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You’re Totally Nuts!! Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on the Xbox360. According to a lot of my classic gaming friends; Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is sort of the black sheep of the Banjo-Kazooie series. Perhaps if I had played Banjo 1 and Banjo-Tooie this would be another “What Are You Doing to a Series?” article. However, I never had a desire to get into the Banjo-Kazooie franchise, since I heard the games were very similar to the 3-D Super Mario games (just with a bunch of gamer humor). In the Banjo-Kazooie games you control the titular bear and bird duo through various 3-D worlds in order to collect “jiggies” (jigsaw puzzle pieces). The jiggies are seemingly worthless tokens that are obtained when you complete various missions in a level, much like the: stars, shines, and star babies in the 3-D Mario games. In the first 2 Banjo-Kazooie games you’re to battle against some evil witch named Gruntilda, who’s the basic equivalent of Bowser. This is really all I know of the series’ storyline and sadly, understanding the story in Nuts & Bolts is heavily dependent on knowing the events and situations in the first 2 games. I do eventually plan on playing the first 2 games on Xbox Live Arcade, so I haven’t really researched the games’ storylines in-depth out of fear of spoilers (though, Nuts & Bolts does kind of ruin the series’ storyline for me in its own ways).
As old rivalries never die in the gaming world, Gruntilda is back to do whatever the hell she was bent on doing to Banjo and Kazooie in the previous game. However, this time there’s a bigger rival to face in this game, the Lord of Games. The LoG is basically a floating TV monitor with a cape and scepter that claims to be the master and creator of all video games. For some unknown reason LoG decides on pitting Banjo-Kazooie against Gruntilda in some sort of sadistic mock video game that’s very similar to their previous 2 games. In the end, the losing party must be LoG’s slave in the spice mines of Kessel (actually, LoG’s video game factory). The story is pretty nonsensical and quite frankly really stupid. Come to think of it, if the other Banjo-Kazooie games have an equally ridiculous story, I might not be playing them on Xbox Live Arcade after all.
While this is sort of making Nuts & Bolts sound like just another rehashing of the old Banjo-Kazooie formula, there’s a very big difference in the gameplay mechanic that keeps it from being just another stupid 3-D platformer. Nuts & Bolts adds a really fun vehicle system to the mix. In fact, exploration on foot is seldom used in this game. Not only do you get to use various vehicles such as: helicopters, airplanes, boats, and cars in this game; but you can use various parts found in the game to customize any vehicle in your garage. You can even build vehicles from scratch, as the “workshop” mode is very simple to use, as it’s almost like working with digital Lego blocks. While many people hate the new vehicle system, I think it really makes the game. Nuts & Bolts plays more like a really whimsical sandbox game with something for my creative side, as opposed to a generic 3-D platformer.
The vehicle system adds a lot to the game, as there’s normally near infinite ways to win a jiggy challenge (unless you’re playing a mission where your vehicle is predetermined by LoG). One of the best examples of this was the time I decimated a time trial by creating a fast biplane that bypassed most of the obstacles and just dropped right into the finish line. One thing that is a bit of the detriment to the game is the missions get a bit repetitive due to them being all vehicle based. About 75% of the missions are either races or time trials with the remaining 25% of the missions being: escort missions, defend a post missions, or move an object from point A to point B. Though this would normally kill a game for me, I find Nuts & Bolts racing heavy gameplay a little more bearable due to the “overworld map,” Showdown Town. Showdown Town offers some nice breaks from jiggy collecting, as you can: poke around, explore the area and find some extra parts scattered throughout.
I’ll admit, I really hate the design of most of the characters. They’re either very poorly designed or outright stupid in their core concept. The only 2 characters I don’t mind are Banjo the bear and TT because he reminds me of Chester Cheetah (and I really like cheetos). Luckily, the vehicles are the stars in this game and you seldom get a view of a character up close aside from LoG. They love showing his stupid green screen mug all the time (but I can let that slide, since it’s like watching a TV from inside a TV). Though the characters may look somewhat stupid, the levels/worlds are simply beautiful. From the first few seconds of booting up the game disc and seeing a stunning overhead view of Spiral Mountain to driving along the harbor in Showdown Town, all the locales look great. They almost make me wish I could live in one of these areas, since they’re: realistic looking, surreal, and near perfectly stylized for the context of this game, it simply blows my mind.
I actually don’t mind this game’s soundtrack. This speaks volumes coming from me. It has a very old timey vibe going for it which I really like. It’s the type of music that feels antiquated yet familiar. The sound effects are appropriate sound effects, nothing too outlandish or out of place. Jumping in the water sounds as it should and crashing sounds like it would hurt in a very G rated sort of way. The only thing I find annoying about the audio is the fact that every character “speaks” in hybrid Sims/Animal Crossing noises. It gets pretty annoying after awhile and makes me wonder why this game doesn’t have voice acting.
I really don’t understand why people don’t like this game. It’s very fun and very well produced with the potential to last you several dozen hours of gameplay. I guess, it gets the same kind of “meh” reaction from Banjo-Kazooie fans as Resident Evil 4 gets from me. Either way, I suggest you give this one a rent at the very least. And I’d highly recommend this game to any gamer that’s at least semi-creative and/or likes Lego.
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