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| Source // MobyGames |
I played Banjo-Kazooie and liked it more than Super Mario 64. I played Banjo-Tooie and was bored out of my mind, almost angry that it was something I had to play. After a long, long wait, fans of the series would finally see a third entry, on the Xbox 360 of all things.
But Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts isn't just an HD version of a Banjo title. It isn't just a third-person hunt for collectables. It's something much, much different.
I've left the series alone, content with having nothing to do with it. I'm certainly in no rush to return to the Nintendo 64 anytime soon, but I did make a note of the Rare Replay ports being a possibility, and now there's this modern Banjo-Kazooie to show me what I've missed out on. Is Nuts & Bolts going to be the Banjo-Kazooie game to finally get me on board with the series?
Buckle up and we'll find out.
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Fun Times
Nuts & Bolts begins in a familiar locale, and if you ignore the stuttering that takes place as the game loads new camera angles of this HD hub, you can begin to imagine just how wonderful this must have looked to fans of the first two games.
Seeing the next step in your favourite series suddenly knock it out of the park with a step up in graphics thanks to the power of better hardware is a magical moment. It's why there are remakes of everything these days. The games are already good, but what if they looked out of this world as well?
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| Source // MobyGames |
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
To remind us of where we've come, the Banjo backstory is briefly shown to us through a movie projector. Look at how awful these visuals were. Horrible. You're going to love Nuts & Bolts. The story takes place in the same universe, years and years after our heroes last fought Gruntilda to save the day. What have they been getting up to?
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| Source // MobyGames |
Getting fat on pizza and playing online on their Xbox 360s, their N64 sitting unplugged beside it. Nuts & Bolts has gone all self-referential and meta on us, its humour derived from poking fun at itself. Nothing wrong with that if it's done right, and this series is known for being silly here and there.
What, then, is the gist of this game? We waddle Banjo up the hill outside his home, pausing every five seconds to be reminded that we shouldn't have eaten all those pizzas (no, really, the same lines again and again to hammer the point home), before coming face to face with the skull of Gruntilda, back for more.
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
Only a comic-sans PAUSE notification interrupts us, and a gold plated television wearing a regal cape appears. He is the Lord of Games, or L.O.G., creator of all video games, and he has decided that our battle will be fought through the medium of video games. You know, kinda like it always has been...
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
But our rotund appearance and insistence on collecting hundreds of floating tokens isn't cool anymore. It's outdated, it's boring, video games have moved on, and besides, we're too fat to collect these things in the first place.
The game has changed. We're not even going to need to work off this excess weight. We're given a cart.
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| Source // MobyGames |
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
It's nothing fancy to look at, essentially a tray on wheels, but she's got a motor and enough fuel to carry us around the place, only the place we'll be using it won't be our familiar surroundings. No, through a portal to Showdown Town we go, where our world radically changes.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
This is Showdown Town, the hub world of Nuts & Bolts. In this place are a bunch of locked doors, behind which are huge worlds full of challenges and collectables to unlock new doors, behind which are huge worlds full of challenges and collectables...
What do you need to navigate huge worlds? Transport. What do you need to make transport interesting? The ability to create it yourself, from bits and pieces you find scattered around the town and beyond, all brought back to Mumbo's Workshop and slapped together to construct wild new vehicle designs.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
As an idea, you might be thinking "Okay, that doesn't sound too bad", and I probably would have agreed, right up until the point where I had to rebuild my cart. Press and hold the Right Trigger to hoist a box up in the air and carry it over to Mumbo. Press X to talk to Mumbo, who smashes the box open and adds the bits and bobs to your inventory. Enter the workshop to scroll through all those bits and bobs, complete with the odd stutter as the game loads a little 3D model of the new part, with accompanying stats that mean little to you right now. Stick them together in a vague vehicle shape and behold, one pathetic shopping trolley.
Because this was a tutorial, I got no feeling of being creative on my own, and it sapped any interest I had for creating anything at all. Actually, no, I tell a lie. What really sapped my interest was bringing my first bits box back to Mumbo after finding it across the road in Showdown Town, smashing it open to find a glove, and having no interest in learning what that glove was going to do for me.
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
Let's forget about making any vehicles and see how they're used. We can ride around town but all the gameplay is to be found behind these doors, so we might as well head to the only one we have available to us and start collecting the Jiggies we need to unlock all the rest.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
Nuts & Bolts includes some familiar faces, so I'm told, and Klungo here is a good guy now, and he's got a bit of a problem for which he'll reward us with a Jiggy for solving. The farm is on fire. Do hurry along and put it out, would you?
