Ok. So I was gonna do a big proper run-down from 10 to 1 on this, but I can't be arsed because there are so many games I haven't played, or haven't given enough time to. Besides, as you'll see, my feelings about a game can't always be summed up all that simply. There are ten games here, but this is not my top ten. Rather it's the ten games I felt most like giving awards to. You'll see.
Best Retail Game
The main purpose of this award is to illustrate how my two favourite games of the year are download-only. As such the winner isn't actually that important. Anyway, it's Dead Space.
Best Sequel
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 is possibly a flawless example of how to make a sequel. It's still got the main mode which is better than ever, and it adds five extra modes which all play with the formula in brilliant ways, building tactics that are useful in other modes, and are varied enough to be fun while never being just novelties. Plus it's prettier and has better music. Yeah, it's the perfect sequel. Which means it's Game Of The Year right? Oh unless someone released a really amazing original game. Hmm.
Best Worst Sequel
Super Smash Bros Brawl is basically the same as Super Smash Bros Melee, which in all honesty wasn't that much better than Super Smash Bros No Subtitle. Somehow it still ended up being my most played game last year.
Best Game For The First Hour Or So
God, Boom Blox got really boring after that, didn't it?
Best Game That Was Split Into Five-Second Chunks And Mixed Together With Five-Second Chunks Of The Worst Game Ever
Consistency is not a word Mirror's Edge knows. Playing it, I can't help the feeling that if I could just peel away the moments of perfect clarity, beauty, exhiliration and grace (of which there are many) and make a game out of them, it would be the best game ever. Problem is, the game left over would be so abhorrently evil that it would probably destroy the world and everything in it.
Best Drumming
Admittedly I haven't played Guitar Hero World Tour, so I am completely unqualified to judge this award. However Rock Band contains some very fine drumming indeed. In fact it is the most fun I have had drumming in a game this year.
Best Game I Had Already Played
Banjo-Kazooie was so much better than I thought it would be. I'd barely rose-tinted it at all. See, this kind of thing is the reason I didn't do a top ten. You can't really put retro-re-releases in a top ten can you.
Best Game That I Still Can't Make Any Sense Of
This sort of game is the other reason I didn't do a top ten. No More Heroes could reasonably go in any position on the list. It renders criticism utterly irrelevant. I can't properly articulate why I like it. I can't properly articulate why I hate it, either. The only real flaw I can pin on it is that none of it makes any fucking sense.
Best Place To Stop Playing A Game
I'm told Zack & Wiki becomes really horribly unpleasantly frustrating at some point along the way, but fortunately I'm nowhere near clever enough to get that far. I'm tempted to just leave it where it is and preserve my love for it.
Best Game
Braid, obviously.
Showing posts with label banjo-kazooie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label banjo-kazooie. Show all posts
Monday, 12 January 2009
Friday, 12 December 2008
Appall!
It's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry, I've been very poor and unable to buy games. I've just had a minor XBLA splurge on Banjo-Kazooie, Bionic Commando and N+, though, so I'll let you know how they strike me as I get into them. At the moment, I'm delaying the latter two until I get home for Christmas, but I just couldn't resist Banjo.
It looks really nice, brightly coloured and full of personality. Admittedly the character design isn't the best: Banjo and Kazooie themselves are endearing enough, and Clanker's great (although he's more level design than character design), but the enemies and NPCs frequently look amateurish and messy. Nipper and his googly eyes are the worst offenders. Still, I'm a sucker for a nice cheerful colour palette, and I think the textures have been sharpened up a bit, which works well. The sound mix is a bit off, oddly. If you want to listen to the music (and you do, because it's excellent), you'll have to turn it up to a level at which the "you got a feather" flute trill will shatter your teeth at 20 paces. Yes this is an exaggeration. It's annoying though.
