Extropia’s Retro-Gaming

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING

‘BANJO AND KAZOOIE: NUTS AND BOLTS’.

How old does a game have to be before it can be called ‘retro?’. Where other games that have featured in this series are concerned, I have no doubt that they would qualify, for they are decades old and were released for systems separated from the latest hardware by several generations. But ‘Banjo And Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts’ is different. It’s not all that old.

Released for the Xbox 360 and published by Rare, the game featured a cartoon Bear (Banjo) who carried his partner Kazooie (a bird) in a backpack. This duo had appeared in several games before, all of which were platformers. But, with ‘Nuts And Bolts’, Rare came up with a different game altogether.

Well, almost. There were two kinds of activities awaiting the player in this game. Part of the action took place in a cartoon village called ‘Showdown Town’. Throughout this place, which was full of fairytale buildings and landscapes, there were musical notes in bronze, silver or gold, which were the currency in this game. Many of these notes were placed in seemingly inaccessible locations and the trick was figuring out how to collect them. Often this involved jumping and tightrope walking, activities that harkened back to Banjo and Kazooie’s platforming heritage.

Musical notes were not all that were waiting to be collected. There were also crates. By collecting these and taking them to ‘Mumbo’s Motors’, you were rewarded with vehicle components, such as wheels, wings and motors.

As to why you should want to collect machine parts, well that is where the other (actually the main) aspect of this game comes into play. Around the town there were various arenas. Visually, these arenas were brilliant. They included the ‘Jiggoseum’, a huge coliseum complete with music that invoked sand-and-sandals epics like ‘Ben Hur’. There was ‘Banjoland’, a museum dedicated to memorabilia from earlier ‘Banjo’ games. And there was my favourite, ‘Nutty Acres’. It’s was a tropical island built within a gigantic glass dome. But, look more closely and things are not as they first appear. The hills are actually fabrics stitched together, so the landscape is like some giant quilt. The animals wandering around or swimming in the sea are actually clockwork automatons, and the clouds drifting by in the sky above are really giant balloons, made to move by a mechanism powered by water.

Of course, these arenas were not just there to look pretty. Scattered around them were various challenges based around using vehicles of some kind or other. If you can remember the old TV show ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ (or ‘Junkyard Wars’ to give it its US name) and imagine what that show would be like if played in Legoland, then you have a pretty good idea of what these challenges are like.

The first part of the challenge usually involved the option to build your vehicle, using whatever parts you have managed to win or collect around Showdown Town. The building mechanics were very easy to pick up, with colour-coding and hints from Mumbo helping the player to understand if parts were being properly put together or not. Once you had built your vehicle, you then had the option of taking it for a spin on a test-track. This gave you an opportunity to see if the machine handled well or if a redesign was necessary. Then, it was time to compete.

How difficult or easy those challenges were depended on how well-suited to the task your vehicle was. Oftentimes it took several redesigns before you had something capable of accomplishing the challenge in a timely fashion. The more challenges you beat, the more ‘jiggies’ (golden jigsaw pieces) you earned, which could be used to unlock more arenas and machine parts. Since better machine parts became accessible as you collected more jiggies, it was often worth retrying a challenge that seemed unbeatable with a new and improved vehicle. Oh, and you did not have to build vehicles from scratch. You could build from a pre-existing chassis or select from a few complete vehicles that other in-game characters offered you. But for me the most engaging thing was to build my own vehicle from the ground up.

I loved this game. I looked great and it had a very creative aspect to its gameplay. Just like Lego, its construction kit was incredibly easy to pick up but at the same time did not restrict your imagination. Sometimes the challenges seemed a bit tough but you could always take a break and just mess around in the various arenas flying your airplanes, piloting your boats or whatever else you had built. This game is definitely worth a go if you can find a copy.

Thanks to Rare for the images.