They put up a demo of this game on XBox Live, so I went and downloaded it. I'm very much impressed. It's a lot better than videos do justice.
At first I thought "what am I just driving around?" but to play it, I found that it's no driving game. It's still a wacky platformer, you just end up moving in a car instead of with a character. In fact you can still use your character if you want, but the point is there's still all sorts of jiggy hunting and the speed just means all the more wackiness. There's these suctiony guys who drag your car all over the dang place, and you can construct it by all sorts of means, and the physics system makes the cars behave in all sorts of weird ways.
Grunty's back, and she's a mechanic now, but so is everyone it seems. The demo has really impressed me!
Really? The whole 'vehicles instead of platforming' thing made me less interested, but it is actually a platformer anyway? But what about the flying vehicles and stuff, how would that work...
It works surprisingly well. The flight of those things is not what you would call "all powerful platform defeating", as they fly in awkward ways.
Seriously I had big doubts about the game but playing the demo has given me very high hopes, and all I had was the first world to play with. It's still very much a banjo game. You talk to guys, they ask you to help them, you do stuff for them.
For example, in that first world I first found out I had to race a mole to knock the "businessman" out of him (Bottles the Mole so ya know). Yep, a race, but it was fun! Aside from all sorts of weird obstacles fitting a cartoony world, the vehicles you got control of worked in weird ways, in that they were top heavy with oddly placed wheels, meaning you could easily topple them over, and further get your wheels stuck on another vehicle. That was fun, but was expected of a "vehicle game".
After that, I found myself having to defend a robo-shark's eyes from electro-gypsies or whatever. You COULD just get out and fight them, but it doesn't work too well. Rather, you will use whatever car you have built and have to knock them all out of the way. Crazy classic Rare fun that was. Further, I had the objective of knocking a ball shaped Jengo fello off the top of a huge tower as far as I could, with a well timed ram. You still gather notes, and still have to climb things, and still have to explore, there's just a lot of tracks now.
The videos just don't do it justice.
That said, it's important to realize that it's NOT Banjo-Threeie, it's meant to be it's own game with unique gameplay, and in this I'd say they succeeded. I was honestly getting sick of the "old formula" anyway. They do a good job here. It's certainly not a "racing game", though there is the occasional race, but rather a platformer with cars.
I dont believe you.
You can play Nuts and Balls all you want, i'll stick to the N64 and my comfort zones.
Comfort Zone has 20% off their mattresses for the next month.
You're convincing me. It's been a while since I played a good Rare game. I'll have to check out the demo.
I'll be playing the original Banjo on XBLA, I dont really like the direction they took with the new one...
It definitely sounds weird, but have you played the demo?
not really, i don't understand why they'd take the game in a different direction(vehicles) when the first game was so popular, and the 2nd one did just as well.
Because when they made Perfect Dark Zero, in the direct vein of the first game, it did poorly because while they were copying their previous success for 8 years, everyone else was reinventing the genre in unique directions. So, they realized they couldn't just copy the old game, it's time for something new.
I think they did well. If you'd rather play the original Banjo, it still exists, they didn't recycle your copy to make the disks. Also, you could play the Banjo game on Gameboy Advance. It's the same sort of gameplay, just with the camera locked overhead. Good luck finding it though...
it becomes available on the xbox live arcade the day nuts and bolts releases
Oh, I thought you meant finding the original game in general
I have the GBA game if you want to borrow it. Do you have an SP or GBA?
I'd prefer to get the achievements :)
Never knew that existed :P
I haven't played the GBA game, actually... heard it was okay, but never played it. I don't actually have any of Rare's GBC or GBA games... their only handheld game I have is the first Donkey Kong Land. :)
Same here, but I'd like to change that.
The GBA Banjo game is pretty good, although not as good as the N64 games. I got it for free back when I was reviewing games for N-Philes. Usually I got crappy games to review, but that was one of the rare good ones.
why would they pick you to review games? your too nintendo biased!
You soul is broken.
B~K on XBL will suck, I base this on several factors.
A.) No N64 controller
B.) I hate you
PDZ was okay but should have been an exact copy of PD, not the Halo/PD hybrid that it stands for. The Deathmatch lost its feel of hunting, deviating from the satismacktion found in Ge and PD. The level design was obtuse, it felt like they didn't even play test them for groups, just went with ideas based on other games for online dm.
Future Perfect is PDZ imo. Why FP hasn't been port'd to Wii is anyone's guess, though.
TrollSr Wrote:why would they pick you to review games? your too nintendo biased!
It was for a Nintendo website so my bias didn't matter much. I also started a feature there in which we highlighted the best 3rd party GameCube game each month so where's the bias in that?
DMiller Wrote:I also started a feature there in which we highlighted the best 3rd party GameCube game each month so where's the bias in that?
3rd Party Game For Gamecube still = Nintendo
but if it was a nintendo site it doesnt really matter much
Your debate is immaculate and this argument is enlightening.
There's plenty of "platforming", but it's just never really on foot. You can go on foot but it's not ideal by any means. There's a lot of ramping onto precarious ledges and such, which is a replacement of jumping onto them. In other words, plenty of platforms, just different ways to get to them.