banjo-tooie

a review of Banjo-Tooie
a videogame developed by Rareware
and published by Nintendo
for the microsoft xbox live arcade and the nintendo 64
text by Ryan Litton

0.5 star

Bottom line: Banjo-Tooie is “a sin whose debts must be paid in hell.”

Ever since I first made landing on the bloodying continent of “white male adulthood”, I’ve made considerable strides to protect the glossy sheen on the media of my childhood. Some people would argue that this is naïve and unrealistic, and I’d like to meet those people; they certainly wouldn’t be wrong to think that way. It stings a lot -– really -– to have to remove those rose-tinted glasses and tuck them away in your side pocket (this shirt has a pocket on the left breast, mind). That day you put Breath of Fire into a yellowing Super Nintendo and fired it up, hoping to feel what is Breath of Fire made you feel 11 years prior . . . well, it’s scary. I mean, what if it doesn’t feel the same way it used to? You sit and you wait and you hope to Christ that the now-apparent, now-appalling elementary school level English translation doesn’t heck you in the ear, but it does. And it hurts. Instantly your memories retroactively disintegrate and you’re left holding a smudgy controller that you refuse to clean because it would mean washing away something you don’t understand. And it’s not as though the game suddenly became bad. Breath of Fire has always had a painfully rudimentary English translation. Now freed of the warm memories that help you sleep at night, its flaws are magnified, and it is with a groan and a shrug that -– brick by brick –- the dismantling of yesteryear becomes a thing of loathing.

Which is to say that yes, I should have stayed away from replaying Banjo-Tooie, a game that up until now had been kept behind glass for many years, safe from the cynical criticisms of a child who has become a man who has played far more and better videogames.

Recently its sequel, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, has been given an actual release date. This leads me to believe that it might actually exist on November 14th rather than to simply dangle in obscurity in the back of our minds in the form of teaser trailer released over 2 years ago. Remember that thing? Remember how it told us nothing at all except that Banjo had been redesigned to resemble a box of cereal? The fact that Banjo had “evolved” from a cartoony bear into a blocky cartoony bear might have literally offended a lot of people, if The Internet and its outcry is any indication. It was this sort of outcry that actually inspired me to make room on my Nintendo 64 cart and give its predecessor another romp in the sack. See, everyone is all ups in arms about how Nuts and Bolts will “probably” destroy “everything we, the fans love about the series!” and that Nuts and Bolts is merely a way for Rare to rejuvenate a popular franchise by shoehorning “gimmicks” into the game. To this I say: yeah, probably. Can you blame them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Kameo: Elements of Power and Grabbed by the Ghoulies were, uh, masterpieces in their own right. It’s just that, you know, Banjo-Kazooie has an automatic audience built in, vehicular gimmickry or not. (Not to mention I’m sure there’s at least some pressure to perform from boss Microsoft, given that they dropped $377 million big ones to have Nintendo’s starlet second-party developer perform miracles on the Xbox platform. lol, et cetera.)

Criticizing a game that no one outside of a developer or smug print journalists have played is nothing new, sure, but I felt that perhaps the purists weren’t without their merit. These self-proclaimed fans are shamelessly disturbed that Banjo and Kazooie have resigned their eclectic arsenal of “moves” in favor of piloting planes, trains and automobiles, or whatever. I gave them the benefit of the doubt while retaining the knowledge that people happily and willingly play Mario games that don’t allow Mario to do what is that Mario does; he didn’t pick up a bat or swing a golf club at any point in Super Mario Bros., and I can’t remember a single instance where he kicked a soccer ball around or created a revolution simply by dancing in Super Mario Bros. 3. However, I am not able to have Mario run perfectly by holding down the B button with the tip of my thumb while having him jump perfectly with a tap of the A button using the back of my thumb in any of the sports and/or party games that Nintendo sees fit to artificially inseminate him in to. And those games sold well regardless; I guess that is admitting something sad.

