Banjo-Pilot Review

Kowbrainz, 29th October ’08

Banjo-Pilot, as the name may suggest to those less informed fans, is a plane racing spin-off from the Banjo-Kazooie franchise. It involves a handful of characters from the N64 titles going head-to-head in races over a number of different tracks, not too different to Mario Kart or the game’s likely inspiration, Diddy Kong Racing. The problem here is that, while the game may have been in development for upwards of five years, the charm which was present in Diddy Kong Racing has been lost. While the concept and design of the game may have looked promising during its earlier stages, in the end the game has been held back by the limited capabilities of the Gameboy Advance, which has forced the developers to cut out a large portion of the game’s heart.

If you’re pondering about what exactly I mean by that, then listen in and I’ll tell you a story about Banjo-Pilot’s development. Originally, Banjo-Pilot was not a Banjo game at all. If you’ve played the game, you might know this already from a few things which were left in the game, most notably the monkeys which start piping up after a race is finished and a certain, familiar ostrich which can be found if you look hard enough on one of the courses. Banjo-Pilot was originally shown as an indirect sequel to Diddy Kong Racing called Diddy Kong Pilot. It possessed a lot of the personality present in Diddy Kong Racing, only with flatter courses a lot similar to those of Mario Kart: Super Circuit. What set it apart from the GBA’s Mario Kart were the visuals – well rendered with bright colours and great texturing like nothing else on the same system. This was back in 2001, before Microsoft’s buyout of Rare. For when Rare was bought out, they no longer had the rights to the Donkey Kong franchise, and were no longer able to produce Diddy Kong Pilot. Thus, a deal was made with publisher THQ so that Rare could continue to develop the game for the GBA, albeit using their own franchise instead. Banjo-Pilot was born.

It took a few development phases before the game ended up looking like what it does now, though. Early screenshots of Banjo-Pilot show that Rare had opted to try and push the Gameboy Advance to the absolute limit – by recreating the three-dimensional terrain surrounding the courses just like in Diddy Kong Racing. For a time this worked, and if you can find any of the rare videos of this beta on the internet you’ll be amazed and just how the game looked for a gameboy advance title. However, like many of Rare’s past projects, Banjo-Pilot had been pushed to the absolute limits of the console it was on, and this hadn’t come without consequences. When faced with this problem during the development of Banjo-Kazooie, all Rare needed to do was simplify a few of the textures, something which ended up becoming almost unnoticeable anyway. In Banjo-Pilot’s case, the three-dimensional courses had to be scrapped, and the courses were reverted back to the flat, bland ones present in the Diddy Kong Pilot beta gamers had seen so many years prior. The Gameboy Advance was ending its life, with the Nintendo DS visible on the horizon. And yet, Rare had effectively wasted years of their development time on the game, held back by the restraints of the GBA. Jumping ship to the Nintendo DS wouldn’t have helped much, as it would only mean starting over from scratch with a new engine to suit the superior capabilities of the system. Rare was stuck, with little but the options of dropping the game several years into development, restarting from scratch on the DS and furthering the delay of the game, or releasing it for the GBA like originally planned.

The end product of Banjo-Pilot, as you may already expect, leaves much to be desired. While characters are nicely rendered, their sprites remain quite static and you may begin to wonder just how these planes stay flying when their propellors aren’t moving at all. You may also wonder exactly what Kazooie is doing in a plane in the first place, but we’ll try to ignore that minor detail for now. The thing that really sticks out is the courses, which can really hurt how much enjoyment you get out of the game. Each course is a simple, flat track similar to those in Super Mario Kart and Super Circuit, with mode 7 scrolling effects to enable the game to stay within the GBA’s capabilities. Most of the sixteen courses are based on worlds and/or characters within the Banjo-Kazooie games, such as Gobi’s Valley, Freezeezy Peak, Witchyworld and Cauldron Keep, but the problem is that a lot of them are not represented very well. The only parts of the course which represent the actual worlds in the previous games are the backgrounds, and the track itself does not always remain accurate to the level it is meant to represent – case in point, Cauldron Keep, which uses an icy track for an area of Banjo-Tooie which clearly had nothing to do with ice or snow at all. The backgrounds aren’t always accurate either, and sometimes you’ll find that the designers have been rather lazy – Breegull Beach is simply Treasure Trove Cove with a different track for you to follow. Sadly, the only music which stays true to the Banjo franchise is the title screen music, a remix of the all-too-known Banjo-Kazooie theme. The music for the courses and other features for the game seems to have been taken straight out of the original Diddy Kong Pilot game – while there are a few decent tunes to listen to, not a lot of them sound even remotely like Banjo.