So off we race, at a blistering speed of slightly faster than running and jumping in any other third-person game of this ilk, heading towards the objective marker across this strangely colourful world that looks to be a mix of styles that don't quite work together.
The water is incredibly wet looking, but the hills are stitched together, the trees out of place, and the who level looking a little empty. Games like this are supposed to instil a sense of wonder about what might be over there, or behind that, but pottering around on my way to this farm gave me nothing of the sort.
Getting there, I didn't even have to put a fire out. I just talked to someone who thanked me for appearing and promptly sent me back to Klungo for my Jiggy.
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
Multiple loading screens later, I've hopped in and out of levels performing challenges to unlock more Jiggies. One was a race against a new character, a Lion I think, who wants to be the coolest, fastest racer out there, but comes second to a fat bear driving a shopping trolley around a hill. Twice.
Another had me delivering a ticking bomb to an airfield for a mole to safely defuse. There was no sense of peril in that one, even when I rolled the trolley and dropped the bomb.
A third saw a volcano spit out balls of hot rock that spewed coconut-killing gas or something, and the only way to deal with them was to load them onto your vehicle one by one and chuck them into water. This was actually a nice mission because you can use the physics of the world to instead just chuck the rocks down the hill, hoping they rolled all the way across the beach and into the sea. It mostly worked. It worked well enough to finish the mission well within time, at least.
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| Source // MobyGames |
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
After all those Jiggies were earned, there was a face-off against Gruntilda. I forget why, but she has a big vehicle with something on the back, and we're supposed to knock it off the back so that she doesn't run away with it. Alright. How shall we do that?
Missions will allow you to build a vehicle specifically for the task ahead. If you're in a race, you might be able to build a faster vehicle. If you've got to transport something, you'll need a flatbed truck of some description.
Here, I was told that I should have something big and bulky, capable of ramming into Grunty. I hoped I'd be able to use my shopping trolley because I don't have anything bigger or bulkier. I haven't been collecting new parts because it hasn't interested me to do so. I've probably shot myself in the foot, and upon starting this challenge, I pretty much immediately lose control of my trolley, watch my target flee into the distance and give up.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Final Word
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
After however long it was that I played for, getting all of four Jiggies, I had my fill of Nuts & Bolts. It didn't capture my attention at all, in its gameplay, story, or characters. Promotional imagery shows you creating all kinds of vehicles, even planes with which to zip around the environments. Sounds great, right?
What it doesn't show is how empty those expanses of land are, and how cumbersome most of the contraptions you'll drive will be. They don't show you what the game is actually like, which is this weird, meta, fun-poking entry that almost knows it's bad, but doesn't do anything to make itself good.
I can't explain it, mostly because I've not played a great deal of it. I've heard people say that as a game it's okay, but as a Banjo-Kazooie entry it's awful, and I can see why. The radical switch in gameplay does nothing to reinvent the games that game before it. It very much feels like a game concept that needed a cast of characters and Banjo et al were gathering dust, so why not use them?
The result of that is a bunch of characters who look out of place and don't know what they're doing, and if they're out of place, how am I meant to relate to them and their plight? Thanks to the outdated way they all talked, I had no connection to any of them. The blurb they splutter to set up a mission meant nothing. Give me the objective and let me roll, everything else is meaningless.
Banjo-Kazooie games have plots, I know that much. I don't know the details, but I bet they're more interesting than the Lord of Games challenging us and Gruntilda to a head to head where the loser is put to work in his video games factory.
It's a weird game. If you stripped away everything related to Banjo you might have an interesting vehicular-based collectable hunter, which hasn't be done. And thanks to Nuts & Bolts, we know why. With its constant loading, stuttering cutscenes and god awful use of comic sans, it's not a highlight of the series.
I've sprinkled "Saving content" throughout this post because Nuts & Bolts sprinkled it throughout my time with it. A small icon would have been nice. A giant sentence at the top of the screen, regardless of what's underneath, isn't. It's the little things that irk players, and this game is full of little things to be irked by.
I can't see myself playing any more. I can't see myself watching it. I've no interest in this game whatsoever, and it's a bold choice to include it on the 1001 list. Perhaps we're meant to play it as an example of the future not always being as bright and colourful as the past? Maybe it's to remind us of the good old times.
Whatever it is, I'll leave it to you to decide whether to play it yourselves.
SAVING CONTENT. PLEASE DON'T TURN OFF YOUR CONSOLE.
Fun Facts
Rare staff reprised their roles as the characters, not that they really ever spoke in the first place. Nuts & Bolts continues the tradition of "Whu aha huh hua haauhuaa hahuau" and the like, supposedly translating to a hilarious quip. Who knows.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, developed by Rare, first released in 2008.
Version played: Xbox 360, 2008.