Game Review - Banjo Kazooie: 15 years later...

Back in 1998 I went on a road trip to Montana with my trusty giant (20 pound) 8'' screen TV, an N64, and a copy of Banjo Kazooie I was borrowing from a friend. During one of the more exciting journeys of my childhood I beat what I remember as being one of the best 3D adventure games ever made! If the save files from my friends' cartridges bear (no pun intended) any resemblance to my own skill at gaming, it probably took between 20-40 hours to get through the game with a 100% completion rate, completely unassisted by strategy guide or the internet (which wasn't a particularly useful thing at that time for walkthroughs). I've been trying to get my hands on a copy of Banjo Kazooie ever since and this weekend, a full 15 years later, I had a chance to pick it up, plug the very same N64 (complete with an expansion pack) into a 19'' flat screen, and use the same controller I used back in the day! I was extremely curious how good the game would still be and wondered with dread if perhaps I remembered Banjo Kazooie to be more fantastic than it actually was.

Cue the opening sequence. I was immediately pulled back in time through nostalgia wormhole by this insanely quirky game. Banjo smiles and laughs as if greeting an old friend, stares straight at you and knocks on the screen, shattering the 4th wall in the opening moments. As the cheesy music picks up, the new game starts, and Tootie is kidnapped, I couldn't stop thinking how hokey but strangely enjoyable the game already was. Perhaps it might just survive the test of time after all...

Plot

The plot is about as deep as one can expect from an All Ages game. You're a big brother bear named Banjo and your little sister bear, Tootie (named such because she plays the flute) is kidnapped by a witch named Gruntilda. Gruntilda wants to steal Tootie's youthful looks so you and your bird-friend, Kazooie (who lives in your backpack) need to rescue her so this doesn't happen.

Fearsome Foes!

Gameplay/Feel

The moment I had control over Banjo and Kazooie the muscle memories from years past told me to try all sorts of jumping moves that didn't seem to work. At first I thought that perhaps I was thinking of the controls for another game but after I talked to Bottles the Mole I quickly re-discovered that you need to learn all of the various moves throughout the course of playing the game by finding mole-hills and having brief yet comical exchanges with Bottles. A few such exchanges and two stages later I found my skills rivaling the apex of my childhood. I was able beat entire levels without dying and questioned if it was just an easy game by today's standards or if perhaps I was just really good at Banjo Kazooie. A few more stages, by Mad Monster Mansion, I discovered that the game has a fairly balanced difficulty curve and found myself genuinely challenged. Rare did a good job with balancing an ever-increasing difficulty without inducing crippling and entirely unenjoyable difficulty spikes found in games like Psychonauts.

The controls of Banjo Kazooe felt alright, even by today's standards. Banjo and Kazooie a fairly responsive and easy to control for the most part but it's sometimes tough to judge exactly where you are spatially, like when you're trying to jump from one floating object to another, or when your trying to judge the correct distance for an attack against a large enemy. It's often hard to judge how close/far you are from objects and creatures when swimming, flying, or even walking in some instances and I often found myself dancing around the pickup items. I think this can be attributed to lack of shading or shadow effects, which is something that can be blamed on the game's age.

Depth Perception Issues...

The Bad

There were only three things I outright disliked in Banjo Kazooie.
Swimming underwater felt slow, clunkly, and difficult to control, especially if you're not inclined towards Y-inversion. This made underwater item pickups frustrating because even if I knew what I wanted to do and how to do it I generally couldn't because of the lack of depth perception.

Another mechanic I really disliked was shooting eggs. I found it to be extremely difficult to aim eggs (a projectile you shoot) at distances greater than point blank. This was only mildly frustrating by comparison to swimming because in the few instances where you need to shoot eggs you are only required a lucky shot or three, and egg ammunition is plentiful.

I also noticed that there were a number of seemingly difficult-to-reach but utterly useless rooms you could reach that pertained to secrets that only affect the game's sequel(!), but that otherwise had no purpose. About half of the game's levels seemed to contain such a secret rooms and I found myself aggravated at the lack of in-game explanation, and the amount of time I spent scouring those empty rooms in confusion, looking for hidden notes or puzzle pieces that just weren't there.

After playing through 15 additional years of platformers and adventure games it also felt like there should have been a ledge-climbing mechanic in Banjo Kazooie, which my brain subconsciously noticed was missing. You can jump into ledges, you can jump over ledges, and you can climb trees, but you can't attach yourself to a ledge and climb up it (or drop from it). Mario 64 (a console release title) featured this mechanic so I don't think it was a system limitation.