The game itself remains very enjoyable, despite a number of dubious design choices. To be fair to Rare it's actually less of a Super Mario 64 ripoff than a lot of people make out. The template's the same, but the levels frequently eschew platforming challenges in favour of a more puzzley-explorey approach. I heartily approve of this decision, partly because the platforming controls aren't quite as solid as they perhaps ought to be, but mostly because exploring was always my favourite part of Mario anyway. This aspect of the game is highly rewarding: the well-designed levels always spur you on to see what's around the next corner, and uncovering a hidden passage is as exciting as it should be. Why don't modern games seem to realise this? OK, Oblivion is a game essentially built around this concept, and it's terrible, but there's stacks of unrealised potential in the idea.
The puzzles, unfortunately, aren't up to scratch. They're all trivially simple and most of them mistake legwork for brainwork. Like, I was coming out of Bubblegloop Swamp in crocodile form and wandered down a secret pirahna-water passage to find a boulder that I had to break to get through, which you can only do as Banjo. No problem, I went back, transformed back into Banjo, used the wading boots to get through, and broke the boulder, which revealed another passage - which was too small for Banjo to fit through, so I had to wander all the way back and change into a crocodile again. OK, so I was obviously meant to discover the passage as Banjo, but even so it remains a lot of waddling about to not much reward (I think all I got was a double-egg-capacity cheat, which I can't even remember now).
It looks really nice, brightly coloured and full of personality. Admittedly the character design isn't the best: Banjo and Kazooie themselves are endearing enough, and Clanker's great (although he's more level design than character design), but the enemies and NPCs frequently look amateurish and messy. Nipper and his googly eyes are the worst offenders. Still, I'm a sucker for a nice cheerful colour palette, and I think the textures have been sharpened up a bit, which works well. The sound mix is a bit off, oddly. If you want to listen to the music (and you do, because it's excellent), you'll have to turn it up to a level at which the "you got a feather" flute trill will shatter your teeth at 20 paces. Yes this is an exaggeration. It's annoying though.
The game itself remains very enjoyable, despite a number of dubious design choices. To be fair to Rare it's actually less of a Super Mario 64 ripoff than a lot of people make out. The template's the same, but the levels frequently eschew platforming challenges in favour of a more puzzley-explorey approach. I heartily approve of this decision, partly because the platforming controls aren't quite as solid as they perhaps ought to be, but mostly because exploring was always my favourite part of Mario anyway. This aspect of the game is highly rewarding: the well-designed levels always spur you on to see what's around the next corner, and uncovering a hidden passage is as exciting as it should be. Why don't modern games seem to realise this? OK, Oblivion is a game essentially built around this concept, and it's terrible, but there's stacks of unrealised potential in the idea.
The puzzles, unfortunately, aren't up to scratch. They're all trivially simple and most of them mistake legwork for brainwork. Like, I was coming out of Bubblegloop Swamp in crocodile form and wandered down a secret pirahna-water passage to find a boulder that I had to break to get through, which you can only do as Banjo. No problem, I went back, transformed back into Banjo, used the wading boots to get through, and broke the boulder, which revealed another passage - which was too small for Banjo to fit through, so I had to wander all the way back and change into a crocodile again. OK, so I was obviously meant to discover the passage as Banjo, but even so it remains a lot of waddling about to not much reward (I think all I got was a double-egg-capacity cheat, which I can't even remember now).
On top of this, there are too many moves, a lot of which are pretty superfluous (like the trigger+B charge move) or boring (like the wading boots), and the creature transformations usually just give you lock/key abilities like immunity to hazards or rapport with NPC creatures of the same species, instead of transforming the gameplay like they could've done. However, all these flaws, as annoying as they are, are nowhere near as ruinous as they were in the execrable Donkey Kong 64*, and the game has plenty else to offer. In fact, I've been going through it very slowly because I don't want it to end. Always the sign of a great game.
(*I really should get out my old copy of Donkey Kong 64 and jot down a few thoughts, because I could rant for hours about it. It just gets it so so wrong in so many ways. It's incredible. Watch this space.)
