Banjo Tooie remake coming next week on Xbox Live Arcade

[unwinddesign]

I downloaded Banjo Kong -- erm, Banjo-Tooie this afternoon. Haven't played it yet.

I remember waiting with bated breath for BT in the days of the N64, since BK is easily in my top 5 favorite games. I never even beat it. BT just pissed me off. Too much to collect and the worlds were just too large (re: stupidly big). I liked the size to quality ratio (that's what she said...or something) in Banjo Kazooie; the worlds were vast, but they were manageable. They were well designed, whereas I felt the level design in BT was lacking. I felt like I was trekking through the wilderness in Banjo-Tooie, not to mention all the minjos, collectibles, stupid first-person mini-games...blah. After collecting all 201 bananas and all the other shit in Donkey Kong 64, I wasn't about to play the same game over again disguised in Banjo trappings.

A quote from the Eurogamer review which I thought pretty much summed up my point:

It's nowhere near as streamlined or ingenious in its design as its obvious inspiration, Super Mario 64

The reason BK was so good was because it was so well designed; each task felt unique, each jiggy -- no matter how easy or difficult to get -- felt like a different challenge than the last. In BT, it's like they dumped a whole shit load of stuff to do, then copied and pasted it 800 times to get a game that's two or three times as long, but half as fun.

BK one-upped Super Mario 64, but BT just stepped back. And then there was Nuts and Bolts. Argh. We'll see how I like this update. Going to play it now...

[Princess-Isabela]

I think people are overwhelmed by levels in B-T, because they are insanely big.
personally, I love it.
completely disagree about what you said about design and such, levels are polished and designed to extreme, I cannot believe how awesomely designed they really are.
you need to know levels very well for sure.
B-K was fantastic but worlds were quite small(still bigger than in Mario 64) so while super sweet, it was very short.
so I played it yesterday, game I've been wanting on 360 for months(since announcement was made),
and boy is this game held up, it's beautifully redone, framerate is perfect(that alone makes this game a completely new experience lol),
addiction reaches maximum level, I started playing in the morning yesterday and stopped this morning(I think my stats are showing bit under 16 hours at 55 jiggies and 800 notes).
30th on leaderdboards ^_~
if you haven't bought this, you owe it to yourself.
just get it and enjoy it till Banjo-Threeie comes out ^^
platformers doesn't get better than this.
ps.and you can try demo first if you cannot afford right now.

[lanemeyer]

I played Banjo-Tooie for the first time about 6 months ago on the N64. Funny, for all the talk about frame-rate, it didn't really bother me much. I don't think it had the same magic as the first one, however. For $15, I definately think anyone that loves platformers and hasn't played it, should get it. That's a great price considering how much gaming you'll get out of it.