"Freedom"

Between the quirky but expansive level design, Mumbo Jumbo's ability to turn you into various magical "creatures", and the ability to fly gained early on in the game there really isn't much of the game that feels unexplored if you attempt a 100% completion playthrough. Before the days where games pointed you in a direction with a giant arrow, a minimap with a giant marker, and a HuD that obscured 25% of your screen, there were games like Banjo Kazooie that told you "there are 10 puzzle pieces, 100 notes, and a few Jinjo's hidden in each level. Good luck finding all that, get lost in any direction you'd like, and have fun!" There was a sense of true exploration throughout each level and I was really glad to reexperience that. It's surprisingly fresh when not 8 hours before I was playing an unnamed modern game where giant looming markers and flashing lights show you where to go on a screen obscured by HuD, or in other games where the level design is so bad that you literally need to follow the mini-map for guidance and just ignore what you actually see on the game's main screen. Banjo Kazooie inspires a sense of excitement when you're exploring the levels by not force-feeding you directions and allows you the freedom of multiple paths... which ultimately lead to the paths you didn't take but it's the illusion of freedom that this game gets right and the cheery sense of achievement you feel when you complete each level with 100% efficiency. The game also throws some silly things things at you like Gruntilda's sister, who tells you all sorts of silly facts about the witch, like the name of her band in highschool.

Kazooie eats those...

Art/Music

The art direction is toonish and despite the issues with depth perception that I mentioned earlier the game's graphics were revolutionary for its time and withstand the test of time as far as I'm concerned. They're not bad and they'd be considered stylistic if you saw them in a new release. At worst, they're about on the same level as the games Nintendo is still releasing on the 3DS.

In terms of music I feel that the soundtrack to Banjo Kazooie was well done. The arrangements are simple, a little hokey perhaps, but the songs constantly change and evolve as you're interacting with the environment. Each stage has a distinct song and within each stage exists several renditions of that song affected by your physical location within the world. Are you walking into a dark and creepy cave? The music for the level will seamlessly become a slightly more creepy version of the same song played on a digital xylophone. This feels fairly advanced for its time and is still an example of what solid interactive audio design can be.

Breaking the 4th Wall

Closing Thoughts

Banjo Kazooie has survived the test of time and in my opinion will always be a solid classic that future gamers can enjoy and seasoned ones can return to time and time again. I can see myself returning to play it in the future, which is rare, though I still have yet to try out the sequel: Banjo Tooie.

Game Review: Fallout

This Christmas break I heard that GOG.com was having a sale whereby the entire classic Fallout series was available for free! Having never actually played the original Fallout I happily "purchased", downloaded, and installed it. About 20 hours of play later I'm through the game and have the following to report.

Bar Fight!

Plot: (Spoiler free) You are a key citizen of an underground vault who's looking for replacement water-generating machine parts in a post apocalyptic 1950's California. The plot is a bit more complex than that but the real plot of the game is about how you experience the journey, exploring and interacting with the few towns and settlements that survived the nuclear holocaust. You can join or fight raiders, mutants, cartels, cults, unmask schemes, investigate rumors, and do most of the things that you would expect from a quality classic RPG of this era.

"Freedom": This is one of the oldest RPG's I've played that I felt offered real freedom of choice, specifically in dialogue and the way you interact with the world. You really can be good or evil, rude, or polite to the people you encounter and there are almost always multiple solutions to the problems presented to you in the game. Unlike action adventures like Diablo (which I enjoy for different reasons), I feel that the Fallout series helped set the standards I hold for the "freedom" I expect from a non-dungeon-crawl RPG and the original Fallout is no exception. Fallout requires you to use your brain and actually plan what you're going to do next at times. As a scavenger with a limited weight capacity, do you want to pick up gear that's more useful or more valuable? Can you really afford to waste the last of your rifle rounds in this fight or will you risk close combat? Do you want to target the enemy's leg, preventing them from following you, or their arm, preventing them from holding their weapon? Do you really have the time to be helping out this time while your family is dying of thirst? Fallout also features dozens of variables that will effect its ending.

A Direct hit with the Rocket Launcher!