Long before Rare began having wet dreams about games which focus on brightly-colored paper animals fornicating in the Garden of Eden, they created the only games we were legally allowed to look forward to in between the megaton bi-annual releases from Nintendo. Their games were, for better or worse, probably some of the best games on the Nintendo 64, which at its best is a miserable statement, and at its worse something you’d be more than a little hesitant to put on a tombstone. On some god-forsaken Christmas that I can’t be bothered to think back on for longer than 6 seconds, I received Diddy Kong Racing, a game in which Donkey Kong’s “nephew wannabe” (that’s seriously what the Donkey Kong Country manual says) has to defeat a gigantic pig that for whatever reason is proficient in black magic. And he has to defeat him by racing with the help of his colorful animal friends, who are questionably also his competitors, considering all they ever do is race. Yes, I own Diddy Kong Racing, but I’m probably younger than you, so relax. Friends of mine –- people who perhaps rightly sided with Mario Kart 64, a game which cuts out the cluttered “adventure mode” in favor of racing because that’s what you do in a racing game -– they would ask me, “Who are these characters? Why should I care about them? The only one I recognize is Donkey Kong’s nephew wannabe, the lovable Diddy Kong.” I would almost always reply, “I don’t know.” I might have also thought deeply on the idea that these same people had basically admitted to having somehow cared about a plumber, his brother, his mushroom friends and his reptilian enemies. Only after it was announced that a Super Mario 64-like platformer would star one of the otherwise forgettable racers from Diddy Kong Racing was I able to say, “Oh, that’s Banjo. He’s a bear. His friend is a bird that lives in his backpack. He will collect golden jigsaw pieces in an upcoming videogame that you and I will surely play, because there is nothing left for us to play.”

Incidentally, I think it should be noted that I had never even played as Banjo in Diddy Kong Racing. I’m not really sure what that means.

I started to think that maybe they would create platformers out of every playable character. Honestly, I wouldn’t have put it past them; hell, maybe they even considered it. Even later, a then-innocent-looking platformer based around Conker the little red squirrel was announced, and I thought that maybe I was right. I thought: “Oh no, they might actually go through with this,” and felt terrible for most of 4th grade. But then Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released just ten seconds before the Nintendo 64 died from neglect by the company that was supposed to have loved and nurtured it, and the world was probably a better place for it.

(Sidenote: I think it’s imperative to this that I mention this: my racer of choice was Tiptup, a lil’ ol’ turtle whose facial expression on the cover of the Nintendo DS re-release of Diddy Kong Racing would be downright offensive to God. Tiptup was, for all intents and purposes, a driver who was well-rounded (lol, he’s a turtle) and damn my soul if playing as a turtle in a racing game isn’t hilariously ironic, if even on a cro-magnon level. I guess I liked his voice, too. Unfortunately he was never given his own game, if you don’t count his brief cameo appearances in both Banjo games. But for the sake of our children, let’s just assume that his game would have been awful but totally worth it if only for the voice acting. “HEY IT’S TIPTUP”, et cetera. We are, however, still waiting patiently for games starring Timber the tiger, Bumper the badger, and God help us, T.T. the anthropomorphic stopwatch.)

Ahem.

So I gave Banjo-Tooie another ride around the block. I did so because maybe I sided with the nay-sayers; maybe they were right. I chose Tooie over the original because a) it’s being released on Xbox Live Arcade as a free download for those who preorder the game which, no matter how you look at it is a really brilliant idea and b) the argument stemmed from the fact that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts stripped the cartoon bear and the cartoon bird of the abilities they’d received in earlier installments; because Banjo-Tooie retained the “moves” from the original game while adding a whole hell of a lot more, I figured I’d explore where Nuts and Bolts would presumably jump off from – Tooie being the so-called “climax” of the series where things were crystalline and sublime (supposedly). What I found was something I wouldn’t be afraid to call rude, presumptuous and downright insulting. It’s also not all that surprising, I’m sure.

Banjo-Tooie is a terrible game. To use a warranted hyperbole, it is everything wrong with videogame design. I’d be hard pressed not to agree with someone who deemed this thing a blue collar assembly line of a game. Actually, I’ll just go ahead and say it: Banjo-Tooie is not a game; it is being assigned your senior thesis on the Friday before prom – yes, the same prom you promised that girl whose name you can’t remember that you would ring her fallopian tubes like church bells. Well, that ended up not happening, and the blame very clearly rests upon the shoulders of a whimsical bear and his squawking son of a bitch of a partner. (Note: Banjo’s shoulders can presently withstand more emotional baggage than ever before due in large part to the redesigned box-like shape that they now retain. Thanks, Rare.) It was a game that I perhaps wrongly defended out of nostalgia, and all at once I couldn’t wait to be relieved of the shackling bullstuff that Rare has been deceitfully gluing to the bottoms of our hearts. I’m sure we’ve all come to the conclusion that they are the most sinister proprietor of “games which require you to collect things”. But there, under the guise of living stuffed animals, perhaps we were duped into thinking that something that is inherently boring is actually fun. I honestly can’t think of anything more shameful.

