-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Today is Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts' 10th Anniversary
- Thread starter NotLiquid
- Start date
I sort of get the impression this game was released at the wrong time. If it were released today (without the Banjo IP) I think it'd be pretty popular. Games about user-created things are very popular nowadays and unlike most, N&B gives a lot of substance outside of just the creating process.
Also if it were released now with a PC version it'd be huge imo
As a long time banjo fan, I really loved this game. Never understood the hate it got at the time, I understand now but frankly it doesn't bother Me. It not being a platformer never bothered me at all. I just wanted a new banjo game
I remember the day it came out. I went to EB Games, bought the game and got Banjo-Kazooie with it. Then, I went to a concert.
It was a good day, but I still haven't played the game. I kept putting it off because it was so different and the demo was, but bought it early because getting BK with it was a good deal.
It was a good day, but I still haven't played the game. I kept putting it off because it was so different and the demo was, but bought it early because getting BK with it was a good deal.
I had heard good things about the original BK and knew this game was a car making game. I played the demo and found it fun enough. I enjoyed Nuts and Bolts but actually never finished BK. Maybe I'll have to dust off my 360 to play it.
But I did beat Nuts and Bolts. My biggest problem is not remember what puzzle pieces I've already collected. Building the cars was fun and it was fun to modify your cars to meet the challenge requirements.
If this was made into a new franchise it would be a lot less talk about it, even as a Rare game,
But I did beat Nuts and Bolts. My biggest problem is not remember what puzzle pieces I've already collected. Building the cars was fun and it was fun to modify your cars to meet the challenge requirements.
If this was made into a new franchise it would be a lot less talk about it, even as a Rare game,
You couldn't be more wrong. I'm not just angry that it isn't Banjo Threeie. That's only part of it.
Nuts and Bolts is simply a terrible game from top to bottom. Controls, UI, physics, world design, mission design, just every single component of that game is cumbersome. It's almost as if they wanted to make every aspect a chore, unintuitive, unnecessarily complicated or just flat out boring.
It's not Daikatana or Big Rigs bad. Those are beyond broken and pure memes. Nuts and Bolts is a game that actually attempts at being polished and good, but fails miserably in every single way imaginable. The devs just had absolutely no clue when it came to making an enjoyable experience for the player.
This is such a great video, and I agree wholeheartedly. Nuts & Bolts drills right down to the core of what Banjo games were all about in a very inspired and spirited way. Solving its freeform puzzles made for some of the most rewarding moments of my gaming career.
Oh, and just to go back to a comment I missed previously...
There isn't another game quite like it, but there are some that took the core concept and ran with it, like Trailmakers, a game by Flashbulb Games (one of the successors of Press Play - and what a great studio that was!), currently in early acces on PC, and apparenly coming to Xbox One and perhaps other consoles at some point. I even made a thread about those games, but nobody cared to participate.
Last edited:
It was kind of funny how the mobile garage let you break so many challenges, because you could just remove a connecting piece off an awkward vehicle and then win with tons of time to spare.
Yes! That was great, it spared me a lot of trouble with some challenges, even though I would usually only remember to do that after scratching my head for a while.
Was a great game. Do I wish it had a bit more platforming? Yes. Did I want a continuation of Banjo 2? Fuck no. Game was like collect-a-thon attrition.
Was important for the series to experiment. Just a shame about that Microsoft didnt have the balls to iterate further.
Was important for the series to experiment. Just a shame about that Microsoft didnt have the balls to iterate further.
Between this, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, and Viva Pinata, I think Rare was far more inventive during their early Microsoft years than what they did while working on Nintendo. Don't get me wrong, they made some great games working under Nintendo, but most of it was fairly derivative, imo.
As a huge Banjo fan who is still waiting for Banjo Threeie, I think it's totally fine when somebody likes Nuts & Bolts or even considers it the best Banjo game. But when it's pretty clear that you're one of those people that never liked "collectathon" platformers to begin with and you're trying to make it out like Banjo fans want nothing but "stale" and "outdated" 90's platformers, then that's just stupid.
If they had made Banjo Threeie instead of Nuts & Bolts and if it turned out to be bad in execution or if it absolutely made no improvements or any changes you'd expect from a modern platformer, it would've gotten a fair amount of hate as well. Just look at Yooka Laylee. Rare has always been an incredibly weird and creative studio. Why is it so hard to imagine that they can just as easily make a traditional platformer and bring some new and fresh ideas to both the IP and genre without resorting to switching to a completely new genre? Rare isn't the type of studio that would make a "boring" by-the-numbers platformer anyway.
Making these kinds of assumptions about what fans expect out of the IP, especially if you're someone that never understood what made the original games so special for so many people in the first place, is missing the point completely and is pretty disingenuous. This always happens in Nuts & Bolts threads and it's a little annoying.
If they had made Banjo Threeie instead of Nuts & Bolts and if it turned out to be bad in execution or if it absolutely made no improvements or any changes you'd expect from a modern platformer, it would've gotten a fair amount of hate as well. Just look at Yooka Laylee. Rare has always been an incredibly weird and creative studio. Why is it so hard to imagine that they can just as easily make a traditional platformer and bring some new and fresh ideas to both the IP and genre without resorting to switching to a completely new genre? Rare isn't the type of studio that would make a "boring" by-the-numbers platformer anyway.
Making these kinds of assumptions about what fans expect out of the IP, especially if you're someone that never understood what made the original games so special for so many people in the first place, is missing the point completely and is pretty disingenuous. This always happens in Nuts & Bolts threads and it's a little annoying.
It wasn't the platforming game we wanted, but for what we got, it wasn't completely bad. I enjoyed it and it was fun to make a wide variety of rides to traverse stages too. Would be nice to see something banjo related nowadays though. Kind of part of a reason why so many of us over at the Smash thread are still crossing fingers that a deal was struck to bring the bear and bird over to do some smashing.
As someone who loves the original Banjo-Kazooie and is a big fan of 3D platformers, I get where you're coming from... but Rare also made DK64, which is a lazy, atrocious mess of a game. I don't think Tooie is much good, either. A third Banjo game that was a pure 3D platformer could have been great, but it could have also sucked. I don't think Rare was ever consistent in their quality.
Nuts & Bolts was great, tbh - I didn't think so at launch but it's aged really well. I think folks look at the first two (and all collectathon platformers of the era, really) with intense nostalgia goggles and the truth is they're only good because they're the best we could get then! That's how we get stuff as plodding as Yooka-Laylee, a game that was for all intents and purposes a follow up to Tooie without the IP. BKN&B was kind of a breath of fresh air and it's a shame it didn't get any sort of follow up. Just an opinion though, don't @ me
Sorry, gonna @ you and say that opinion is dumb. The original BK holds up as a great platformer. I didn't play it till 2009 and enjoy playing it every few years (Tooie is another story but I get why some people like it). Yooka-Laylee was mediocre because the execution was pretty poor. The game was buggy, had poor level design, and a lot of the mechanics didn't feel good to use. YL being a disappointment had nothing to do with it using the same formula that BK had.