Today, I spent extensive amounts of time with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, and I’m here to tell you all about what I’ve learned about the game. We had plenty of questions answered by both a designer of the game and Creative Director Ken Lobb, who, as I’m sure most of you know, is one of the most influential people working at Microsoft Game Studios today. It was both revealing and invigorating for me personally (an enormous fan of the Banjo series) to see and play what we did today.
Allow me to begin this article by repeating my initial disappointment after seeing the first trailer for B-K: Nuts and Bolts. The trailer showed vehicles and more vehicles, and was indeed quite pretty. But I, like many others, had not been waiting for a Banjo-Kazooie explosion-filled vehicle exploration game—we wanted a platformer. And, ignoring my initial shortsightedness, I joined the masses of Banjo enthusiasts who really more than anything just wanted to know how such a seemingly massive change in gameplay could possibly factor into providing a traditional Banjo experience comparable to that of the wonderfully enjoyable titles released for the N64.
Well, my friends, I’ve now seen the light, and it all makes sense to me. The honest truth is that Nuts and Bolts really isn’t that terribly different in design from the original Banjo titles; it’s merely expanded and shifted. The focus remains: you collect Jiggies and report to Mumbo in an effort to progress through a series of game worlds and eventually defeat the evil witch Gruntilda (or “Grunty”), who also has a uniquely nasty habit of rhyming all of her devious narratives throughout the games.
But the actual design and scope of the game has shifted dramatically. Now, rather than over a dozen individual worlds to explore, there are just five (plus an enormous hub world called Showdown Town). But don’t despair—each world is now absolutely massive, with Showdown Town alone reportedly sporting a square footage comparable to nearly half of the entire world of Oblivion. What? Yeah, you read that right—wow, huh? So, having taken that into account, Rare designers quickly determined that the world was simply too large to traverse on foot without seemingly overly expansive and almost dreadfully slow. As a result, they decided to implement a vehicle-building system where players can construct their own personal creations to transport them through the various game worlds by land, sea, or sky. And it’s not just any vehicle building system—it’s a deep, yet accessible, cafeteria-style smorgasbord of mechanical parts and gadgets that all factor into your vehicle’s resulting capabilities.
You can make pretty much anything you like by stacking parts together in your garage to create a working vehicle, but quite obviously some creations will be more ideal for certain situations than others. What situations, you might ask? Well, the way you progress through the game is largely comprised of “challenges” (such as corralling soccer balls for a soccer team made of stone, reuniting gigantic ice blocks in love… you know, the sort of thing you do all the time in real life anyway). Completing these challenges quickly or efficiently enough earns you a Jiggy (if you’re slow or you suck, you’ll only score a music note, which is merely currency in the game). Or, if you really do a great job, you may even score a special prize (typically a part for use in vehicle creation). The quality of your performance is graphically indicated on a continuum so that you can better gauge how much it will take to reach the next tier of reward. If it seems impossible, chances are you’ve got the wrong kind of vehicle for the job (or you just need to get better, you wuss).
That’s when you want to start picking and choosing your vehicles for each challenge. You can go with a stock pick each time, but if you develop your own, you can always get it done faster. For instance, during the soccer ball corralling mini-game, the Microsoft representative demonstrated the convenience of having a sort of basket vehicle built specifically for the task. That makes moving the balls around quite simple. The top times and scores for each mini-game will also be posted on a leaderboard; you can then sign on and watch a video of the performance of the record holder to see what type of vehicle was used and how it was done. But you can’t just steal the vehicle idea—you have to actually build it for yourself. Luckily, Rare has provided a way for you to trade blueprints with people if you so desire, however, so you can help others to use your vehicles if that’s what you want. But they won’t be able to build them still without the requisite parts—and you’re on your own when it comes to finding those.
Collecting parts also will get you to new areas that you could not previously reach. The best example of this is Showdown Town, which is full of hardcore platforming required to find a place for each Jiggy to go. Here, your new vehicle parts will grant you access to all sorts of new areas that you previously might have seen but were not able to access. At the end of each world, you fight Grunty in a new contraption… and you’ll gain a new gadget for use on your vehicles (and which will help you reach new areas) once you defeat her. Sound more like the old games yet?
While building a vehicle, you have to consider the attributes as well: speed, weight, and fuel consumption, for instance. But while it’s absolutely deep, it’s not overwhelmingly demanding. It’s very difficult to build anything that doesn’t work (though the rep tells me Lobb has done it, to the amusement of others at Microsoft), which mean kids will still be able to enjoy the game as well. The physics are fairly accurate, but also very forgiving; a rocket booster on the back of the car will send the car flying forward, for instance, without pretty much any exceptions. The various gadgets in the game have profound effects on the functions of the vehicle you build as well. In the demo, we were shown the detachers, which can be used to drop off parts from your car if and when you deem them unnecessary or inconvenient. For instance, you might build a helicopter, fly overtop a body of water, and then release the propellers in mid-air to send yourself dropping to the water below in a newly-converted boat. Although I wasn’t supposed to, I also managed to catch a glimpse of some of the other gadgets in the game. Here are the names: Gyroscope, Smoke, Replenisher, Robo-fix, and Suck-n-Blow.
If you drive too erratically and wreck into things, you can also knock parts off your vehicle unwittingly. These can be retrieved by Kazooie, thankfully, through the use of her lasso (that is, as long as you can get to it). Outside of vehicles, Kazooie’s magic wrench beam can also pick up pretty much anything of varying sizes (the weight is indicated by the number of beams shown firing at the object while you’re holding it). However, one thing that Kazooie can’t do in this game is provide a double-jump to Banjo; that’s because vehicles are a central part of the experience now, and the use of different parts is integral to progression through the game worlds. Oh, and speaking of which, the different worlds are beautifully colored and breathtakingly complex in terms of geometry and features—Banjoland alone (which comprises parts taken from every other level in the Banjo series, sort of an homage) was absolutely massive and wonderfully detailed.
So how many unique parts are in the game in total? No final numbers yet, but we were able to wrestle “102 so far” out of the developers, who promise there’ll be more in the final build. Each part is painstakingly detailed, with engines pumping at the proper speed, fuel tanks draining visibly as fuel depletes, and other various things taking place all at once on your wacky contraption of an automobile. You can fool around with your creations in the Test Track, which is available in single-player, but also serves as the lobby for all online multiplayer games, where you can interact and trade designs with other people.
Overall, the game is extremely polished already, which is nothing short of expected considering it’s coming out of Rare. The gameplay is intuitive and, most importantly, fun—and the vehicles system quickly grows on you after you become cognizant of the sheer size of your environments. Quite honestly, from the looks of it, I might just love this game. We’ll find out soon enough, but for now, it’s safe to say that Nuts and Bolts is on the right track.
-Steve