Gameplay: While I enjoy turn based RPGs, the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, and the VATS targeting system it was difficult for me to enjoy Fallout 1 at times because it felt watered down from the future versions of the system which I've become accustomed. Understanding that this is the 1.0 of a game system that's evolved quite a lot, there are significantly less perks available, the scarcity of ammunition more or less invisibly guides you into a specific type of character build/evolution, leveling up feels sort of useless after awhile, and there really aren't many ways to improve your base statistics, but it's still a fairly fun system. However, Fallout is very glitchy in terms of quest acceptance/resolution. For instance, at the end of the game I had no less than 5 fairly big plot-points that I was entirely unable to resolve due to the fact that I'd played the missions in the wrong order, or was entirely unable to interact with a character (through dialogue) properly due to poor programming, or unable to beat a character in a game of chess because of additional poor programming (don't even try, it's a glitch!). Considering that the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system was created from scratch in mid game development after a disagreement with the creators of the GURPS system (who felt that the Fallout world was too dark) I feel like the programmers did what they could with their limited resources and still made a fun game.

Feel: I did a bit of research before writing this and was still unable to conclude if the GOG edition of Fallout was censored or not. I felt that the because Fallout was only a third as dark as its predecessor, Fallout 2 it was either an issue of post-release censorship (AKA GOG cut content) or perhaps the creators of the game felt it wasn't dark enough and compensated in the sequel. If there were any children characters in the original Fallout game they don't appear in the GOG version, so perhaps that can be some form of measurement if anyone reading this has played the original and can clarify... Possible censorship aside Fallout feels a lot like Fallout 3 in terms of story, world, and characters in that it's quirky, exciting, and adventurous. That is to say it feels like a different kind of fantasy RPG of its era, like Baulder's Gate or Arcanum. There isn't any of the sexual stuff or child-killing prevalent in Fallout 2 but drugs and their respective abusers are still present in small numbers. If you like Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog this game is perfect for you.

In-Game Map of Vault 13

Art/Music: The graphics for Fallout are what I think of as characteristic of the first classic age of PC-RPG's. The few 3D renderings in use for the game's 4 or 5 cinematic, or in conversations with key characters, are obviously dated but they're indicative of the best that 1997 had to offer. In terms of music I felt that the soundtrack, though not entirely memorable, matched the mood the game was trying to convey and created the right atmosphere. Where the game really shines in many places though is surprisingly in its voice acting. It boasts a talented cast, my favorite of which is the classic RPG narrator of the era, the voice I automatically associate with Baulder's Gate, Jim Cummings.

You can get permanent party members
but they don't talk much more than this...

Closing Thoughts: The aforementioned quest-based issues: not being able to help the very people I needed to tell something to or not being able to interact with them at all after I'd completed a key mission were frustrating and made me feel less of a connection to the characters and their world. This hurt my opinion of a game I otherwise enjoyed and caused me to halfheartedly rush through the game's final few quests just so I could experience the final really enjoyable things the game had in store at the very end (which were totally worth it!). For all my gripes I felt that Fallout was still an enjoyable experience overall and one I'd easy recommend to people before moving on to the greatly improved sequels: Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3, and New Vegas.

Game Review: Far Cry 3: The Co-Op Campaign

I often subscribe to the "if you don't have anything nice to say..." mentality but when I sat down this Thanksgiving weekend with my friend Keegan to play coop video games for the few days of free time we both had this year (while recovering from the flu) we had no reason to suspect that we were in for anything but good times. We blew through the coop mode of the new Splinter Cell, we rocked Terrorist Hunts in a personal favorite, Rainbow 6: Vegas, and then we excitedly set up the Co Op Campaign for one of our mutually favorite games of all time, Far Cry 3. For those of you who've never played it, Far Cry 3 is an intense immersive journey of survival. It features one of the best video game villains of all time, a strong story that even Zero Punctuation gave praise to, one of the best free-roam stealth systems I've played, realistic mechanics for wildfires, terrifying and detailed wildlife, stealth-kills, and is a top-notch first person survival-shooter. Lured in by the promise of a "completely new story" and with the high expectations given to us by the main game and subsequent release of Blood Dragon we didn't expect that the co op mode could be anything but a great time.

