Banjo-Kazooie 3 info avalanche for Christmas
The bear, protagonist of a Xmas Greeting and a festive Scribes
Banjo is back for Christmas! Once again, the BK team has chosen these special dates of the year to unveil some info and stuff about their upcoming title, just as they did in 1999 when the first Tooie stuff was released in Rare’s official site. This time, the classic Scribes Xmas edition got lots of tidbits about our fave Bear’s look, the return of Grunty and even the secretive gameplay of the title.
This year, Rare chose Banjo for their Xmas Greeting, showing what without a doubt is the new aspect of the bear and his fellow mate Kazooie: still a bit blocky, a bit cel-shaded we dare to say, but their look has definitely changed from the X06 teaser trailer. Finally, Gregg Mayles gives some new hints about the change: “Banjo’s new look resulted from Rare’s opinion that he needed an update. The previous games were very young-looking and the industry has moved on. Even younger gamers do not want their games to look overly young. We think the updated look has a distinctive style and really suits the whole theme of the new game (of course this means absolutely nothing to you at the moment as we haven’t revealed what it is).”
But fear not: Banjo will not become another mature rated star of Xbox at all. According to the team “it’s pretty safe to assume that the new Banjo game will also be E-rated, although Banjo fans will be pleased to know the same ‘rough around the edges’ humour will remain.”
The game mechanics remain as the most kept secret, but for the first time Mayles decided to let out one important fact about it: “The new game, Banjo-Needsanamie, adopts a different approach due to its core gameplay mechanic. It will all become clear when we actually reveal what we have been up to these last few years, but for now all I’m going to say is that the player will determine the difficulty level by how they approach the Jiggy tasks. The same task could be really simple and take just a few seconds for some players, but others may find it very hard and take hours.”
Probably somehow related with this, the BK team also refers to the importance of the X360 power for this game: “the 360 is extremely powerful and without it we would not be able to take the approach to the new Banjo game that we have”.
It’s important to note that “Banjo and Kazooie haven’t got many of the abilities that they used in previous games”, and “there is no Isle of Hags” either; but Mayles assures that “Spiral Mountain will return, it will be an all-new shiny model with a gazillion polygons and we will be using it differently than in the previous games. So if that doesn’t satisfy your spirally cravings, I don’t know what will.” Moreover, “Klungo or any made-up Splungo/Bungo/Flungo variant will not be Grunty’s assistant. Believe it or not, we’ve actually come up with a new character rather than trying to recycle old ones (although Grant [Kirkhope] has promised to recycle his old tunes).”
Also, Rare finally has decided to get rid of the BK3 PC mumbling, that Justin Cook involuntary unleashed a while ago, by stating that “although there are no plans for a PC version at this time, I don’t think that Banjo would be a particularly good fit anyway. Control schemes for these kinds of games are difficult to recreate on a PC, due to it primarily using a keyboard and a mouse. In my opinion, PC games seem to fall into a small number of categories and generally lack innovation whereas console games offer more choice and are willing to try something new. As Banjo falls into the latter category its natural home is on a console.”
Finally, the team also clarifies that there are no plans for a BK / BT remake or port in XBLA at the time: “Let’s just get the new 360 game finished before we consider anything else.”
And that’s it! And interesting amount of Banjo info brought to us at the end of the year by Santa Leigh, with a quite promising quote for next year offerings coming also from Rare Xmas Greeting: “We all wish you a very merry Xmas, a happy New Year and look forward to a very busy 2008.”
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By MundoRare | Banjo-Kazooie 3 website goes online
[…] both in X360 and PC, though. But Rare already explained themselves about this very same issue some months ago in the Xmas edition of Scribes, when a member of the BK3 team stated that “although there are […]
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By MundoRare | Rare is not revamping its Nintendo catalogue for Xbox 360
[…] As Rare fans learned with the latest Scribes edition for Rare’s official site, there are no plans for any new release or remake of the Banjo games for Xbox Live Arcade in the near future. “Let’s just get the new 360 game finished before we consider anything else” said the members of the Banjo 3 team back then. Knowing that, and reminding to everyone out there that the GoldenEye 007 rumours were actually about its cancellation and nothing else, there are no logical reasons to believe that Rare is working on downloadable versions of virtually every game they developed for Nintendo between 1995 and 2001. […]