At the Microsoft event last week they did little more then confirm that a new Banjo and Kazooie game would be released under the title Banjo and Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. The screens were leaked well ahead of time. Rare was even forced to release a statement acknowledging them and declaring it was a platformer, not a racer. Those shots were taken out of context by a lot of people and nobody really knew what it was until that event. Now, the facts are out there. A vehicle creation platformer was not something anyone expected. It’s been pretty conflicting and really separated a lot of people. I’m very optimistic personally.
First of all, it seems everywhere I visit online someone who would go under the title Nintendo Fanboy is criticizing this franchise. Very ironic considering Nintendo owes so much success to Rare for the titles they developed over those years. They still haven’t paid off for Microsoft yet but I do think that will soon change. The impression I got was that they had created the foundation for a vehicle creation type of game. They had the physics and everything ready to go. But they couldn’t sell it as just that, so they put the Banjo name on it. That’s fine, it’s not a big deal honestly.
The idea is ambitious and different. Imagine having a car, and you stick a couple of boosters on the back with some wings on the sides. Take it into the world, and your car will eventually gain lift and fly. That opens up really just a huge number of variations in gameplay, vehicles, and objectives. It’s not quite like anything we’ve seen before. Not like this, in that it would combine so many genres.
The worlds looked big enough to do anything. They are really pushing that. Graphically it wasn’t quite there yet. They will most likely take a massive upgrade leading up to the release. But already you can see it’s a Rare game. The style and the colors were all there. And it ran pretty nicely. I liked the lighting effects. Cool sky box, things like that.
They didn’t show the motion sensitive remote there. I know a lot of people expected it to coincide with Banjo. I can’t say I’d expect it because if nobody knows any real evidence for it that leads me to believe that it’s still too early for showing it off. E3 will be interesting because if I had to guess this thing will show up there running on a few titles already announced.
So that was my favorite title for that day. There were reports of a few other games like Sonic Unleashed but since so many were negatively received my expectations for titles like that really dropped. Nothing is very original this year. Too Human is looking to be the next big game for me to get. And just as that game is getting unfairly scrutinized STILL, people are giving a pass to Killzone 2 which, from what I’ve seen and heard, probably will be disappointing a lot of folks next year unless they really get it up to a high level of performance. Some people will forever be veiled under Sony though. So those are sort of my thoughts on those events. It was nice to see some innovation, even when so many went on the attack over it.
No comments:
Post a Comment