More games need rude sidekicks that neg you imho
2 Likes
bring her back!!!
4 Likes
it was pretty much a constant thing until Fi, who everyone hated (because they were annoying and boring)
3 Likes
They tried to have a Cortana and it just didn’t work
4 Likes
oh yeah also don’t forget every time you touch a pixel of a rock without the right gloves the game gives you a nice long text about that too! infuriating lol
7 Likes
I’m going to have to get a better phone cause I can’t take screenshots of this shader (jvc d series variant of sony megatron prepended with ntsc adaptive) that don’t turn out an illegible haze and I need meticulous documentation of every town and interior in this game. truly God’s chosen JRPG, I shouldn’t have put off replaying it for so long.
23 Likes
Banjo Kazooie is one of those games i’ve so deeply internalized that it’s no longer about if i find the game “good” or not now, because it’s so ingrained in me. i played those first several levels so many times. also i just really love the music and the way it changes when you go around to different areas, and also the way the overworld feels. the note collecting is definitely really stupid and tedious… but it ends up getting a pass for me because of i know the levels so well generally.
also i def feel pandered to by recent games like Cavern of Dreams and Corn Kidz 64 that are going after the Banjo Kazooie nostalgia market even tho i’m also slightly alienated by them.
5 Likes
i honestly preferred it to mario as a kid i think bc it had far fewer abstracted “videogame challenge” segments, no infinite death holes, and i’ve never really cared about movement tech compared to the feeling of a place. but trying it out again i’m like… you gotta give me SOMETHING… even the roll button makes you stand stock still at the end for like half a second, just in case people wanted to chain them and have too much fun. i’m probably getting the worst portion of it bc everything at the start is like text popups for each of several hundred new items… also like it’s very explicitly a kids game when it comes to spelling stuff out so even remarking on all this now makes me feel like one of those people who leaves comments on Blues Clues videos being like “sigh, another turgid filler episode. if they dont finally give us some Steve backstory in the finale i’m going to consider the premise totally wasted ¬¬”
something i have been thinking abt: for some reason i absolutely can’t stand a certain type of cartoony 3d, like the spyros and sly raccoons and gexes and etc with their blobby recreations of a kind of generalised “saturday morning cartoon” aesthetic that feels like it’s been art directed to death, so i gotta give this credit for not triggering the same feeling in me. maybe its just familiarity but it feels a bit more garish and sludgy which helps reduce that sort of manicured feeling. i remember it has really good sewer pipes in general
13 Likes
yeah, esp when 3D platformers transitioned to the PS2 and there’s this more bouncy/clean/rigid feeling and it doesn’t have the weird gruginess of a lot of n64 games, i started to lose interest. i tried to play Sly at some point and something about it just wasn’t for me - i’m not even really sure what, exactly. maybe the age had passed for me to be into that sort of thing anymore. maybe that’s the fate of most mascot 3D platformers that aren’t like Mario 64 or whatever.
re: Gex i think it’s just not as good of a game that is also chock-full of 90’s obnoxiousness, and Spyro has really simple worlds that read well for kids but are a bit Blue’s Clues and not as colorful/labyrinthine as a Banjo Kazooie.
7 Likes
Giving Link a Data-like emotionless robot sidekick was a bold choice. I always found it funny when a NPC would reveal something significant and both Link and Fi would stare at them giving no emotional reaction whatsoever
100%. Saturday morning aesthetic is how I used to always think about the majority of these games. Mario 64’s style is like an early 3D fascination with textures wrapped around 3D objects and I think a lot of other developers mistook that for being cartoonish. And you’re right, somehow Banjo Kazooie avoids this quality despite having the most exaggerated googly eyes on everything design possible.
8 Likes
i think Banjo Kazooie is going for more of a “dark fairytale” sort of setting vs. a straight saturday morning cartoon. the n64 helps in conveying that sort of sense of spooky strangeness in a way it wouldn’t as much in higher definition, and there’s some creative texture work to that end as well - esp in the sort of sewery Clanker’s Cavern type locations. the music and sound is also much more memorably/intentionally directed and a crucial part of the experience vs. other games where you can tell they didn’t prioritize it as much.
8 Likes
Banjo-Kazooie and -Tooie both did genuinely clever things with the 3D collectathon platformer template, which is what we had for “open world” console games before GTA3-likes took the crown (as perfectly symbolized by Jak & Daxter → Jak 2)
so the problem with them imo is mostly that theyre good games in a genre that died for good reasons. i mean Rare helped kill it with DK64 and then loudly pissed on the corpse with Conker’s BFD lol
Banjo-Tooie is imo a fantastic game that is. a drag to actually play. theres so much creativity in the world themes, and strange Easter eggs and secrets (i obsessed over Stop-and-Swap at the time lol) and weird dark kid fantasy humor which ive always got time for. Its actually neat af when they interconnect worlds via the train stations or secret passages, have you swap/split up the characters to solve different puzzles, etc. its just at the end of the day moving your little guy around doesnt feel that great and your rewards for completing goals are like, exactly as satisfying as checking off a grocery list except there’s no food in your fridge when you turn the game off
You can spend upwards of a half hour of your life that you will never ever get back ferrying dinosaurs between worlds to get one (1) jiggy which isnt even enough to unlock a new world or anything, because both games have ridiculous collectathon bottlenecks. Like Mario 64 figured this pacing out from the jump and no one else ever grokked it
it does remain my favorite game where you can transform into a washing machine and shoot tighty whities at your enemies
14 Likes
plus tooie is somehow to this day the gold standard for insane old-disney-cartoon-style chucklefuck racism in videogames
13 Likes
whoa forgive my ignorance but i dont remember that part
edit: OH DUHHH its Mumbo Jumbo and fuckin Humba Wumba right. yeah thats inexcusable
5 Likes
8 Likes
I played the first Spyro really recently and actually in my mind it felt a bit like Quake… it was all about navigating 3D spaces and seeing somewhere and figuring out how to get up there so you can free the sexy buff dragons.
The sequels were all much more kiddo though with lots of mini-games and such and less about exploring 3D space (the levels felt more flat as a result), but they’re still fun if you like that kind of thing
I liked the sly games because they involve lots of jumping across rooftops which is one of my favourite things to do in videogames. my favourite thief 2 level is the one where you go across rooftops, raid a building, then escape back across them
10 Likes
lost judgement is pleasing me for:
- enhancing the menu of actual detective mechanical bullshit
- letting me befrend a bunch of cats
9 Likes
i think it’s the fact that they inexplicably hold my beer’d themselves there, almost as if in response to the fact that they had gotten away with mumbo jumbo, that makes them such a Legendary Developer
7 Likes
the british had blackface characters on their tv shows well into the 00s, banjo tooie accurately reflects the chucklefuck racism of the angloid soul
15 Likes