Remember when Rare was a good developer?  Back before Kameo, before Starfox Adventures.  There was a time when Rare was a name you could trust, and seeing their logo on the box was a sign that this would be a very good, and very English game.

Among the last of those titles was Conker’s Bad Fur Day.  If you haven’t played it, you probably dismissed it as a Mature Game for Mature Gamers (such as myself), a game of nothing but tits, blood, cursing and gratuitous violence.  You were half right.

I recently received my old copy of BFD in the mail in a birthday package from my mother.  I was fucking psyched.
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Okay, I discovered this by accident. It’s how to play the full Banjo game from the trial.

Step 1: Get into Spiral Mountain
Step 2: Go to the giant Ape and make him hit all 3 orange tiles. Make sure the one furtherest away from the tree stub with the monkey is hit LAST. DON’T GET THIS JIGGY YET.
Step 3: Get the orange from Ape’s tree, and give it to the monkey on the tree stub. GET THIS JIGGY.
Step 4: Go to the mole hill above the tree stump, learn how to egg attack, and beat the Ape. A Jiggy will fall.
Step 5: If done correctly, the 2 Jiggys will be right next to each other. Jump right in the middle of them. You should collect 2 Jiggys at the same time, extending the trial.

TRY IT OUT. The only thing you can’t do is save.

I’m not clever, that’s actually an achievement from Rare’s Banjo–Kazooie on the N64, and now the Xbox 360. In case you haven’t heard, yes Rare did re-release Banjo and his pal’s original game onto the Xbox Live Arcade selection. A few days ago I acquired an Xbox Live points card and I figured “I never beat Banjo–Kazooie on the N64, why not give it another shot for nostalgia sakes” and like that I downloaded it and “jumped right in”.

Banjo–Kazooie is still a hell of a lot of fun to play. It turns out that regardless of nostalgia, the game still retains it’s beautiful stature and it’s fun puzzles. There are some issues though.

One thing I distinctly remember is the underwater controls, god damn they pissed me off ’till no end.  When I started playing again, the frustration was still there. The fact of the matter is, the underwater controls of the game are terrible. There is a fast way to swim that’s inaccurate as hell, and there’s a slow way to swim which is very slow but very controlled. There is no middle ground between them and combining them is no easy task. The same applies to flying, when Kazooie gets in the air she becomes a real bitch to control, and it’s similar to the water difficulties except that controlling altitude is the ball-buster. If there’s a target you have to hit in the air you’ll no doubt have perform the task more than one because the angle is wrong or the altitude is wrong.

The controls on ground are easy and intuitive. There are many different moves that you acquire throughout the game that add an extra block to the gameplay, and also helps give the illusion of character growth, as Banjo and Kazooie go from lying around the house, to becoming witch busting badasses with their new skill sets.

One thing I really like, and I don’t see as much in newer games is characters with a real personality. Banjo and Kazooie both have distinct personalities that complement each other and those personalities never change and are always evident in they way they speak. Kazooie is a stubborn, arrogant, trash-talking tough bird. Banjo is a slow, dim-witted bear. You’ll always see that when you see them communicate to others. It adds a level of connection with the characters and makes the game more enjoyable. I know that every time Kazooie talks to something it’s very “put up or shut up” style and I often find myself saying “Hell yes Kazooie”.

Banjo–Kazooie was my first game on the N64, even before Super Mario 64, and when I was playing it when I was around 9 or 10, the puzzles seemed so frustrating and complex, the world seemed so expansive and huge, and threats in the game a lot more scary. Example? Remember that shark in the water at Treasure Cove? Yeah that fucker, he scared the living shit out of me whenever I fell into water in that level. Which brings me to the point that, the game has amazing atmosphere and ambience. The music especially is wonderful and festive toward it’s respectable level, but the whole game just seems to fit. Every piece of the puzzle is there (dohoh).

The long and the short is, Banjo–Kazooie is a wonderful game, one of many great games by Rare, sure there are some working issues underwater but it doesn’t break the game, just adds some challenge into it. In the future I’d love to see games like Banjo–Kazooie that have standout and deliver an excellent experience. However, the rate of things as they are now, I don’t see any gems like this coming for a while.

I haven’t gotten a chance to bust out Nuts and Bolts but I will shortly after Banjo–Kazooie.