Latest Banjo-Kazooie made for the wrong box

Chad Sapieha, November 13, 2008 at 12:31 AM EST

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Famed British developer Rare Ltd. hasn't made very many headlines since being purchased by Microsoft six years ago. The studio once revered for titles such as GoldenEye and Donkey Kong 64 delivered a couple of lacklustre games for the original Xbox—anyone remember Grabbed by the Ghoulies?—and then a pair of underperforming Xbox 360 launch titles in Kameo: Elements of Power and Perfect Dark Zero. Since then, all we've seen from Rare is a pair of kids titles in the Viva Piñata franchise, neither of which received all that much attention.

 

And it seems unlikely the developer's newfound middling popularity will be improved much by their latest effort, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, the third proper entry in the once loved Banjo-Kazooie series.

It's not that Nuts & Bolts is a bad game. In fact, it might be the company's best work since hooking up with Microsoft. It takes the standard 3D platform formula (which Rare helped establish)—a hub world with slowly unlocked peripheral worlds, plenty of items to collect, lots of little mini-games—and tweaks it by focusing play on user designed vehicles.

Players can create their own cars, bikes, planes, helicopters, boats, hovercraft, and more by snapping together collectable vehicle bits as though they were Lego blocks. It's a surprisingly intricate system. We have to select and match up engines and fuel, connect weapons with ammunition boxes, and ensure that everything is properly balanced and connected. A person could spend countless hours just designing and testing all sorts of conveyances. 

What's more, you'll need a variety of different vehicles to complete the game's many tasks. A shopping cart kind of transport might be required to haul something around in one challenge, while a tank-like machine could be needed in the next to push around other cars. Suffice to say there is plenty of reason to spend time in the virtual garage designing new rides.

And that's to say nothing of the game's wonderfully imaginative environments (my favourite takes place inside an Xbox 360 console—I actually ran overtop a Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts disc as it was spinning in its tray), its witty, self deprecating dialogue (our heroes are actually called out at one point as being second rate video game characters), or the head-to-head online modes, which allow players to pit their custom vehicles against one another.

So why do I think the game won't do well? Because it doesn't have any sort of easily identifiable target audience—or at least not one native to the Xbox 360. 

Nuts & Bolts' look and feel makes it seem like something made for grade school kids; a game that could compete with the likes ofSuper Mario Galaxy. It has a very all-ages, Nintendo-ish sort of flavour—at least on the surface.

Play for a few minutes and you'll realize that much of the game's humour will likely be appreciated only by older players. Gags poke fun of everything from 1970s television shows to Pong, and the comedy has a decidedly dry flavour (upon bumping into a rhino, he looked at me and said, “So, you're going to physically assault a rhinoceros? Really? That's your plan?”). 

And while ambitious older players will probably appreciate the sophisticated vehicle building system, I doubt many kids would have the patience to spend half an hour or more designing, testing, and redesigning a truly useful car.

Indeed, fun and smart as it may be, it seems to me that Nuts & Bolts' true audience is a small group of gamers between the ages of 20 and 40 who grew up with Nintendo consoles and still like to play the odd platform game. 

In fact, the game probably could have been quite lucrative, had it been released for a Nintendo platform. Nintendo has as part of its hardware user base a massive number of mature gamers who were weaned on and still love old-school platform games. 

Alas, the Xbox 360's core demographic is made up of teens and twenty-somethings who grind away their nights playing gritty, gruesome shooters. I doubt many of them will make time for this colourful little distraction—especially not in a season loaded with blockbuster games that are right up their alley.

Put plainly, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is a good game that will go to waste on a platform that can offer it no market. It's nice that Microsoft is trying to diversify its line-up; it's just too bad this bright little game will become a casualty along the way.

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