Time to get down to business

To show that I actually intend to use this thing, here's another post!

Today was gonna be a nice day where I slept in to make up some lost sleep but dad wanted to see me and it had been a while since I had visited him (not counting a lunch meeting at the Chamber of Commerce). He wanted me to help him with his facebook page and to talk about his insurance agency's website. His facebook had been set up for a while but he had no profile picture, no pictures uploaded, and didn't know how to confirm friends. I helped him with those things (in fact I spent the majority of the time there uploading pictures for him on facebook), had some lunch, and talked about his website.

He got some generic thing from the Fruitland Chamber of Commerce that looks like it's sorta a standard template and they threw in his business's name somewhere. He wants to add pictures and get rid of some of the junky things, possibly get a whole new site. I told him I'd see what I remembered of HTML and javascript and see what I could do. He gave me the pictures and one of their old brochures for me to use in making a staff page. Should be sorta fun and if I manage to pull it off I'll get paid and if I don't, well then nothing lost I suppose.

After I got back I basically just browsed the internet, talked to people, and played Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Speaking of which, that will be the first game I'm gonna review. I'm gonna do an overview, pros, cons, and closing remarks. I'm not gonna break it down into anything more exact then that, though I may mention gameplay, graphics, music, story, ect. in the one of the three categories as it applies to them. I'll give the game a score out of ten as well with 10 being (basically) perfect, 1 being terrible, and 7 being average. I had to struggle whether to do it like the school system where a 70% is average or not. This text here is actually me coming back from later on and changing how I do things, originally I DID have 5 being average but found myself subconsciously leaning towards the old ways so now 7 is average, games reviewed under the old way have had their scores altered to fit this system.. Hopefully I won't be too biased by the way I'm used to seeing scores given.

Anyway, without further delaying:

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts

Overall:

The general idea of the game is that several years after the 2nd Banjo Kazooie game Banjo and Kazooie have become lazy slobs with no one to fight and the series antagonist, Gruntilda has been reduced to nothing but a bouncing skull (who returns as the game starts to challenge our "heroes" once again). Before any fighting occurs the "Lord of Games" shows up, makes Banjo and Kazooie fighting fit, and gives Gruntilda a new body but takes the cast to his town Showdown Town and forces them to play the game by his rules which is their excuse to change the series from platformer to vehicle racer/sandbox game. You go to 5 worlds (plus the hub world of Showdown Town) to do little challenges for Jiggies which open up new worlds and eventually allow you to fight Gruntilda for control of your home (Spiral Mountain). The characters have lost most of the moves from the platforming games and you'll be relying on your vehicles to get from place to place and do heavy fighting. The vehicles can be made at any time (even right before a challenge).

Pros:

Rare isn't afraid to poke fun at themselves, the series, and video games in general and most of their humor in this regard is well done and will probably give you a chuckle or two. I also have to give them credit for making the vehicle making process fairly easy and straight forward. Being someone who never once made their own gummi ship in Kingdom Hearts, I was a little worried going in that the vehicle creation mode would be daunting, complex, and a huge pain in the ass. You can buy a bunch of blueprints for pre-made vehicles and they're generally good enough to carry you through most challenges and give you a chance to see what does what in a vehicle so that by the time the second world opens up you should have the gist of how to make a vehicle that does what you want even if it's not optimized perfectly. They also keep the flow of new parts for you to play with coming steadily from hidden crates in the hub world, letting you buy more as you get more jiggies, giving you more when you get more jiggies, and just giving you them when you beat Gruntilda in each world (one of the acts in each world is a boss battle of sorts against Gruntilda though it may take the form of a race sometimes). Most of the challenges are of an appropriate difficulty (though there are some exceptions as mentioned in the con section) and earning the special trophy for getting a fast time is usually not too bad (most of the time). I also liked how individual pieces took damage and fell off instead of a generic health bar for the whole vehicle.

Cons:

The game does fall down on it's reliance of time based challenges in getting jiggies. A small few aren't time based, but I'd say that 90-95% of the challenges are time based races or complete the task type stuff. Some people won't mind that, others will. I'm somewhat in the middle, I would prefer less time based missions but it's not something that bothers me terribly. One thing that did bother me was how sometimes when putting objects into or taking them out of your vehicle, and this occurs very very frequently in the game, you will grab your entire vehicle (most things can be picked up with your magic wrench and carried around, vehicles included) or a nearby object. That doesn't sound bad but most missions are timed and maybe 30-50% of the missions involve getting someone or something from point A to point B and dumping out all of your objects when you meant to take one out halfway through a challenge basically will require you to restart the mission (though there is no penalty for this thankfully). Another problem are a handful of tricky missions, often races, where it feels the computer is being a little cheap. The computer tends to speed up if you're ahead and slow down a little if you're behind a la Mario Kart so if you're simply behind you can catch up but you usually can't be sure of your lead if you are winning. The reason this is in the con category is because most races are full of obstacles or parts that if you mess up, you'll have lost due to the amount of time it will take to repair your vehicle/ get turned around.

Overall: 7.25/10

Closing Remarks:

This game has a fun vehicle creation system and is willing to take a shot at itself but is kept from being a great game by a few minor problems that together cause frustration and an over reliance on one or two types of challenges. It's not bad, but I'd probably recommend another game to a friend before this one.