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.