Nintendo's Press Conference

[A Black Falcon]

After playing each one of these games to death (death, I say!) I can very safely say that the levels in Banjo are far more clever and well-designed than the ones in DK64. DK64 doesn't even try to be new and original. It basically just copies Banjo's themes but does it worse.

I hadn't played B-K first, so from my perspective I'd say that DK64 took similar ideas and improved on them. :)

The reason why you see no reason for the different control scheme is the same reason why you prefer DK64 over the Banjo games; you simply can't tell the difference between average platforming fare and near-perfection.

Why can you not understand that your opinion of game quality isn't the law? It'd be SO nice if you'd understand that... but given your history I very much doubt it'll ever happen.

I accept that you find BK better. I disagree, but its not an absurd statement. Yet you... you seem to think that whenever someone disagrees with you on something like this they are stupid and so obviously wrong and you must tell them again and again how because they don't think the same way you do they are stupid, and many times without really backing up your statements with facts or in depth analyses of the games... that's sure the case here. About all I still see in your posts is "well they are better!" 'well they are better' doesn't cut it for an explanation, which is why I gave more depth... but I can't say much in reply when you don't say much...

You did the same thing in the discussion of Oni. "its stupid". Great. Helpful for discussion there. "the combat system is so simple". I still don't get that one, when you consider that it is in a genre where anything more than two or three attacks is abnormal...

The gameplay is different because each game places different emphases on certain basic 3D paltformer aspects. In Banjo there is plenty of collecting just like most 3D platformers, but the emphasis is placed more on doing really cool, fun platforming in order to get the things that you need to collect, while DK is just about the collecting. There are very few real platforming bits in the game and the tasks are very menial. Most people that lived through the birth and growth of the 3D platforming genre agree with me. Back during the N64 days we would have to live on maybe two or three big releases per year, and we got very well aquanted with each game. The platforming genre was one of the biggest on the N64, so it is one that a lot of us are very particular about. Either we completely got sick of the genre or got really picky about it, only accepting the best. I'm the latter.

B-T feels like DK64, but with one character. It doesn't feel like I do any more or less platforming, because you don't. DK64 had just as much platforming as B-T, its just split up some by how you have to do varying tasks as each of the five Kongs instead of doing most stuff as standard Banjo-Kazooie and just limited tasks as the other playable characters.

That is a gameplay difference that does differentiate them, for sure. But nowhere NEAR as dramatically as you make it sound.

And DK64 just doesn't have so much less platforming. That is simply untrue.

As for 3d platformers... I got kind of sick of them after getting three of them in around a year (Mario 64, DK64, Rocket). Oh, they were fun... but it got old, somewhat. So similar, and the idea of 'a small number of open worlds where you collect items' is okay but just not as good as more focused quest platformers, IMO.., That is why I loved Rayman 2 so much -- it was different! Rayman 2 is, IMO, the second best 3d platformer after Mario 64...

Now I'm having fun with B-T, probably, because its been quite a while since I played a 3d platformer... :)

Look. I didn't think DK64 was one of the best games on the N64. It did get somewhat dull at parts, and there were several levels I didn't like very much. They weren't bad, but I just wasn't that interested by them... but the game WAS fun enough to slowly make progress. Somewhat repetetive? Yeah. Do you spend a lot of time collecting? Well, sure, but you do that in every single game in the genre... DK64 was just different in that it has five characters so you need to go back over places more than usual. I didn't mind that, you clearly did. Difference of opinion, oh well...


As for Banjo-Kazooie, I really should buy that game... eventually...


Oh, and the PSP WILL have to deal with the major issues that its format brings up: battery life (it CAN'T be very good!), fragility (a disc-based media... yes, more fragile and easier to break...), maybe skipping (games, I bet, are harder to deal with that problem with than music is), and most importantly PRICE...