PS As regards to the title: Banjo-Kazooie also has an excellent metagame in which you try to figure out what Banjo's yelling when he does his moves. In the same way as Link is clearly saying "Harp! Harp!" when he's swinging his sword, I'm fairly sure Banjo shouts "Appall!" when he rolls. (I also think he says "get off my lawn" when he's doing a crouch jump, but no one else seems to agree.)
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Banjo-Kazutility
After extensive statistical analysis I have determined the best course of action re the Banjo-Kazooie situation (see previous post). Assuming that the original's a tenner and the new one's £40, and that you'll get the original no matter what, the expected profit from pre-ordering is £(10-40R), where R is the probability that Nuts & Bolts is rubbish. Based on this equation, you ought to take advantage of the deal if you are more than three-quarters certain that it'll be good.
This ignores the factor of being disappointed if you don't pre-order and then it does turn out to be good and you could've saved money. If you want to assign a utility value to that outcome and model the situation as a game theory problem, go ahead. Personally I'm an empty soulless drone who feels neither excitement nor disappointment, nor any emotion bar a perpetual all-consuming apathy, so I'll pass. Have fun though.
This ignores the factor of being disappointed if you don't pre-order and then it does turn out to be good and you could've saved money. If you want to assign a utility value to that outcome and model the situation as a game theory problem, go ahead. Personally I'm an empty soulless drone who feels neither excitement nor disappointment, nor any emotion bar a perpetual all-consuming apathy, so I'll pass. Have fun though.
Super Everything 64
So if you preorder Nuts & Bolts, you get the original Banjo-Kazooie on XBLA for free, two weeks early. I definitely want the original but I'm not sure yet if I want the new one. It looks good (not literally: the art design and next-gen sheen make me vomit blood from my eyeballs), but it also brings back disturbing memories of the terrifying nuclear holocaust Rare perpetrated on the world of 3D platforming with Donkey Kong 64. Is it coincidence that the genre has been in freefall since? I don't think so. Anyway, it's a question of risking £30 for a potential profit of £10. Well, not profit, but you know what I mean. It's like the bloody Prisoner's Dilemma. I'm seriously considering formulating the situation as a game theory problem and leaving the decision up to maths.
The main qualm I have about Nuts & Bolts is that it's not a "traditional" 3D platformer. This is a vague term, so I'll define it: any game you can tell apart from Super Mario 64 at ten paces isn't one. Yes, I'm a fundamentalist on this. Like any sane person, I tend to think that any given game can be improved tenfold by making it more like Super Mario 64. I'm barely even joking here. I'd probably have liked GTA IV if it had had bob-ombs.
Unfortunately this principle also applies to other Mario games, which is why Sunshine and Galaxy were various levels of disappointing to me. Let's take a moment to remind ourselves of the differences. In Super Mario Sunshine you go into a level, get shown a star in a cinematic, and go get it. The end. In Super Mario 64 you get a single-sentence hint and are unceremoniously dumped into a dazzling non-linear playground (where any number of stars are also available to you) and left to get on with it. And that's if you manage to even find a level in the first place, what with them being hidden behind walls and in mirrors and so on. Sunshine's approach is fun; 64's is effortlessly magical.
So basically I entered the Mario universe with the game that's least like any of the others, and now I'm in love with a series that doesn't exist. I guess I wasn't the only person to be disappointed by Sunshine - actually this little quirk of mine probably aided my enjoyment of the game by initially masking all its other shortcomings - but admitting to not liking Galaxy is essentially Nintendo heresy. As it should be. I did like Galaxy. I just didn't like it as much as 64 and, more depressingly, I saw it as a sign that the series was set on a different course to the one I wanted it to follow. Marry Galaxy's level of invention and beauty to 64's structure and intricate genius and you've got got the best game in the world, although since 64 itself is already more or less the best game in the world this might be asking for too much.