We looked forward to Banjo-Kazooie because it was built off of the Super Mario 64 engine, and Lord knows we couldn’t get enough of that back then. Super Mario 64 was the sort of game that one person could play at a birthday party sleepover and everyone could watch and be content, even if they never even picked up a controller that night. It was something to be a part of, and I imagine likening it to the way the baby boomer generation would talk about the 60s, albeit in a childlike manner that would almost unanimously be considered hilarious. “It was something you had to be alive for.” We, the children of the Nintendo 64 era, wanted more of that. Banjo-Kazooie came just in time, I figure. It was bold and it was beautiful, even if its boxart is something of a surrealist enema; as Wikipedia will shamelessly tell you, the characters had looping voice-like sounds rather than actual voice acting, a choice “likely made due to memory limitations on Nintendo 64 cartridges; however, this added considerably to the atmosphere and uniqueness of the game.” Now, I don’t know if you agree with that last part. I don’t know if I agree with it. Perhaps something so charming at the time has crumbled under the weight of retrospection, though hell if it wasn’t heartwarming back then, given that you were under the age of 12 (anything above that is pushing it, maybe). It had all the ingredients, really: rather than coins, you collected musical notes; instead of stars, you inexplicably collected golden jigsaw pieces; instead of power-ups, there existed a pink lizard-skinned shaman who transformed Banjo into a variety of different animals and vehicles depending on the situation and level motif; Mario punched and jumped on his enemies, whereas Banjo relied on the bird in his backpack to gouge enemies with her beak. There was an appreciated nuance that I believe is often forgotten, and it was this: After collecting a jigsaw piece (ubiquitous to the series as a “jiggy”), Banjo and Kazooie remained inside the level where the player could then decide to continue collecting more jigsaw pieces, should he or she wish to do so. Mario 64 had Mario dancing around to something resembling what I’m sure can be considered music, followed by a cookie cutter profile silhouette of the plumber’s head engorging the screen, suspending us in temporary darkness; and then there you were, back in the lobby. Banjo didn’t do this, and we unwitting respected the decision to omit said dancing. There might be a brilliant argument behind the idea of forcing you back into the lobby, but unfortunately I’m not in the business of delving into such madness right now.

I believe there was something to be said about Banjo-Tooie.

Oh, yes. Banjo-Tooie is not Banjo-Kazooie at all, and it’s not a good game because of that. That is not to say that it was imperative the game attempt to emulate its predecessor in order to be a good game; no, this is simply not true. But the box clearly states: “THE BEAR AND BIRD ARE BACK.” Do not be fooled, gentle reader, into thinking that such a thing is true, as I’m certain so many of us were. They had returned in the sense that their on-screen avatars masqueraded around as characters we perhaps liked for reasons we didn’t understand, though there isn’t much else to it. Make no fuss about it: this game is a sin whose debts must be paid in hell.

It is because Banjo-Tooie relies so heavily on its varied move set that it is convoluted and insulting. On one hand I can’t help but applaud Rare in somehow cramming more available button combinations into an inherently flawed controller (human beings do not have 3 hands), but on the other hand I hate their game. The whole “running out of buttons” dilemma was easily solved by allowing Banjo and Kazooie to split up, which is 100% a pain in the ass and 0% fun. And it seems as though when even that wasn’t enough, they had to go and make painful and unnecessary changes that lead to even more agonizing foreplay before we’re even allowed to play the game as it was meant to be played. Take, for instance, Mumbo Jumbo; in the last game he transformed Banjo into a variety of different animals which related in some way to the overall theme of the level. If it was an ice world, you’d better believe he’s turning you into a walrus, et cetera. In Tooie, he is merely a cockblock to having fun. His job now handed over to Humba Wumba, a large-breasted parody of what I can only assume is a Native American, Mumbo Jumbo is purely Someone Who Does Something in order for you to receive a hecking puzzle piece. But he won’t do it for free, oh no! In order to enlist his services, he needs a glowbo, a magical creature which giggles incessantly and can usually be found within five feet of Mumbo’s home, don’t you know. After attaining said creature, we become Mumbo; Banjo waits behind as we take Mumbo to where he needs to go in order to do what he has to do, which, of course, requires the use of the glowbo we had to catch for him. In the first world we’re able to explore, Mayahem Temple, he brings a golden golem to life. We then take control of the golem, and are able to do so for a minute or so. As the golem, we are to kick a gigantic stone door open – a feat Banjo and Kazooie would be unable to do otherwise. Once the timer runs up, control is returned to Mumbo. Mumbo then has to run all the way back to his home where, if you recall, we’ve left Banjo and Kazooie. Once returned, we assume control of the bear and bird, which have been waiting patiently for the chance to play the game they supposedly star in.