About as deep as the plot gets

Plot: The introduction video that plays when you start the co op mode is very much in the vein of Far Cry 3, showcasing the main characters being sold out by their former employer, a ship captain known as The Captain. In short, the Captain took their money, sold the main characters to pirates, and left them high and dry. This much is learned from the video. What the Captain didn't expect the main characters to do was survive the pirate attack, get armed, team up, and cut a bloody path of carnage that would make Rambo blush. I found the introduction video to be exciting, enjoyable, and an indication of good times to come. Keegan and I seemed equally pumped and it came as a large surprise to us to find out that the video would be the most plot-intensive part of the entire game. 

Each of the six co-op missions has a plot, sort of, but the plot really doesn't seem that well thought out, executed, or relevant to the main story of "getting revenge." It sort of just felt like a bunch of pirates incidentally got between the main characters and their prey, the Captain, so the main characters decided to murder them all for laughs and go through places they didn't really need to go through to accomplish their common goal. Each of the six missions, including the last one, didn't really feel like a quest for revenge and felt more like an attempt at finding less than creative ways to murder pirates on an island. Even the last mission where you actually get a go at the Captain (who is entirely absent throughout the other missions) didn't feel fulfilling in the least, and though I won't spoil the ending for you, I'll say that I felt cheated of any true resolution. The "interesting" characters that you get to play as never get developed further than skin deep and you shouldn't expect any insight into their lives or back stories beyond what you can find on the Far Cry 3 Wiki.

As for the four main characters you play as [left to right]: 

Callum: the Scottish thug. I honestly couldn't understand anything he said except the curse words and found him useful only as comic relief. He lacked any sort of real likability and I had no idea what his personal goals were or why he was even working with the other characters. It seems like he would honestly just ditch them at first opportunity and I was surprised that he was playable after the first mission.

Leonard: the crooked cop. I found this sexist thug to be devoid of any value or interest whatsoever. He's greedy, selfish, and while he delivers one of the best lines in the game in the final act I felt no progression or motivation for him beyond "I can't wait to kill this guy and be rich," which was boring.

Mikhail: the Russian hitman. Mikhail was the most interesting character in the Co Op because he had things the other characters all seemed to lack... Relatability and a conscience. Mikhail is ex-mob with a wife and daughter who just wants to start a new life. Sadly beyond the introduction you really don't hear anything more about his life.

Tisha: the ex-soldier. On the surface, Tisha seems like she's going to be relatable like Mikhail, a soldier with a tough upbringing who left the Marines for doing the right thing in a bad situation. However, where Mikhail quietly kills his prey and seems to get no real enjoyment out of the things he has to do to get off the island Tisha seems to relish in the violence and goes from noble Marine martyr to bloodthirsty thug. I felt like this was one of the biggest areas where the creative team really dropped the ball.

Without spoiling the "story" there is also a 5th character, one you don't play as who acts as your guide to the island. I found this character to be one dimensional, stupid, slow, greedy, and entirely unhelpful. There were a few times (like when he ran me over with a truck on accident or when he decided the best course of action would be to drive straight through the enemy encampment at 5 miles per hour) that I questioned if he was really on our side and why he wasn't cut from the game entirely.

The most exciting moment in the entire game...
Is in the first mission.

"Freedom/Gameplay": For a franchise known for allowing a player to accomplish a given task a dozen different ways and allowing players to explore acres of open-world environment the coop mode can only be described as a FF XIII style hallway from which you cannot possibly avoid conflict with every enemy on the map. Keegan and I are both traditionally stealth shooters, running through the tall grass with silenced scoped rifles, pistols, and a knife and killing only as many enemies as are required to accomplish a given task, if any at all. Given the fact that you're not allowed to walk more than a few paces off the main road for cover (you lose if you get caught "leaving the map" kind of like playing Marco Polo in a narrow swimming pool), the fact that you're not allowed to leave an area until you kill every person in that area (literally), this tactic is entirely nonviable. They also reduced the effectiveness of close combat attacks, which you can normally chain in FC3 and do a number of fairly awesome things with.

You start each level by selecting one of four basic layouts: Silent, Assault, Close-Assault, and Sniper, and beyond the ability to pick up the weapons of dead enemies (mostly AKs or weapons from other layouts), you're entirely unable to evolve or adapt your loadout. This is particularly bothersome when you encounter the armored bad guys who can take 3 sniper rifle shots to the head, 4 frag grenades, an unlimited supply of normal gunfire to anywhere but the head, and are all but immune to rocket launchers (which earn the "most useless" award for FC3 Coop) and are immune to futile close combat attacks. None of the guns except for the sniper rifle come with a scope either, and only two classes can use grenades. 

