Zoo Review is a monthly feature at Murderblog 3D in which our esteemed review panel pores over the hottest new game and breaks it down into a score that you can understand.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is the fifth game in the Banjo-Kazooie series (sixth if you count Diddy Kong Racing). The initial release in 1998 was heralded as an evolution of Super Mario 64, which is total bullshit if you’ve experienced both games. Whereas Mario 64 was about spectacular environmental design, Banjo-Kazooie focused more on throwing a bunch of meaningless crap in a level and making the player find it all. They both had similar control elements and progression methods, but that’s about it. The newest Banjo-Kazooie title is  a subpar platformer as expected with a bit of genius tacked on.

Nuts & Bolts is still a collect-a-thon like the previous Banjo-Kazooie releases, although there are a few additional layers. There are now various methods of transportation that can be fully tweaked and customized. There’s some sort of magic wrench that exists only to remove the player from the action by another step.  There is also a narrative that I was not quite clear on, mostly because the dialogue is written out with exaggerated accents (phonetic spellings of mispronounced words and hyphens everywhere).  If this bothers you, you can do what I did and imagine that every character is a stroke victim. It gives the cut-scenes a somewhat tragic vibe.

The structure of the game centers around various missions that reward the player with “jiggies.”  The progression goes something like this:  Finish an activity and get a jiggy. Walk back to the level entrance. In the overworld, locate the jiggy dispenser. Interact with the jiggy dispenser until the jiggy you were just awarded pops out. Carry that jiggy to the jiggy assimilator, then put it down to have your jiggy total updated.  I’m still not terribly certain as to what a jiggy actually is. This seems a bit convoluted, no?  Please consider the following embedded video.

See that number in the upper left hand corner?  Notice how it increases when stuff happens?  Very novel for 1979.  I imagine a version of Space Invaders developed by Rare would involve the player shooting a ship, taking the points that are awarded and  spending eight minutes carrying those points over to the score board.

This is not the worst of it, though.  The platforming becomes an unbearable experience due to the inclusion of additional game play components. Each level is massive and barren, with points of interest as far apart as possible. It takes a very long time to walk your avatar from point A to point B. This is because the developer wants to enforce a reliance on vehicles. The player is supposed to think “hey, I need to hop in my golf cart thing if I want to get to that destination before the Xbox overheats.” It makes me wonder why there is any platforming element at all; if ninety percent of the game involves vehicular tasks, why not ditch the ten percent that doesn’t and refine the focus?  There is nothing wrong with trimming out what doesn’t work and making a simple and polished experience.

It may seem like I’m being a bit hard on this game.  I am, mostly because it’s not very good.  There is however, one redeeming factor, and the reason why I’m bothering to write about it at all:  vehicular creation.

I am normally not a fan of games that hinge on the creative abilities of the player, but Nuts & Bolts has a nice balance to it. The game world is already set in stone and the expressive element comes from designing ways to traverse that world.  I greatly enjoyed piecing together vehicles in the workshop and seeing how the physics engine would react. Making a long vehicle with two springs on the back and trying to do somersaults was wonderful. This element made me wonder: why does the game need all that other stuff? Why can’t it just be an open world Pimp My Ride?

You don’t need jiggies or notes or any of that other stuff; the sole collectible element should be more vehicle components. Scatter them around levels and have them only be accessible by using certain vehicle configurations. Lose the avatar and put the player directly in control of an automobile that can be adjusted on the fly.  This could be Burnout Paradise with the option of modifying your transport when you want to explore.  This could be beautiful!

Let’s look at some supplemental materials.  This is a Venn diagram illustrating the relationship between various game play elements that are really awesome.

Notice how there’s no circle for “BABY TALK” or “UNNECESSARY COLLECTIBLES” or even “ANTHROPOMORPHIC BEARS THAT YOU WANT TO PUNCH IN THE FACE?”  That’s because they’re not required to have a really awesome game.  You can do this, developers.  Make this game and I promise you will get sixty dollars from me.

Summing it up:  playing Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts has now sparked the fantasy of a Lego Burnout title, so I guess it can’t be all bad.

You know the Resident Evil 5 debate our people have been having? The “is it racist” thing? Well, mainstream media just picked up on it. Specifically, The Atlantic. It’s important to realize exactly what is happening here: a periodical that is over 150 years old has published something on the ethical and moral conflicts related to a video game’s subject matter. That’s huge! This is a chance for advocates of gaming as an art form to interact with sort of folk who decide what will be remembered as art. Comments are enabled in the article! Get out there and show them how intelligent, civil and personable we can be!

Or, you know, just keep doing what you’re doing. I’m going to go back to playing Scrabble on Facebook.