It wasn't as if the find-the-stars-yourself-damnit approach was a creative dead end, as SM64 spawned a number of clones. Most notable is Banjo-Kazooie itself, of course, and it'll be interesting to see how my second playthrough of that goes (the first time I played it, I hadn't yet played SM64, although I've since completed it half a dozen times). There was also a rather splendid effort from Ubisoft called Rocket: Robot On Wheels where you drove a little unicycle robot around a theme park and had all sorts of fun with a quite advanced physics engine. It was like Half-Life 2 meets, er, Super Mario 64. Like I told you, it works with any game. (Allegedly SM64 was even the inspiration for Goldeneye's mission structure.)
In the field of nontraditional platformers there's Mirror's Edge, which looks better and better every time I see it, and then there's always stuff like Tomb Raider, obviously. Supposedly both games are moving away from linearity and towards finding your own route through the level, which is definitely a step forwards if you ask me. Although with Tomb Raider I still wish they'd get rid of the combat. And put in collectable stars, and maybe a race against a giant penguin. They're already got dinosaurs in it, although if you went up to one and asked for 100 lives it'd probably bite your implausibly large breasts off. Still, you can't blame them for trying. (The developers. Not the breasts.)
The main qualm I have about Nuts & Bolts is that it's not a "traditional" 3D platformer. This is a vague term, so I'll define it: any game you can tell apart from Super Mario 64 at ten paces isn't one. Yes, I'm a fundamentalist on this. Like any sane person, I tend to think that any given game can be improved tenfold by making it more like Super Mario 64. I'm barely even joking here. I'd probably have liked GTA IV if it had had bob-ombs.
Unfortunately this principle also applies to other Mario games, which is why Sunshine and Galaxy were various levels of disappointing to me. Let's take a moment to remind ourselves of the differences. In Super Mario Sunshine you go into a level, get shown a star in a cinematic, and go get it. The end. In Super Mario 64 you get a single-sentence hint and are unceremoniously dumped into a dazzling non-linear playground (where any number of stars are also available to you) and left to get on with it. And that's if you manage to even find a level in the first place, what with them being hidden behind walls and in mirrors and so on. Sunshine's approach is fun; 64's is effortlessly magical.
So basically I entered the Mario universe with the game that's least like any of the others, and now I'm in love with a series that doesn't exist. I guess I wasn't the only person to be disappointed by Sunshine - actually this little quirk of mine probably aided my enjoyment of the game by initially masking all its other shortcomings - but admitting to not liking Galaxy is essentially Nintendo heresy. As it should be. I did like Galaxy. I just didn't like it as much as 64 and, more depressingly, I saw it as a sign that the series was set on a different course to the one I wanted it to follow. Marry Galaxy's level of invention and beauty to 64's structure and intricate genius and you've got got the best game in the world, although since 64 itself is already more or less the best game in the world this might be asking for too much.
It wasn't as if the find-the-stars-yourself-damnit approach was a creative dead end, as SM64 spawned a number of clones. Most notable is Banjo-Kazooie itself, of course, and it'll be interesting to see how my second playthrough of that goes (the first time I played it, I hadn't yet played SM64, although I've since completed it half a dozen times). There was also a rather splendid effort from Ubisoft called Rocket: Robot On Wheels where you drove a little unicycle robot around a theme park and had all sorts of fun with a quite advanced physics engine. It was like Half-Life 2 meets, er, Super Mario 64. Like I told you, it works with any game. (Allegedly SM64 was even the inspiration for Goldeneye's mission structure.)
In the field of nontraditional platformers there's Mirror's Edge, which looks better and better every time I see it, and then there's always stuff like Tomb Raider, obviously. Supposedly both games are moving away from linearity and towards finding your own route through the level, which is definitely a step forwards if you ask me. Although with Tomb Raider I still wish they'd get rid of the combat. And put in collectable stars, and maybe a race against a giant penguin. They're already got dinosaurs in it, although if you went up to one and asked for 100 lives it'd probably bite your implausibly large breasts off. Still, you can't blame them for trying. (The developers. Not the breasts.)
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