Here’s where things get dicey.

Remember that stone door you kicked down? Well put on your goddamned Levis, Denim Dan, because we’re going through that door. Once inside, there it is: Humba’s tepee. You can rightly assume that we’re probably going to be transformed into something in order to do . . . something, which will eventually lead to you receiving a jigsaw piece. (The “jiggy”, of course, is the same reward you receive for doing anything – every single time – no matter how horrifically varied the difficulty may be, and no matter how close you were to killing a loved one.) You talk to Humba: “Big heap welcome to bear and bird. Me Humba Wumba, best magic person on island. You bring glowbo magic creatures here!” We sort of brush off the mild racism, then we stare at her blocky tits for a few seconds and then it finally hits us: she needs a glowbo. Maybe we step outside to rip the radio out of someone’s car and beat on it for a few minutes, I don’t know. All we know is that if we want to keep playing this game, we need to find a glowbo. So we do, or whatever; the damned thing is laughing and cavorting around like a fool behind her tepee, something you can’t help but feel insulted by. That is to say that Rare assumes that you’re an idiot, or a child, or more realistically all of the above. Deliver the glowbo, jump into her arousingly pink-purple pool of whatever and viola! You’ve been transformed into . . . yeah, a stone bear. Banjo, in case you’ve forgotten, is a bear. And now he’s made of stone. This is supposed to make sense.

What does all of this lead to? Well, you get to play in a kickball tournament against some stone statues (referred to as “stoneys”), but only if you’re made out of stone, which of course is why we just spent the last hour assuming the roles of different playable characters to get to this point. Your reward for all of this? A jiggy, of course: the currency of the Banjo series. The currency which clears the way for more worlds, more moves, and more opportunities to collect more jiggies. It is at this point that we can dismiss Banjo-Tooie as a game. If Super Mario 64 is a light lunch with the in-laws, then Tooie is purchasing the entire restaurant, firing all of the employees and spending the remainder of the week eating whole, raw turkeys in the back freezer while simultaneously vomiting and crying (which then freezes instantly).

Rare does this sort of thing so very often; they frequently tempt their audience with pursed, quivering lips, promising to “rock your world, baby; now lay that seat back and let me show you what’s what,” before realizing that they’re “not that kind of girl” and “I don’t usually do things like this.” What a total waste of a night, and you paid for dinner only because you were positive that you’d be getting desert later on, if you know what I mean. In the same sort of way I stop and wonder: I enjoyed the first game (I think), so what is this? What is this thing?

Someone – or more realistically a lot of someones – decided that this sort of thing is fun, and kids will love it! To be quite honest, I’ve stopped to think many times over the course of writing this review to consider that perhaps this is a children’s game, and best left to be played by children or no one at all. And then I remember two things: 1) this is most certainly not a children’s game, despite what on the surface may appear to be the contrary; I say this because there is no way anyone with that sort of attention span would submit themselves to this sort of treachery and 2) I set out to prove to adults, if we must refer to them as such, that it is most assuredly not wrong of Rare to tinker with what these folks consider to be a “classic formula”. Though really, if the idea of vehicles in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts sounds terrifying, I ask this: Have you considered the vehicle from Banjo-Tooie? I mean, really? I realize this is a bit of a stretch, though it’s an opportunity to complain about something so inane that I can hardly keep myself from laughing really hard about bringing it up, while at the same time descending to a level of frustration I did not think possible.

There’s this train in Banjo-Tooie. In the game, it is referenced to as though it is alive; it’s called Chuffy.

I hate that train.