There are basically 4 enemy types: Gunners, molitov throwers, snipers, and men armed with machetes. They recycle the same few models throughout, throw dozens of each at you for each of the 6 levels with an occasional dog or armored heavy gunner/flamethrower, and that describes every enemy in the co op... All of them... No joke... While the mechanics of the game were mostly fluid, matching FC3, the removal of character evolution, stealth, scopes, and multiple ways to accomplish a task were infuriating. The worst moment for us was when we were told to "sneak through a base", we snuck through the base without being spotted, and then were told we needed to kill everyone in the base to proceed through the secret tunnel because Callum just felt like killing everyone. This is the sort of BS the game throws at you.

The joke here is that there are no animals in the Co Op,
so this scene isn't a part of the game...

Feel: The FC3 Coop is clunky and extremely awkward. By mission 4, the only reason we were still playing was so we could see if there was any sort of triumph felt in finally killing the Captain, whom the main characters talked about but whom we never saw. The missions felt like they weren't all that well thought through as the general idea for each mission was "sneak" into this area by killing everyone on the way there, push a button that operates something noisy, and defend the spot for a few minutes while the noisy thing happens. Of course there was the occasional mission of "pick up this object that suddenly causes enemies to spawn all around you and bring it across the map by walking down the middle of the road." Between the drudge of shoot-em-up missions were moments of relief akin to mini-games where you and your friends compete to see who can shoot more people with a sniper rifle, who can drive a jet ski better, or who can drive a jeep better. They felt awkward but were preferable over playing through another shoot-em-up mission that would have filled the space.

The FC3 Coop was incredibly glitchy. 

Even though we only played through it once, here's an example of what we had to endure to complete it:

The enemy spawning was abysmal and I'd often watch enemies appear feet in front of me, just in time to murder me with a 1 hit kill machete to the face.

After each checkpoint, our guns wouldn't reload.

The guns often glitched and vanished from thin air, making it look like we were only holding a barrel.

The textures and lighting as we went indoors and outdoors would often clash, get confused, and reverse on us, giving us a dark cave suddenly lit with brighter than day lighting.

The truck we had to escort often would drive too slow, too fast (at one point running me over), or just stopped altogether, forcing us to restart the mission.

Enemies we'd kill would often continue talking or shooting guns during the closing cinemas to each mission, so we couldn't hear the scarce dialogue of the main characters.

A key zip-line ceased to be for my character, forcing me to fall 30 feet to my death on jagged rocks from which I could not be rescued. We had to use the zipline on the right after restarting from the checkpoint, which was about 10 minutes of gameplay back.

Art: This is actually the area I have much praise for the FC3 coop. While it's a glitch hallway style shooter it had some really solid visual character design. The main team felt unique visually, and while they lacked depth they looked cool and had good voice acting. For the most part the visuals in game matched the quality of FC 3, which is great, though for some reason the water seemed to be visually lacking during one of the mini games (perhaps just another glitch?). The music was unmemorable for the most part which I feel is a negative in a game that linear, and the audio design failed in that the world didn't feel truly like it was a part of the outdoors. There was also no visual or audio cue when you killed someone unless it was a Kill-Assist, which made progression frustrating... Correction, there is an audio cue, but it's often muffled by, and seems like it's part of the games soundtrack.

Closing Thoughts: They took out stealth, exploration, wildlife, wildfire, wind, close combat, the bow, arrows, scopes, and the plot. Shy of the name and tropical setting it didn't really feel very much like a Far Cry game at all. It was unenjoyable to play, unfilling to complete, and more glitchy than I thought to expect from such a large franchise. While it started off a great concept with an intriguing introduction video I can't recommend this game to anyone except truly hardcore fans of coop shooters devoid of plot or completionist fanatics of the Far Cry franchise.

Disclaimer: I understand that it's a huge undertaking to make a video game. I understand that I don't have any of the talents required to make a video game like Far Cry 3. I understand that rough timelines, budget cuts, and general corporate griminess can lead to a great idea turning into something less than stellar. I mean no disrespect towards the makers of this game with my review, nor do I hold any of them responsible for the problems I have with it as it very well could have been the product of corporate resource mismanagement, clashing ideas at the highest level (even a stellar team can't make conflicting ideas from their bosses into something good), or some other unknowable constrictions placed on the creative team.