Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts

[Schimid]

It's one thing to introduce an inventive vehicle creation system that immerses the player and forces them to think within the boundaries of your world, ask them to adapt to challenges you set by giving them the tools, then lean back upon your directors chair and observe how they mortar the bricks.

It's entirely another to take an established franchise and tack said creation system onto it. Sure, cultivating an entirely new IP is much more difficult and expensive than just relying on a known brand, but if you're going to introduce an entirely new mechanic then for fucks sake don't make it the central focus of the game. Banjo-Kazooie was good enough at differentiating itself from other platform games through the music, level design and art style, it just feels to me like the guys at Rare have some kind of inferiority complex and thought "man, Ratchet and Clank are so much better than us, we need a new direction."

From what I've been reading, they just took away all of Kazooie's abilities and gave them to the cars. So now instead of being an annoyingly sarcastic twat that shot eggs, super jump or fly, now she's just an annoying sarcastic twat with no powers, and the futility of her existence just makes her even more annoying. She was never really funny, she was just there because she made Banjo do cool shit. Now she's just popping out of the backpack to make an off-color remark that Boggy Bear will handily ignore and she'll retreat in your backpack to resume her steady diet of not doing a Goddamn thing.

I guess platform games just don't sell like they used to. Besides that, the 360 is hardly the market for a cartoon platformer.