Reviews: To prove I'm not dead, here's a series that likely is

No, I'm not dead. I've just been busy and a bit depressed. The holidays are great at inspiring both of these things, especially to someone unemployed and who has to move soon because he can't afford the place he currently lives.

This period also was the, at least temporary, end to a much less important segment of my life. My Gamefly account, useful as it's been, has been suspended due to the holidays, or more specifically the influx of games the holidays resulted in. I'm not 100% pleased with Dragon Age and New Super Mario Wii, the first Xmas games I've been playing, but both have been both entertaining and time consuming.

The Gamefly came to an end with Banjo: Nuts and Bolts, the latest of the Banjo Kazooie games that last appeared (in the main series, at least) on the Nintendo 64. It was a series I...huh. I had some affection for. That's the weird thing about Banjo. I remember the games, I enjoyed the games, but while I was nostalgic for the series, I can't say I especially cared for it, either. But we'll get to that element in a minute, because there is a much more crucial issue here: I HATE vehicles in non-vehicle games.

Something like the cars in Grand Theft Auto are normally fine (though the ones in GTA 4 have rubbed me the wrong way, hence why that one's near the back of my holiday games set.) But whether it's the dune buggies in Jak 3, the Mako in Mass Effect, and even Halo's famous Warthog, they just make me seethe. It's not the basic inclusion of a vehicle that's the problem, but the controls of these abominations are almost universally designed to get on my last nerve. If they aren't overshooting turns or getting themselves wedged into hallways or corners, they're taking a slight bump and immediately spinning around or flipping upside down on the first hill. I'm not a car or other vehicle guy in the real world, so maybe some of this is realistic. But I don't care. A vehicle is fine in a close race or when carefully dodging obstacles, not when I have to reset a race for the fifteenth time because a car can't even be trusted to stay pointed in the general direction of the target.

So Banjo: Nuts and Bolts was maybe not the best game for me. It has the same general premise of other Banjo games. The heroes, a bear named Banjo and a bird named Kazooie, explore various platform-centric video game levels to collect umpteen prizes as part of a vague quest to stop the witch Gruntilda. But in Nuts and Bolts, the platforming itself is all but absent, replaced by endless (about 90 of them, all told,) vehicle challenges. Sometimes you use the vehicles the game forces on you, but usually you can get around in machines that the player makes. And the actual ACT of customizing your vehicle is fun (at first.)

But using them is another story. Your fragile little machines are often either too slow to function or so fast that they control like, well, the jet engine on wheels that they often are. Conversely, any vehicle with the weapons or unique widgets needed for a mission is often too heavy and unwieldy to actually use them, at least with skill.

And it doesn't help that this is otherwise a Banjo game. The Banjo series has always aped the Mario series, but to me at least it always missed the point. The levels were huge, beautiful, and full of surprises, but the actual act of exploring them was often either sterile or so excessive to be overkill. In a Mario game, getting a Star/Shine or whatnot always felt like a singular achievement. In Banjo, they felt like items off a checklist. The problem is that as you get farther into a game or the series, each item wasn't just at the end of a series of challenges and possibly guarded by a boss. You had to find a minor NPC, let it ask for help, and accomplish some minor task for them first. Sometimes you had to perform three or four minor tasks, often with their own requirements, just to get one of the 120 primary collectibles (called "jiggies".)

Nuts and Bolts kept up this tradition and took it one step farther by not even integrating the tasks as part of the normal world. Instead, each level just has the help-needed characters standing around and speaking to them triggers a mini-game. To make it worse, each mini-game now has some other requirement, usually a timer or score of some sort. You have to finish each mission within a limited time to even get the jiggy, so it's entirely plausible to successfully finish a mission and still get next to nothing for it. AND there now are trophies that you get for each mini-game mission requiring you to do even better than the requirements for getting the jiggy. And each trophy is worth a quarter of a jiggy, so you have to get all THOSE as well to get everything in the game. AND FINALLY (phew,) the other major collectible in Banjo games, friendly animals called Jinjos, no longer can just be grabbed as you find them. No, that would be too easy. Instead, each one has their own mini-game now, tossing another 50 or so mini-games onto the list, those these at least are pass/fail. It's like Rare took all the complaints about too many collectibles into account but misunderstand the reasons for the complaints completely.

As for the mini-games themselves, they aren't exactly impressive. Most, Jiggy or Jinjo, require to transport some other objects from point a from point b, fight off hordes of enemies, taxi characters around, or win races. Oh, gods, the races. One of the reasons I dislike vehicles in games is the need to have to gallivant around areas while driving or flying through a bunch of tiny rings. This game has so many of these challenges that I easily lost count. There are a few boss fights, but not nearly as many as one can hope, and those few are just about dismantling someone else's vehicle, not a real boss fight. Considering how the boss fights, especially the final bosses, of the earlier games are among their most memorable moments, losing these really felt like a waste.

That brings up the original question of why I bothered playing this game, let alone to completion and near-total collection victory (no way in hell was I getting those 90 trophies, though.) Part of it was the memories. The series never really had the characters or world that something like Mario has, where every element is just so full of life and character. Honestly, except for the rhyming, horrific main villain, everyone's a cipher. But the series has its charms. In particular, it has a sense of humor, a self-awareness of how ridiculous this how is and how none of it can be taken seriously. And the levels themselves are often visually impressive. This game fell apart a bit here as well, with too many levels consisting of one big enclosed room with just a few hallways and side-rooms for variety, but even they were awesome in scope. The first level of the game was much better; an artificial farm surround by walls to hint that the whole thing is just a video game. But the game went beyond that, as the edges of the world had literal gears you can climb on, emulating the old days of platformers, and a flying vehicle could climb higher to see rotating artificial clouds, a "sun" in the form of a giant lamp, and the giant gear that operated this entire reality. And then you could leap into the volcano a mile below for fun.

The game's "hub" world, a massive town consisting of six major districts, was especially impressive. It wasn't a Grand Theft Auto city, no, but the way it expands and connects all of its elements made the whole thing more real than your typical action-adventure experience. It's telling that the very last thing I did before I returned the game was travel to the highest point in town, looked at all the lands I had explored and conquered, and sighed as I surveyed the areas beyond the city. What was that bridge to the east, the manor to the south, the farmlands and ocean that probably took up the free time of programmers for days yet did nothing? As I looked around, the music having muted itself as it traditionally does at high altitudes in a Banjo game, I felt that thrill to explore come over me, a sense of wonder possibly gone forever as the platforming games vanish from the face of consoles. If only I had a vehicle there.