BITCH? (See rhyming isn't hard at all) Also there is apparently a sub-plot about Mumbo having been turned into the way he was Gruntilda or some bullshit.
1 out of 10

Difficulty: Pfff, unless you consider running around collecting the notes to be difficult, which they could only even be seen as such in the later stages, this game is easy as pie. Note collecting isn't hard it's just tedious, and the actual things you do for Jiggies are just basic platforming for the most part nothing you can't figure out if you played Mario 64 (which given the fact it was a launch title for the N64 it is pretty reasonable to assume Rare expected its audience to have played it). The fact there only a few bosses in the game probably hurts that.
2 out of 15

Total: 58/100 = 58 %

The success of this game caused the N64, and 3D platformers to largely become polluted with shitty MacGuffin fetching quests. Now I know you're thinking that Mario 64 is responsible for that but Mario 64 actually had interesting platforming sections under it all, as opposed to just platforming designed around making you go and collect a bunch of shit. To this credit I put Banjo Kazooie as one of the worst games of all time regardless of its score, not only did it corrupt the genre the success of this game gave Rare the impression that people like mindless MacGuffin hunts... and we all know what happened next. As such, I am going to go against my usual practice and discard my score and pull a number out of my ass right now as there is more to consider than the game itself.

Verdict: 40 %

Positive: Giving the cartridge to someone to set it on fire.

Negative: THE FUCKING VOICE SOUND EFFECTS. ALSO WHERE DOES A VIDEO GAME GET OFF ASKING YOU TRIVIA ABOUT IT AND MAKES IT MANDATORY?!

I never played the sequel, and have no intentions of playing the game and thus logically I cannot review it. However you will still see a review of that game on this board as I shall use my ancient dark powers I stole from FireMan.EXE when Neon foolishly re-released him, to manage to get a review posted anyways in a couple of days. FWHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Then I'll use those dark powers to take over the world, etc. etc.

Jesuszilla

Where the hell did the term MacGuffin come from?


Just try to keep things peaceful.

UHMEEEEBA

What you can't be assed to go to Wikipedia?

Basically it's something used for the sake of motivating the characters (or in this case the player) to advance the story (or in this case the game).

See also.

MC2

I like it.  Not too many have the gonads to review  the game in such a negative way.  I'd love to see some outside reactions to this review, should provide humor.

Jesuszilla

I liked Banjo Kazooie, but I agree that the collecting is very tedious.


Just try to keep things peaceful.

Insanius

It's almost like it was designed for OCD people to spend the majority of their lifetime getting EVERYTHING.

Jesuszilla

I have OCD and I rarely ever try to get 100% on a game. Even if I do try, I usually give up because I get bored with it. Perhaps it's ADHD nullifying that aspect.


Just try to keep things peaceful.