I mean, it’s hard to talk about anything BK-related-or-adjacent without it!
This is a good back-of-the-box quote
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I liked the singing bees in Click Clock Wood though 
Ok, that was an alright touch, but you still gotta admit that game had too much dang polka
I watched the whole video and now I actually think the review is kind of good, it makes sense
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Yeah I think the thrust of the article is alright, though it’s written a little clumsily. Yooka Laylee is Banjo Kazooie as filtered through our flawed, rose-colored memories of the game, so it doesn’t really do anything to improve on its inspiration. Whether or not this is damning is in the eye of the beholder, though.
If I had written it I’d maybe have opined on how it could have improved on the formula, but maybe nobody wants armchair game design in their reviews.
yeah actually i think it kind of touches on something that has always felt weird to me about this game existing, i.e. i had no idea anyone cared enough about Banjo Kazooie to make such an obvious “tribute” to it, it just seems to be overstating the importance of that specific game, and even that “era” of gaming, as something that is worth being nostalgic for
but also like people can do whatever the heck they want if you ask me
okay, well dang. as someone who never had an Nintendo console post-NES and has no special feelings at all for RARE because the only thing of theirs I know is Battletoads, how would I approach a game like Yooka Laylee?
At a discount
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Yeah I mean obviously enough people wanted this thing so good for the people who made it and the people who will enjoy playing it.
Confession: I’ve never played the Banjo Kazooie games, but I did play Jet Force Gemini which I think probably does a lot of the same things but with more of a shooty bent, and Star Fox Adventures which seems to be sort of the end of the line for that school of game design.
A heavy one at that.
I mean, I don’t think the content is wrong, it’s just presented clumsily as a video for no real reason, and isn’t saying anything that people haven’t been saying about Nintendo games for a long time. Also her whole “the real BK sucks, but it doesn’t” at the beginning is way more illustrative of her point (in what comes off as an unintentional way) than any of the Baudrillard citing stuff that follows. She takes like ten minutes to say something that could be said way quicker, and for some reason makes it a video that doesn’t actually illustrate what she is talking about much.’
I mean, I know this is largely like how people criticize Sarkesian for being basically Feminism 101, but it just was really boring, and basically what everyone who saw the vids of the original kickstarter for YL thought when watching them.
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why is it impossible to talk about banjo-kazooie without bringing nostalgia up? it’s a piece of work that still exists and you can go play it right now. fetishing console generations and “experiences” “we” had as “children” is such a gamery approach, and it also conveniently allows you to say literally nothing at all about either game.
if i ever read another videogame review that starts with an anecdote about how the author was twelve and they saved up their allowance and asked their dad to drive them to
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I think BK in particular is subject to this because it’s the kind of game that simply does not get made anymore, and it also hasn’t aged very well. People feel like they need to justify their attitude toward the game by calling to nostalgia, which is easy because there aren’t any games like this.
Rare is also a company that is not what it used to be; people often remember their good works through a filter of “they aren’t as great anymore.” But the truth is that they’ve never been incredible, just very…influential I guess.
[quote=“u_u, post:29, topic:4371, full:true”]yeah actually i think it kind of touches on something that has always felt weird to me about this game existing, i.e. i had no idea anyone cared enough about Banjo Kazooie to make such an obvious “tribute” to it, it just seems to be overstating the importance of that specific game, and even that “era” of gaming, as something that is worth being nostalgic for
[/quote]
I don’t think it’s overstating anything. In my circle (I’m 25) people SWEAR by Banjo Kazooie. Like, I know at least one friend who calls it his favorite game. The N64, in general, seems to have an enormously inflated space in gamer culture. That’s why every damn game is still being called “Better than Ocarina of Time???” as if gamer culture is a monolith and we all decided OoT was the definite best game ages ago. It’s more than just nostalgia… a lot of gamers who grew up with the N64 don’t just have fond memories of it but also firmly believe it’s the best videogames will ever get. And they feel that way to a degree that I have NOT seen among people who grew up with the PS1, Saturn, Genesis, SNES, PS2, Gamecube, etcetera. It’s weird.
Any I like the Baudrillard stuff, not cuz of the “rose colored glasses” commentary (which as y’all have said is pretty basic and obvious), but the other part: the idea that Yooka is being made not just BECAUSE of BK’s exalted position, but actually to REINFORCE the position. On the part of both the developers and the fans it’s a case of a dominant culture reinforcing its own mythology, and its conception of itself as dominant. Which is why (in addition to the user gamer reasons) fans are getting extremely mad about YL’s bad reviews. It also brings to mind the reaction to Undertale being voted “Best game of all time” in the 2015 gamefaqs tournament, beating Ocarina in the last round. The dominant, monolithic gamer culture doesn’t want to cede ground.
