0verhyped

Why? Just why…

‘

Seeing as we’re in a new year and possibly a new gaming generation, I figured now is a good time to look back on what games from the last few years really defied my expectations. Either because they went above and beyond what I was expecting of them or because they were horrible letdowns that made me feel stupid for buying them. Today’s disappointment is Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, most likely the very last Rare game I’ll ever play.

This is an odd one for me. I actually didn’t expect this game to be any good, but I bought it anyways. Why you may ask? Well, I actually felt I owed Rare something. When I was younger I was never really into the Playstation, I liked my Nintendo 64 more. And about half the great games that appeared on the Nintendo 64 were made by Rare, with the other half usually being made by Nintendo themselves since most companies didn’t want to pay for those expensive cartridges.

I used to play Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Blast Corps, Banjo-Kazooie, and Jet Force Gemini for hours on end. Before that I played the Donkey Kong Country games on the SNES that they made. Rare also made Conker’s Bad Fur Day, which was my absolute favorite game until I played No More Heroes and it’s still one of my favorite games today. It’s hard to completely write off a company that gave me so many good childhood memories.

But over the years, Rare seemed to lose their edge. Well actually they were losing their people for various reasons, but in either case, the quality of their games sharply declined. Banjo-Tooie wasn’t nearly as good as the first one, they made the incredibly forgetable Star Fox Adventures, then that lousy Kameo: Elements of Power and Prefect Dark Zero. They did make Viva Pinata, which was a decent game, but it was followed up with a truly dull sequel.

But I felt compelled to try the Nuts & Bolts demo when it came out just the same. And that was probably a mistake because I found myself trapped in a bizarre nightmare world where I WAS SUBJECTED TO TALKING IDOLS OF DEMON GODS AS THE VEIL OF REALITY MELTED AWAY BEFORE MY VERY EYES!!!

‘

HER EYES! THEY CAN SEE INTO MY SOUL!

‘

Yeah, I found out the hard way that spiked brownies and Banjo-Kazooie don’t mix well. (Unrelated sidenote: Does mix well with No More Heroes.) After I sobered up and stop having nightmares about being trapped in horrible domes filled with terrible things, I tried the demo again and found out that it was only slightly less horrifying than my drug addled mind remembered. The graphics were strange, everything looked plastic and artificial, you couldn’t skip dialogue and all the levels were strange enclosed spheres.

And yet, I bought this damn game anyways. Why? I don’t know, I guess I felt I still owed them something for so many good times as a kid. But after finishing Nuts & Bolts, I don’t feel I owe Rare a damn thing. This game was a jumbled mess and came off as some bizarre impersonation of a Banjo-Kazooie game. It just seemed like Microsoft wanted to claim they had a stake in the whole user-generated content fad and needed a game to compete with Little Big Planet, so they told whoever was left at Rare to morph whatever they were doing with Banjo-Kazooie into the unholy hydra of insane crap that is Nuts & Bolts.

Nuts & Bolts is a very strange game. It’s almost entirely vehicle based, but it’s not purely a racing game. You have to build your own vehicles, from blocks and parts and crap, but most of the shit you do is really simple. Like push things or race against a time limit. The story is strange, where some weird god like figure called the Lord of Games basically kidnaps the cast of Banjo-Kazooie to participate in his own game. Even off drugs it feels like a nightmare.

‘

…actually you go right head and leave them like this. That be just fine with me.

‘

And worst of all it’s just a damn mess. The physics are a train wreck, with slight bumps against small objects stopping you dead. Your vehicles usually goes faster in reverse than it does forward and will tip over at the drop of a hat. The goals are just a few recycled fetch objectives and yet the obstacles force you to put a lot of thought into something that inevitably ends up being boring and tedious. It’s just an utter disaster.

There were a few rare (accidental pun!) times when coming up with a particularly clever vehicle design did feel rewarding when it solved a problem. A tiny little nugget of gaming ingenuity buried beneath all the misery. But overall I hated playing this game. Hell, even some of the aforementioned cleverness was more about outsmarting the game’s rules than finding the best solution. Like one challenge where I’m suppose to use guns to defend a statue, I got so fed up with missing the gold score that I just made a plane that stole the statue and flew it away from the enemy until time was up.

I really don’t feel I owe Rare anything anymore. Neither does Microsoft it seems, seeing as the last couple of years Rare has been reduced to making blatant Wii Sports knock offs for the XBOX’s silly camera system. I guess all things must come to an end, so I keep asking myself, when is Rare going to end? It kills me seeing what’s left of them like this. I think at this point it’d be better if they bowed out than spent another ten years as Microsoft’s bitch.

‘

Seriously, can’t you die with just a modicum of dignity?

‘

I had low expectations for this game. Really low. Like fucking rock bottom low, and it still couldn’t live up to them. At the time, my mother had this case at the local flea market and sometimes I’d stick old games in there to sell. I put Nuts and Bolts in there at half of what I paid for it. No one ever bought it. Pretty much every other game I put in that case always sold eventually, but not this one. I think the only other game that didn’t sell was the AC/DC track pack for Rock Band, which I got for like five dollars and already used up the download code on. So now Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts is just sitting on my game shelf, because no one else wants it…