Recent reviews by Banjo-Kaczynski

YouTubers are unnecessarily harsh to Yooka-Laylee. I didn"t have Banjo on N64, growing up, and have no nostalgia for it. Some friends who did seemed to enjoy this game. I don"t "hate" YL, but I"ve now exhausted every angle without being able to have fun or get lost in it. As someone who accidentally plays through platformers in one night out of sheer excitement, that"s not an encouraging sign. I tried again on a couple other platforms, even years apart, mostly out of superstition, hence my Steam hours. "Maybe it"s not the same on PC, and a console with a well-tested controller and uniform specs will feel more streamlined?"

The turning point was tonight, when I finally played Banjo-Kazooie for the first time on my actual N64. Even despite technically being a "Europlatformer," a category often reviled in certain retrogaming circle, Banjo-Kazooie is all-around an excellent platformer in any way I can measure. I nerd out over collision response, I try to break things, I play games with an active interest in how they work at the low level. Yooka-Laylee has already been dissected at exhausting length by its naysayers, but I want to focus solely on this divergence, and why I think you should instead play BK, if you"ve not yet tried either game. It"s available on Xbox, you can find it for N64, I"m sure there"s other ways. Banjo isn"t as free-flowing or athletic as a sliding and diving platformer like Mario 64, but the way it moves and animates was tested and tuned to near perfection. You"ll never find yourself asking, "how did the developers expect me to interpret this?!" Rather, "What hint is the game giving me?" Every once in a while, you"re stumped for just a few minutes, only to suddenly feel like a smartypants for progressing again. It"s that feeling you remember from playing games growing up. Not just an artifact of nostalgia, but designers and programmers who are good at combining riddles and reflexes.

Collecting goodies, which is monotonous in any inferior collectathon, does not feel like virtual chores. The sounds the pickups make, their distinct looks, and their immediate usefulness will even tempt you. It"s sometimes hard to resist grabbing honeycombs even when Banjo"s health is topped off. Contrarily, Yooka-Laylee as a collectathon does not give me that same weird, irrational satisfaction. The long walks, slow cooldowns, and sprawling to-do list of ever-increasing quotas feels like a single-player interpretation of the worst elements seen in a freemium MMO. I"m not collecting Pagies, I"m combing the world for Chore Points. Just another hour of this, and I can get a change of scenery!

The deeper technical side fares no better. YL"s equivalent to Kazooie"s slope-running drains the dreaded ability meter, where BK"s could be used freely without being broken or obsoleting your other moves. The way your more extreme abilities in BK are limited is carefully coordinated with the levels, and how pickups and objects are arranged. Running out of consumables does not feel like hitting a wall. Where Banjo"s single point of floor contact is great at making it clear if you"re on a steep slope or not, and whether you"re falling or grounded (See also: Super Mario 64, Mystical Ninja, Corn Kidz 64) Yooka-Laylee uses capsulloidal collision. This is no problem, even with the potential to be a great improvement. Many modern platformers use spheres, capsules and axis-aligned cylinders (Pac-Man World 2, Super Mario Odyssey, Kirby and the Forgotten Land) with the oldschool method arguably being a trade of accuracy for performance, or even a result of collective programmer inexperience with 3D games. Glover, a later N64 game, has pretty sophisticated floor/wall collision, as does Rocket: Robot on Wheels. But in Yooka-Laylee, I can feel that "Lean Unity" tutorial seeping through. The Rextro minigames exemplify it even more. The whole thing does not feel as homegrown as I had hoped.

A ton of people were able to enjoy this game, so it can stand on its own. If the review scores on Steam are any indication, you"ll likely be one of them. But if the meticulously tuned joy of the Banjo titles, even sans-nostalgia, are what get you excited, you could end up feeling let down. If this were typed 30 years ago, I"d conclude with "Rent, before you buy!"

They"re REALLY extending that old Unity character controller they used for Yo Noid! 2. I like it. I originally backed this game for this as a Kickstarter reward, so I"ll only list minor concerns here. I am an amateur graphics programmer and a platformer superfan, so this isn"t a pointed critique or teardown. If any gripes are the true intent of the developers, then there is nothing to worry about.

The controls handle well, though this game"s equivalent to SM64"s side flip (pull back on the stick and jump, needs a "sharp turn" or a near -1 dot product on your move vector vs. your projected input direction) has screwed me more than it"s saved me. SM64"s side flip was more for stopping yourself short of a ledge if you were having issues decelerating, or if turning would prove too unwieldy. In that game"s final release, they also heightened it for general platforming use. In this game, the spin jump travels much higher, and you can generally make narrow turns on the ground without as much trouble as in SM64. Still, putting the brakes on your momentum in the air for a precise landing at high speeds can be tough, sometimes requiring you to instead aim for a ledge grab. Pounding the ground does not fully zero your lateral speed. In short, I"m curious how the developers are using certain moves, compared with how I did as a new player.

Things you"d want to jump and grab onto don"t have huge snap radii. This is great for keeping the game precise, but these objects might instead benefit from blob shadows beneath, to aid depth perception. Little pickups and coins already project downward blob shadows, as do the fish and the player.

The shader programming is top notch. It really shows what you can do with "modern," homogenized GPUs. I don"t just mean the imitation PS1 motif that a lot of art nowadays celebrates, I mean the clouds, the weather, the swaying and flexing of meshes, the vertex manipulation, the day/night cycles. Performance at full resolution may tax your computer more than you would expect. However, the overall result is spectacular. It"s like faux-PS1 (e.g., quantized vertex positions, 15-bit framebuffer, no filtering, software perspective correction) but without fillrate or framerate concerns. And now there"s visual tricks like rimlight added to the mix, too. You can tell artists have a true understanding of their inspirations, when they can conceive a such natural evolution for "old" visuals.

SOLVE PROBLEM REAL GOOD

Pros:
I LIKE TO EAT FOOD

Cons:
Pac-Man"s shadow does not cast straight down, making certain diagonal jumps harder.

Namco-Bandai, please partner with NOWPRO again, I want to see their take on Pac-Man World 2!

I rented the original game from Blockbuster as a kid, and barely reached the first checkpoint in Jellyfish Fields, so my impressions of this game should match those of a fresh player. While nothing"s perfect, I thought this was fantastic! Despite using a big commercial game engine like Unreal 4, it has that strange harmony of polish and exploitability, that just screams "sixth-gen." There"s a few skips and cool routes to be found, and all kinds of silly unintended stuff that does not negatively impact playability. Try fighting the SpongeBob robot and leaving one of his hands intact. Then, every time he leaves his good hand exposed, ram Cruise Bubbles into his face instead! My only complaint is the same as for every good platformer: It felt short, I wish there was still more to do, beyond some of Patrick"s lost socks.

While they obviously include valid criticisms, critic reviews of this game seem to miss the intent of the remaster, and dock it points for ridiculous, arbitrary reasons. The player reviews here show a pretty stark contrast. We did not give it a 2/10, just because we were too impatient to learn the Bubble Bowl.

Son, I don"t want you hanging around that "Tim Sweeney," anymore. I think he"s a bad influence.

If you cannot run this game, I will call you poor on the Internet until you purchase the same RTX card as me.

☑ Plays just like top-quality mobile games
☑ Early Access
☑ No updates for two years
☑ Steam Trading Cards and emoticons
☐ Was approved for sale by a human

You can draw faces on things, name them rude words, and then collide them with the sun.

Better online than Smash Ultimate.