You first encounter Chuffy in Glitter Gulch Mine, one of Banjo-Tooie‘s more uninspired levels that is only tolerable for its music and for the fact that the enemies wear cowboy hats and say “YEE-HAW!” before attempting to kill you. The train is found inside a room, which ends up being the train station; Chuffy is turned over on its side, and we are unable to enter it. The logical solution to returning the train to an upright position on the tracks? Well, before you even have time to think, there it is: a goddamned Mumbo Jumbo pad. Mumbo must be sought out, because that’s just what you have to do. He’s on the complete other side of the level, waiting for action inside of a house shaped like a gigantic skull. He needs a glowbo. We find one. As Mumbo, we then proceed to walk to the other side of the level where we realize that his magic is relevant for all of 10 seconds in their entire level. Mumbo levitates the train and places it back on the tracks; once we backtrack to the skull, we become Banjo again. We then walk back to where we just were. That’s three trips in order to do one thing with virtually no incentive. One first needs to enter the room as Banjo and Kazooie to see the Mumbo Jumbo pad, and then return as Mumbo to do what it is that the context-sensitive pad even does. Finally, we make one last return to the train station to mess around with this train. Presumably the train is ours for the taking, since hey, we just did a lot of work just to even enter the damn thing. Well, then we’re told that no, we can’t use the train, which then prompts a boss battle inside the furnace. This boss, Old King Coal, is a gigantic mound of coal with eyes. He heats up the floor and runs around with his arms in the air. He never appears to do anything else. You fire a few eggs at him and he goes down quickly. Now, finally, the train is ours.

That is, if we find a train button in each world, thus unlocking the various train stations housed within. This is only the beginning of the train debacle, but for the purposes of this review, I will simply relate an experience – one that I find most offensive and patronizing to the player.

The next train station is found in the very next world, which is called Witchyworld. It’s a game world inside of a mock-amusement park, which almost sounds too brilliant to believe, though later disheartening considering how poorly executed it was. At some point we run in to a baby dinosaur that has been caged up as an exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors, a sort of haunted cavern that presumably you’d find in an amusement park. After blasting the cell door open, the dinosaur remarks that he’d like to go home, but can’t until the train pulls in to the station. Once the train station is unlocked, Chuffy pulls in to the Witchyworld station, effectively connecting the two game worlds – something that was touted as an innovate feature instead of the sort of migraine that makes you never want to show kindness to another human being ever again. The dinosaur, overjoyed, runs to the train and sits in the empty freight car.

Eventually we find ourselves in Terrydactyland, a dinosaur themed world and, well . . . you know where it goes from there (unlock the train station, the dinosaur returns home, et cetera). We then go to the dinosaur’s home, where his mother is overjoyed to be reunited with her missing child. Except she doesn’t give us anything. Not a jiggy, nothing. Why? Well, because she has two other children, of course, and there’s something wrong with both of them. One of them is very ill, and the other has somehow shrunk. But what’s this? We spy a breakable rock just in front of the shrunken dinosaur, and after using an otherwise worthless move, the Bill Drill, we blast the rock open to find . . . a Mumbo Jumbo pad. I’m actually not even joking; I don’t quite know what else to say.

 

HILARIOUS ALT TEXT

Was all of that boring to read? Good, because puzzlingly enough it’s even worse to actually play it.

So to you, children of the world, I say this: give ol’ Nuts and Bolts a chance, because it most certainly can’t be any worse than the game that came before it. Reject the idea that Banjo-Tooie is fun and innovative -– that it is a sin for Nuts and Bolts to deviate from a formula that Rare so ceremoniously muddled and destroyed. It’s time to lay our memories to rest, friends, and embrace the new ideal. Relying on warm nostalgia to guide us through decision-making is a perverted form of trickery, and something a lot of people appear to have accepted – the YouTube comments on “THE FIRST NUTS AND BOLTS GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE” are a testament to this. Lay down your swords, brothers and sisters, and reject senselessness and collect-a-thons masquerading as “game design”. I don’t know, I guess I’m ready to kiss and make up with Rare – hold its hand as its flagship series gives birth to something radically different from, you know, something awful. Ruthless and brash and everything in between, Nuts and Bolts will scoff at anti-progressive, self-righteous cosmonauts of the not-so-distant-past who hide behind oversized bowls of atomic orange Cheetos –- the jungle of the lesser man. Or maybe it’ll just be a pretty all right game about a bear and a bird who ride around in vehicles for some reason. Either way, hold the Mumbo Jumbo pads.

Ryan Litton

Comments

30 Responses to banjo-tooie

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *