Banjo-Tooie XBLA Review

Kowbrainz, 17th July ’09

Continuing with a goal of bringing the full banjo experience to the Xbox 360, Rare and 4J studios have teamed up to release Banjo-Tooie on the Xbox Live Arcade, updated in the same manner as Banjo-Kazooie last November. In terms of getting more people familiar with Rare’s mascots and stars of Nuts & Bolts, it’s a good strategy and is sure to pull in some new fans of the classic titles. But as for everyone else, it’s unfortunate that the updated Banjo-Tooie doesn’t have as much going for it as you might expect, aside from a few graphical touch-ups and framerate fixing.

If you’re completely clueless as to what this game is about, this probably isn’t the best place to look, although I’ll give a quick run down nonetheless. Two years have passed after Grunty’s defeat in Banjo-Kazooie. Her evil sisters come to pull her out from under her boulder in Spiral Mountain, then take her off to a new hideout in the Isle O’ Hags, where it is revealed Grunty will be planning to revitalise herself by draining the lifeforce of others with a giant machine. It’s up to Banjo and Kazooie to save the day, with a little help from a few friends.

I went back to the original Banjo-Tooie on the Nintendo 64 roughly a week after I played through it again on the Xbox Live Arcade, and the first thing I noticed was how jaggy and blurred some of the visuals had been, as well as a less-than-stellar framerate. The visuals of the rerelease are a lot smoother, and the colours are much more natural; not nearly as washed out and much easier on the eyes. At times it really felt astonishing playing in 60 frames per second when I knew the N64 had struggled to hit 20 at times, dropping to something like 10fps every now and then due to the sheer size of some of Tooie’s locales. But the Xbox 360 handles all of this fine, and the game feels a whole lot better for it.

There’s a couple of new additions to the game that 4J have added in which are quite nice to see – online leaderboards for most of the minigames and the game itself, as well as a new Boss time attack challenge with highscores for beating all thirteen battles in the lowest total time you can. It’s a bit disappointing that no online functionality was added for the multiplayer, although this definitely isn’t the worst of my gripes with the game.

A lot of the advertising prior to Tooie’s rerelease had to do with the re-inclusion of the fabled Stop ‘n’ Swop feature from the Nintendo 64. Previously dropped due to hardware capabilities, Rare decided to bring it back for the 360 since it was capable of ‘swopping’ data between two or more games. Unfortunately the rewards for fulfilling this feature’s requirements aren’t much more than those included in the original Banjo-Tooie anyway. That’s not to say I was expecting anything ridiculous like an entire extra level like Grabbed by the Ghoulies had proposed – the real reason this annoys me is that a lot of the advertising prior to Tooie’s rerelease included images of Devil Bottles from the dropped Bottles Revenge feature, as if it were to be included in the new game. But lo and behold, after getting the hopes of fans up, this wasn’t to be.

There’s also a few minor issues I have with the game’s sound, mainly in two areas. Some of the instruments from the original have been changed a bit, and although this was the same case with the rerelease of Banjo-Kazooie to an extent, it makes Atlantis in Jolly Roger’s Lagoon lose its beauty as a piece and makes it sound really eerie and weird instead. The other thing comes as a result of the decreased load times between scenes – specifically, in cutscenes where the pieces are composed to suit the mood of the situation at hand, the music lags behind and makes the scene seem rather awkward. You only need to watch the starting cutscene to realize this problem.

My problems with the new release don’t end there, though, as unfortunate as it may be. Funny how after I learned to love the new controls for Banjo-Kazooie so easily that Banjo-Tooie’s rerelease would mess everything up. First off and probably the least of concern is the camera control. While still mapped to the right thumbstick, Tooie’s camera control is a lot slower and not nearly as smooth as the one used in Banjo-Kazooie. If you’re in a tight situation but have the camera the wrong way around, it’ll take you quite some time to get it in the right position, and for whatever reason it always seems to feel as if it’s working against you when you try to change its positioning.

There’s a couple of other unnecessary control tweaks which I found quite weird. Upon entering Mayahem Temple and starting my collection of jiggies, I found the urge to jump into the game’s menu searching for the control options as I realized that the controls for swimming and flying had been messed around with. Swimming and flying have always consisted of inverted controls in these platforming games – heck, the rerelease of Banjo-Kazooie had inverted controls, so it absolutely boggles my mind as to why 4J would change this. To add fury to frustration the sensitivity of the control stick is now ridiculous, to the point where tiptoeing almost requires me to hold the control stick steady with two hands, and flying is terrible to control. I managed to learn how to beak bomb in the N64 version of Tooie so that I could pick up items mid flight – in the new version trying to do this results in missing the target by several in-game metres.

Perhaps the worst of the control changes comes with the first person shooter modes. The controls have now been changed to Turok mode with the left stick controlling forward-backward movement and strafing and the right for looking. The worst of it though comes when the player wishes to change the height at which they are aiming – if you don’t hold the right stick in place, your view will constantly revert to the default position. It makes me wonder whether 4J bothered to test the final battle with Gruntilda, where aiming at Grunty herself becomes one of the worst chores imaginable. The fight was difficult enough for players to begin with; there wasn’t any need to add an extra layer of frustration on top of that.

All of these gripes address the quality of the port, not the game itself though. If you’re still yet to play Banjo-Tooie, you should definitely pick this up when you can as it’s an excellent game and the improvements in framerate and visuals make it all the more worth your while. For long time Banjo fans though – I can say that I really wanted to see what a Banjo-Tooie experience would be like without the framerate issues and whether it would top Banjo-Kazooie, my favourite of the two, but sadly for every problem 4J has fixed they have introduced two more in its place, and thus I can’t really recommend Tooie XBLA to everyone. You may as well dust off the old N64 instead.

Overall: 4/5