I do wish Heather had just said BK fuckin blows tho. However, seeing how insanely mad people are getting about her video already, I honestly feel like her “BK’s still great tho!” attitude is just to minimize that reaction.
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This is interesting to me on a number of levels cos I’m a lot older and the N64 was still incredibly important to my Gamer Identity, yet I still don’t have any particular affection for Banjo Kazooie. I mean it makes as it was def. targeted at a younger audience than I was at the time, but I still had it and played it I think all the way through. It was probably the last collect-a-thon 3D platformer I ever attempted actually, but I never felt it was anything other than competently put together. It was enough to convince me DK64 wouldn’t be worth the effort.
And yeah the OoT obsession is also not surprising, but basically I would 100x prefer an indie developer make a slavish imitation of that game than BK, it seems like most of the zelda-influenced games look to ALttP instead for influence, and still try to surpass or improve it more than simply recreate it. There is that one game that’s “heavily influenced” by Windwaker right.
Ironically it is probably the fact that in 2017 OoT looks a lot more influential than BK does that makes it easier to conceive of a game that is an imitation of BK’s design style rather than an improvement on it. Even Nintendo has kind of abandoned the 64-era mascot platformer mold for their Marioses post Galaxy (which already kind of pushed at the seams of the genre), although NEW DONK CITY might be a return to form in a way. All roads lead to NEW DONK CITY
I think the difference is just that there isn’t much there to build on in BK to begin with. It’s not very difficult to take a Zelda game and imagine all sorts of new angles for it: new mechanics, a different macro structure (Ittle Dew!!), different tone, etcetera. But Banjo-Kazooie’s “thing” is just… googly eyes, stupid music, and lots of “stuff.” So if you wanna make a game “inspired” by it, it’s a bit of a dead end. Proof: Banjo-Tooie. Which just has MORE goofy characters, MORE stupid music, and MORE stuff. Which is to say, contrary to what one might intuit, perhaps it’s easier to improve on a good game than a fundamentally bad one.
Man, I’m thinking about that firend I mentioned and just getting more and more annoyed. I know it’s just one guy, but most of my friends are weirdo SB-types, so I often see him as my window into “normal” gamers. If you were to ask him why BK is so good he’s just use words like “charming” “whimsical,” “love the music” (???how), “childlike wonder,” etcetera. And it “plays well,” which is to say it lacks anything resembling the frustrating, brain-rearranging frictive nuance of Mario 64, and instead all the animations are really wobbly and there are only two kinds of platform jumps: “trivial” and “clearly impossible.” It’s easy to see what BK can and can’t do, so you never have the experience of trying to do something and failing. You see a ledge and it’s either “i’ll come back later” or “i can definitely do that in one try.” [extremely Elim Garak voice] It’s insidious.
Someone earlier in this thread said that BK ruined 3d platformers for a decade but now im all riled up and actually BK ruined videogames but now we have dark souls and breath of the wild so YL has come to remind us all that videogames are supposed to be bad
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I hate that Mario 64 and BK get compared so much, even though it seems so obvious. They are fundamentally different games. And admittedly, BK’s style (adventure game with light platforming and lots of wacky characters) works way better for an 11 year old than a 30 year old. Mario 64 holds up somewhat better, but it’s not an apt comparison in my opinion.
Look, what I’m saying is that not all videogames have to challenge you, either physically or mentally. BK is comfort food, and it has some pretty wild scenery to boot (Cloud cuckoo land from BT springs to mind). It’s no masterpiece but the idea that it ruined video games is i think better directed towards other, more influential games (cough GTA3 cough)
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I am one of those who grew up with the N64 as a major part of my childhood gaming memories, and was a big enough fan of Rare and BK that honestly the only reason I can think of to buy an XBone is because of Rare Replay.
Now, I haven’t played BK in over a decade now so my fondness for it is entirely based on nostalgia, and now that I think of it I can’t really think of what it is that made the game any good back in the day. I reckon part of it was that the N64 was pretty starved for great games, so any release from either Nintendo or Rare was like a special, highly anticipated event. The other reason I can think of is that BK was short and breezy enough on subsequent playthroughs that you would eventually develop a sort of speedrun-style path through area, sort of a comforting zen-like state of finding order in sprawling, tangled maps.
Rare kind of messed that up in their next platformer, DK64, where you now had 5 different characters that you had to switch between, each with their own specific coloured trinkets to collect. It was just too much crap. Tooie had the same problem, but after DK64 it felt like they had toned it down a lot, so I don’t have as much of a negative feeling towards that one.
Isn’t the sentiment that the game still exists while the conditions under which you experienced it and which somehow made it ideal no longer exist. I don’t understand why this is flummoxing anyone but I also am ethically obligated to not read any published literature on Banjo Kazooie, so that may not be what the writer is saying.