Getting ‘back on track’ again, players will soon find that there’s little freedom to be had with this pilot racer, and at its heart lies a kart racer not too different to Mario Kart. While courses are flat with no terrain present on either side of the track, you’re forced to keep your course, and the game will guide you back onto the track if you try to take a short-cut where you aren’t meant to. The problem is, a lot of the time you’re hardly able to tell whether you’re meant to go somewhere or not. A map is presented to you in the bottom-right corner of the screen, but there are times where things can get quite fast on screen and you may veer off-course. You can get quite lost when the course opens out and tries to give you a bit of freedom with your flying, as you won’t be able to see far enough into the distance to see where the course is going, and will have to refer to your map to prevent yourself from being steered back on course by the game after you hit an invisible wall. To add fury to this frustration, you’ll soon see that the game actually punishes you for going off course, as your plane will begin to cough and splutter even though the ground may be several metres below you. It makes you realise how much better the game would have been if Rare had just stuck with kart racing instead, but it also makes you wonder just what could have been if only the gameboy advance could have handled what Rare had originally envisioned Banjo-Pilot becoming.

The rest of the game is basically what you’d expect from a kart-racing, Mario Kart look-a-like. There’s a variety of weapons at your disposal, themed around various things in the Banjo franchise. Ice eggs work a bit like Banana Peels, Fire Eggs are like red shells, gold feathers are like invincibility stars, UFOs [or saucer of perils] are like blue homing shells and the turbo trainers are like a mushroom boost. The difference is that you can avoid items coming in from behind by using a couple of cool looking aerial manoeuvres – a barrel roll or a loop-de-loop. You’ll also find it a lot harder to keep placed in first – while there aren’t any different engine classes like in Mario Kart, in Banjo-Pilot getting hit with a single item can mean being overtaken by four or more racers. At times, it can add a bit of challenge to the game, but at others it can be frustrating.

There’s a cool sort of variation Mario Kart’s battle mode in the game which takes the form of a dog fight, where one player is placed behind the other and has to try and score as much damage on the other player before they switch places – whoever knocks the other plane out of the sky first wins, of course. The game uses this mode as a sort of boss battle at the end of each cup, and while it’s a nice break from the races, it doesn’t give quite the amount of freedom as the Mario Kart battle modes, even those dating back to the Super NES days. Multiplayer may be a little bit better, but I wouldn’t know. I’ll get to that later, though.

There’s nine different characters you can unlock in all if you decide to play through all the different cups Banjo-Pilot has to offer, however, just like Diddy Kong Racing, the characters are hideously unbalanced and you’ll find that once you unlock the last character, achieving the platinum trophy in all of the cups will lose all the difficulty it previously had. Had the multiplayer kicked off in this game, we would have really expected to see the same character used by everyone and their mothers, which is never fun to see in a multiplayer game. But therein lies the main problem with this game. Banjo-Pilot is a racing game, and yet the replay value is almost non-existent. After beating the game, the only thing you can do solo is try and improve your time trial records – don’t worry about the so-called ‘Rare Records’, as they haven’t even been set by Rare staff members judging by the rounded numbers for each of the lap and track times, and they’re ridiculously easy to beat once you’ve unlocked all of the characters anyway. Multiplayer is restricted to four players via the link cable – good luck finding people to play with, because unlike Super Circuit, Banjo-Pilot requires all players to have their own cartridge to play. Even if you just want a match against your younger sibling to test out how it all works, you’re going to need to fork out the cash for another copy of the game… which just isn’t worth the trouble, to be honest. Even if you have a friend who happens to have a copy and you manage to persuade him into a few races, it’s not going to last long, and there’s a lot more fun to be had with other, fleshier racing games like the original Diddy Kong Racing or Mario Kart 64.

There’s not much else that can be said about Banjo-Pilot. If you’re a big Banjo fan and you’re willing to give it a shot, try and get it cheap online if you can, but be warned that it won’t take long to finish everything. I collected all platinum trophies and beat all of the Rare time trial records within roughly a week, and while I occasionally return to the game to see if I can beat my best times, I can admit that there’s not a lot of the Banjo charm in the game which was present in previous titles. Even Grunty’s Revenge on the Gameboy Advance had more of a flavour to it than this – it felt good for a GBA title, and at least I felt I could pick it up to play again. Banjo-Pilot, on the other hand, feels much less like a Banjo game, and rather like a collector’s item instead.

Overall: 2/5