It's been eight years since the last significant Banjo adventure, and a lot has changed. Rare's making games for Microsoft now, of course, and you know the Xbox 360 is pretty short on colorful platformers. Then again, this latest Banjo, Nuts & Bolts, isn't exactly a platformer. What is it? Here, I'll let this video do the talking.
Microsoft imposed some story-specific limitations on our coverage, so I'll just go for the top-level stuff here: Gruntilda the evil witch is back to terrorize Banjo and Kazooie...sort of. She's actually been dead, more or less, since the last game, but her skull is still hanging around, speaking in venomous rhymes. Meanwhile, our dynamic duo has gotten pretty fat without any villains to fight against. Then the Lord of Games appears. This guy is basically an old monochrome CRT--displaying a game of Pong that looks like a face--attached to some empty, floating robes. (That's him in the loading screen midway through the video.) This guy is the witty, sarcastic, all-powerful creator of every video game, ever, so he creates a bunch of new, varied action levels that spiral off the game's central hub, Showdown Town, where Banjo and Kazooie can face off against the newly empowered Gruntilda (who is now a head floating in a jar on top of a robot body).
The workshop and the open-world missions were enough to entice me from a gameplay standpoint, but Nuts & Bolts' humor and personality are what have me extra jazzed for it. It's out in early November, and we've got a build in here now, so look for more coverage and a review between now and the release.
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