Side Note: I’ve had the RE5 demo for a week now, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to play it. I loved Resident Evil 4, but there is something about the sequel that just makes me feel off. I get the same vibe from footage of this game that I got from Call of Duty: World at War. See below if you have no idea what I’m talking about but somehow managed to read this entire entry.

There are a few things we need to be clear on, sincere reader, if we are to be friends.  One:  I like to read.  Books, plays, comics, essays… anything with words that say something.  Two:  I take a lot of surveys.  At some point I was nice to a telemarketer and now I get about a dozen survey invitations in my inbox every day.  Three:  I love looking at pictures of tiny dogs on the internet.  Only the first two are really relevant to this blog entry, but all three are good to know in case the police ever need your help piecing together a psychological profile.

I was just taking a survey that I found particularly interesting.  It was about video games, specifically the qualities of realism in which they contain.  Here are screenshots of some of the questions.  I’m sure posting these are totally against the terms of service provided by the survey company, but I’m a rebel.  Click on any of the images to see them full size.

Well, obviously you have to exclude magic.  Magic should only be considered when you need to negate Superman’s powers and you just did a kryptonite issue.

This is a very loaded question.  For relatively obvious reasons.

Hmm, “high school” isn’t an option for some reason.

Toronto has been severely neglected as a backdrop for first-person shooters.

I’m not sure why “spouse takes the kids and gets the hell out of there” isn’t an option.

A game tailored to my preferences wouldn’t feature weapons at all, but I’m probably in the minority with that one.

It’s quite clear that the characteristics of realism defined by this survey are a bit different than my own.  When I think of “realism,” I picture literary Realism… the type of realism with a capital R.  Unembellished portrayal of life and all that.  Odes to the unexceptional and the ordinary.  Literary Realism is more or less tied directly to the evolution of theatrical Realism, as is the tendency of these -isms.  And theater is where the money is.

Henrik Ibsen is sort of an important figure in theatrical Realism.  And by “sort of,” I mean dude totally.  He wrote the rules for this stuff before anyone else realized there needed to be rules, almost the same way Wagner invented video games a century before they came into being.  More than just defining realism through his early work, Ibsen helped with developing a criteria for distinguishing art from entertainment.   That is, he hypothesized that art speaks directly about social issues and will challenge them, while entertainment dresses up such issues as symbols or avoids them completely.   If the critical gaming world has the goal of establishing games as art, shouldn’t we be examining this guy a bit more closely?

Clearly, there is work to be done.

One of the potential sources of trouble when taking a traditional Realist approach to games is that such narratives could be a bit boring.  Most titles feature fantastic plots and embellished characters because they are engaging over long periods of time.  Games with a narrative focus lean on conflict and a Joseph Campbell hero to hold the player’s attention… the sort of elements which stand in conflict to the goals of Realism.

Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully is a wonderful example of what is possible when combining games and Realism. I racked my brain trying to think of suitable examples available on home consoles, but this is the one I kept coming back to.

Breaking it down, Bully is a high school simulator.  The player attends classes, explores the campus and engages in social activities with other students.  There is a structured narrative that is told through cut-scenes and assigned tasks.  The antagonist, Gary, is remarkably well written… he is paranoid, antisocial, and generally disturbed in the way that most teenagers are.  The central conflict of the game arises from his paranoia:  the player character, Jimmy, is new to school and is befriended by Gary.  After a while, Gary suspects Jimmy is conspiring against him due to Jimmy’s passive nature and begins to engineer his social ruin.  There’s actually a lot going on here, and it all feels quite real.

The fantastic elements emerge through the interactivity; that is, mini-games as a way of progression.  Obviously acing Chemistry is not normally accomplished by participating in a rhythm game, but as these segments exist as supplements to the main narrative, should they be required to conform to the same Realist guidelines?  Should there be a clear distinction between the “game” and the “story”, or should they be fundamentally unified?

I feel inclined to also mention the Graveyard by Tale of Tales.  This has been covered indepth elsewhere, so you should go read that if you want a full analysis.  I will add one point:  the only difference between the trial (free) version and the full (commercial) version of the Graveyard is that the full version adds the risk of death.  Some advocates of Realism feel that death moves a narrative away from the real and towards the superficial or extraordinary, potentially negating a work’s function as art and transforming it into entertainment.  It’s interesting to consider the monetized version of the software’s inclusion of such a device as a statement on the mixing of business and art, but most likely that statement was not intended by the developers.

Trying to take the principals behind a very old artistic movement and apply them to a relatively young medium is difficult.  There are many factors at play here, and I can rant on endlessly.  But, honestly, there are pictures of tiny dogs to be looked at.

Look at that!  He is so tiny!  So… real!