WAA - Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

It's time for the Wednesday Achievement Awards! I forgot to mention yesterday that I'd also finish each of these with a rating (out of 10) for the quality of the Achievement set and another rating for how difficult it is to finish.

This week's game is Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

The "One With Combat"Award: "Blueprint Buyout"
Talk about simple. All you have to do is buy one blueprint from Humba in Showdown Town, which involves such challenging tasks as talking to her and clicking a button on one of the many blueprints she offers.

The "Mile High Club" Award: "A Lot of Trophy Pts"
No typos on my part there...that's actually how the Achievement is listed. I assume that "Pts" is short for points. In any case, every challenge in the game has three levels of success - the bronze level where you earn some notes but didn't really succeed (much like getting a certificate of participation), the silver level where you earn a jigsaw piece (which is what you need to proceed in the game), and the gold level which isn't really necessary but earns you a special trophy from Trophy Thomas. For this Achievement, you need to finish 60 of the 61 challenges at the top level, and while some of them are not that difficult, others are RIDICULOUSLY hard. There's not much advice I can give except to access the leaderboard on Live, which allows you to see a video replay of the top scores. Hopefully you can adapt some of their vehicle designs and strategies to beat the challenge. You'll still need sick B&K skills to beat some of these though.

The "Seriously..." Award: "Premier League"
Why are multiplayer Achievements such utter crap??? For this one, you need to complete a multiplayer "league" that includes every race and every sport/game available ALL IN A ROW. The good news is that you can do this locally if you have two controllers, so you don't have to find someone else crazy enough to go after this too. The bad news is that it takes several hours to complete with no breaks. I suggest starting up a local game with two controllers and then wandering off to do something else while it autoplays. What a stupid Achievement...

The "Little Rocket Man" Award: "Speedy of the Colossus"
Again, not a typo. This Achievement cuts to the heart of everything that makes B&K: Nuts and Bolts fun - designing crazy vehicles to meet a specific purpose. For this one you need to build an enormous vehicle of 200 or more pieces and then get it to go over a set speed (the game doesn't say, but it's pretty fast). Of course, that's not so simple because a big vehicle is heavy and so it isn't easy to get it moving quickly. If you're stumped, highlight this section for a hint: (Use wings to get high in the air, then use gravity and a little rocket power to build up some serious speed!)

The Scientist Gone Gamer Award: "Arcade Pwner"
Yes, just yes. This is everything that Achievements are about in my eyes. Within the game is a separate mini-game starring Klungo, the lizard assistant from previous B&K games. It's an old-school side scroller out of the Pitfall school, but with a hilarious take on the genre. If you beat all the levels (some are actually pretty tough), you get this awesome Achievement. As if that wasn't enough, you also get a free Gamerpic of the Achievement as well, which you can then use online. AND I DO!

Achievement Set Rating - 8
It's a very solid set. You'll find the Achievements come pretty steadily throughout the game, and there aren't too many multiplayer awards to get in the way. The icons are colorful and reasonably varied.

Achievement Difficulty Rating - 5
If you want around 800 points, you can accomplish that in 20 hours or so without much difficulty. The final 200 are going to take some real effort though, both in setting up online matches and grinding out those last few trophies.

Banjo-Kazooie: Achievements

B-K is your standard Live Arcade game, meaning it features 12 Achievements for 200 points. Before playing the game I read a few guides that boasted this game is easy points and can be finished without issue in around 10 hours.

Here's an issue: that's bullshit.

If you're already an expert on B-K and played through it a couple times on the N64, then maybe you can cruise through quickly. But if you're coming into the game new, that "10 hours" is blatantly false. Consider this one:

"Music Maestro" - 25 points
Collect all the musical notes in the game. There are 900. No, I'm serious. 900. And they're hidden throughout 9 worlds in the game. That means you'll need to thoroughly explore every single one, including finding any secret areas that might be housing notes. And if you're missing a few, it takes forever to figure out which ones you already have versus which ones you still need.

Unless you have the game memorized, this Achievement alone takes more than 10 hours. Now it's certainly the case that you can work on this while you're completing all the other Achievements. There are definitely some easy ones. But it took me at least 20 hours to finish the game with all the Achievements, and it certainly wasn't because I was taking my sweet time.

It's also worth noting that while the game is far from difficult, I wouldn't exactly call it easy either. I mentioned in an earlier post that there are some elaborate jumping puzzles later in the game, and the camera does you no favors. The game also uses the utterly outdated "lives" system, and if you run out you need to start back at the beginning and jog to wherever you were. The bottom line is that there's a lot of frustrating "fail until you succeed" challenges in B-K so don't expect those 200 points to come in a lazy evening.

Banjo-Kazooie - Gameplay

I just finished Banjo-Kazooie from the Xbox Live Arcade. I downloaded it after I finished Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. It was originally a Nintendo 64 release from Rare, who also made Viva Pinata and Conker: Bad Fur Day. I had an "uneven" relationship with B-K...through the first half of the game I was really enjoying it, and during the second half I thoroughly hated it.

B-K is a 3d platformer. I've reviewed a few of those over on bucketofchuck.com and the same axiom applies here as it did in those games: it all comes down to the camera. The more precise and intuitive the camera, the more enjoyable the experience. The camera in B-K is mediocre...it's responsive and fairly easy to control, but it hangs on environmental objects too easily and is imprecise.

That then goes a long way to explaining my shifting feelings about the game. Through the first half the game is pretty easy, with basic combat and rare, straightforward jumping puzzles. The camera is good enough in those situations to not hinder the player, so the game is fun. But in the second half (around the time you hit the snow world), combat becomes more common and dangerous, and your chances of success will often hinge on your ability to make precisely timed and aimed jumps around the environment. Suddenly the camera, which you probably weren't giving a lot of thought to that point, becomes your biggest enemy. It is massively frustrating to perform a series of jumps (say, to get to a high point) only to miss the last one because the camera spins off to the side while you're in midair and you suddenly can't see where you're about to land. I remember investing a lot of time mastering these types of jumping challenges playing Super Mario World as a kid, but I've really lost my patience for it over the years. Redoing jumping puzzles over and over is not my idea of fun, and being foiled by the camera is the proverbial salt in my wounds.

I wouldn't make such a big deal out of this except that gameplay is pretty much everything in B-K. The entire game is running (and jumping) around environments looking for widgets to collect. There's not much story here, so if the gameplay isn't fun then it's kind of a dealbreaker.

Other notes:
- I liked the graphical design of the game, as it features some nicely constructed worlds. However, if you're a graphics snob then B-K is not for you. They cleaned up the graphics a bit for the Arcade release, but this is an N-64 port and it shows.
- The save system in this game is just plain broken. Essentially it autosaves whenever you collect a key item like a musical note or jigsaw piece. But it doesn't save your progress with other aspects of individual worlds. Let's say you need to feed 10 worms to a hungry bird to advance. If you find nine worms, give them to the bird, and then die while looking for the tenth (say by falling a long distance thanks to a camera issue), you have to start over from worm #1. It's exactly those kind of design decisions that made me bitter and resentful towards the game once it got more difficult.
- One thing I did really love about the game is it's sense of humor. You can really tell that these are the same people that made Conker, because you can already see their subversive sense of humor developing in this game. Gruntilda make for a great nemesis, and I found the game's ending to be really satisfying.

I'll have another post later about the Achievements...