I wasn't planning on blogging until the weekend. I had the intention of voicing my opinions of the Half-Life expansion packs, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. On this quiet Thursday, with University lectures cancelled and no pressure from essays or exams, I thought I'd just kick back and chill. Maybe read a little of Mrs Dalloway or The Faerie Queene in preparation for my Literature seminars next week. Maybe do a bit of creative writing, work on my novel to pass the time. Maybe even pick up the PSP and clear a few more outstanding missions in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Instead, I opted to fire up the Xbox 360 and play a little Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. 
 
I've been meaning to get around to playing Nuts & Bolts ever since Brad's glowing review encouraged me to pick up a copy from Amazon last Easter. Finishing off the Half-Life expansions, as well as feeling the need to return to my 360 after over a month of inactivity, prompted me to finally pick it up and start playing. Initially my opinion of the game was positive, but not especially high. It's funny, it looks absolutely gorgeous, it controls well, the gameplay is built on a very firm foundation, and the vehicle editor is accessible but also incredibly deep. I spent my first few hours with the game adjusting to the mechanics, mucking about in the Workshop and Test-O-Track, and completing some of the first few Jiggy challenges with some pretty rudimentary vehicular designs. I was enjoying Nuts & Bolts, but wasn't really seeing what Brad was talking about.
 

Then came "the moment"

I wasn't planning on blogging until the weekend. I had the intention of voicing my opinions of the Half-Life expansion packs, Opposing Force and Blue Shift. On this quiet Thursday, with University lectures cancelled and no pressure from essays or exams, I thought I'd just kick back and chill. Maybe read a little of Mrs Dalloway or The Faerie Queene in preparation for my Literature seminars next week. Maybe do a bit of creative writing, work on my novel to pass the time. Maybe even pick up the PSP and clear a few more outstanding missions in Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Instead, I opted to fire up the Xbox 360 and play a little Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. 
 
I've been meaning to get around to playing Nuts & Bolts ever since Brad's glowing review encouraged me to pick up a copy from Amazon last Easter. Finishing off the Half-Life expansions, as well as feeling the need to return to my 360 after over a month of inactivity, prompted me to finally pick it up and start playing. Initially my opinion of the game was positive, but not especially high. It's funny, it looks absolutely gorgeous, it controls well, the gameplay is built on a very firm foundation, and the vehicle editor is accessible but also incredibly deep. I spent my first few hours with the game adjusting to the mechanics, mucking about in the Workshop and Test-O-Track, and completing some of the first few Jiggy challenges with some pretty rudimentary vehicular designs. I was enjoying Nuts & Bolts, but wasn't really seeing what Brad was talking about.
 

Then came "the moment"

Hmmm... by now I've forgotten most of my great Nuts & Bolts moments, but 'breaking' the challenges and being able to see how other people did good is one of the best points of the game.  It truly is an engineering game!
 
A lot of my favorite moments were seeing how other people broke the game.  'This stuff has to be in the trash', so just flip the trash can over!  'Put these things through the hoop', so just pull the hoop down with a specialized tool!
 
I guess my most glorious moment was how in one event I had the best time, so a lot of people downloaded my vehicle and did a little better.

I gave up too quick on Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I bought it Christmas of '08 with a bunch of other games. I really never gave it a chance before I traded it in. It's even cheaper now and sometimes I think, hey, pick it up a again, give it another try. I usually don't have regrets about letting video games go, but this one has stuck with me as a bad choice.

I thought about getting this game, but decided that I probably wouldn't have the patience to keep rebuilding vehicles in order to beat challenges.

I really want this game. Maybe my next purchase after ME2

My only real problem with Nuts & Bolts comes from the challenges later on, particularly if you're going for the Jiggillionaire achievement. There are a lot of creative challenges in there but there's so many uninspired fetch quests and simple races in between that you end up using the same vehicles for a lot of them.  There really needs to be something imaginative on both sides of the equation for it to work – I’m not going to want to build something innovative if I’ve been doing the same races or fetch-quests over and over throughout the game. So in that way the first ten or so hours of the game were great, but the rest boiled down to me picking one of five or six saved blueprints and tweaking it ever-so-slightly for the challenge then doing the same thing I'd done several times before for another T.T. Trophy. To me it was like so much time had been put into making the vehicle creator so awesome that the rest of the game and challenge design couldn't keep up.
 
There were other complaints I had with the game when I played it for the first time but most of those stem from me being a Banjo fanboy prior to the game's release and not liking how Rare had advertised it as an evolution of the same platforming gameplay when in reality it was something really different. Now, this is the only problem as far as I can tell, and I've gladly recommended the game or lent it to several friends.

Getting a time in the top 500 on the leaderboards was a proud moment for me.  It made spending time crafting vehicles seem worthwhile.  

The chopper I built for that mission was an ugly beast. Only just bought that game today

The problem I had with this games was that I kept trying to make my vehicles really complicated or look cool, and they just came off not functional or stupid.  If I build a simple vehicle I felt like I was doing it wrong.
 
Though I did make a vehicle that was just giant letters that spelled  my name BRYCE, so that was pretty cool