Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

No one’s mentioned Street Hawk or Airworlf. Those were great shows too but between them and Knight Rider it seems that black was definitely the in colour 😀

@Fragile So you’re the guy who’s analysis of “War and Peace” is that it’s a simple adventure story. 😜 Its okay because I’m the one who is still looking for the secrets to the universe in the chewing gum wrapper. 😄

I always appreciate your unique takes on games and movies, nonetheless. And I also thank you for taking the time to read my babbling sentiments.

@RogerRoger very interesting discussion about Drake and how your feelings about him has changed also being a microcosm of your feelings about other fictional protagonists. So while totally valid and well worded, I hope you don’t mind if I add a different perspective on character and what makes a character ‘good’ from an audience perspective, if not from one of pure morality. I’ve always found flawed heroes the most interesting (and relatable if I’m honest). A character whose moral compass ultimately wins out against any inherent weaknesses just provides a natural extra level or two of depth during any character development for me.

That… and of course, nobody is perfect (I certainly ain’t) so if our heroes had no character flaws I think that the greater audience would at the very least have difficulty relating to them but also treat them with varying degrees of cynicism. Basically, I think it’s okay to like characters (& people irl) who may have the odd difference to you in terms of your own personal morals, as long as certain unforgivable boundaries are not breached.

@RogerRoger well put… and I agree with pretty much everything you’ve added there. A progression should be consistent across a series, so I’m totally with you on that.

@RogerRoger I would have to wonder how much of the story and how Drake acts in that game would be different if Amy Hennig wasn't forced out and the whole script wasn't scrapped. I know the former was considered a rumor after IGN posted their original article on it, but Nolan North's recent comments in a recent interview make it surely seem like it was actually true in the end given that they scrapped everything and changed actors.

I'm not criticizing you or saying you shouldn't take things more seriously than I do (aside from The Last of Us Part II forcing me to fight Ellie), but I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum as well. There may be slight bias considering Uncharted is possibly my favorite game series of all time. It's definitely my most influential as I likely wouldn't be gaming on PlayStation right now without it (at least not as my main platform). Like Horizon Forbidden West this generation, the next Uncharted game coming out was a huge deal and the reason why I would buy a PS4 without question within it's first year of release and not even think about the Xbox One. Unfortunately expectations would get the better of me and Uncharted 3 would be a disappointment at the time, but that's not really the point.

At least between Uncharted 4 and The Lost Legacy, I liked The Lost Legacy far more. I look forward to giving Uncharted 4 a second chance via the Legacy of Thieves Collection to see if I like it better away from expectations like with Uncharted 3 last year, but I loved The Lost Legacy and it easily earns it's place alongside the best of the series. I would love it if they did at least another game with Chloe as the main character, especially since there's no reason to do any more with Nate. A cameo would be cool, but while I had my reservations with Uncharted 4's story, I thought they ended Nate's story really well at least. He got his happy ending with Elena and their child.

@RogerRoger no problem at all… always willing to play a little devil’s advocate 🍻

Banjo-Kazooie
Platform: N64 emu on Nintendo Switch via NSO Expansion Pack
Completion: 94 or so jiggies; enough to access the final battle, but not quite 100%

Banjo-Kazooie was released by legendary British game developer Rare on the Nintendo 64 way back in 1998. The game is often heralded as a masterpiece, and one of the first and most famous examples of what has been termed "collect-a-thon platformer" game design. Despite now technically being a first-party Microsoft IP, Nintendo gamers of an older stock who grew up playing games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in their formative years often include this title alongside those first-party classics as being one of the best titles ever published on a Nintendo console. Actually, probably the most excited I've seen some of my Nintendo-loving friends was when Banjo and Kazooie (they're two characters, but I'll get into that) were announced as DLC fighters for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. In brief, there's no shortage of love for this game. However, being primarily a Sega and Sony gamer until the release of the Playstation 3 (I didn't even play my first 3D Zelda game until 2011), it was a game I'd never had the opportunity to experience. I told myself I'd jump on this title if it was ever released on a modern system I actually owned, so when Banjo-Kazooie was revealed to be one of the titles coming to Nintendo's lineup of N64 games on their premium subscription service, I jumped at the opportunity to play it. Finally, a chance to patch up one of the few major remaining holes in my resume as a Nintendo fan!

Well, I've played it now. Pretty comprehensively, because the game forces to to nearly 100% it in order to access the final boss. And... wow, I hate it. Maybe even more than The World Ends With You. Which seems funny, since I completed this game and dropped that one. I'm honestly not sure why I did. I suppose, like with Mario 64, I was hoping that, even if I completed it, I'd come to grudgingly appreciate it for what it did well at the time. But there is no appreciation to be had here, and I'll never play another game in this series again (I did play the weird Xbox 360-exclusive spinoff Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts years back, and also hated that; but, honestly, everyone hates that game).

Banjo-Kazooie begins on Spiral Mountain. Dim-witted honey bear Banjo lives together with his younger sister Tooty. Their peaceful existence is disrupted, however, when the sister is kidnapped by the witch Gruntilda, who plans on using a ritual to steal the girl's beauty for herself. Banjo sets off toward the witch's lair with his best friend (life partner?) Kazooie, a large red bird who seemingly lives in Banjo's backpack.

The game is structured much like N64 platformer classic Super Mario 64 insofar as you unlock and explore a series of levels from a central hub area that you continually return to. In this case, it's Gruntilda's Lair, a labyrinthine and frequently confusing environment you'll have to re=navigate over and over if you play the game the way it was meant to be played (i.e. saving and quitting instead of using save states). This is the first of many complaints I have about the game: whereas Peach's Castle in SM64 was a smaller location dense with secrets, Gruntilda's lair operates as more of a gigantic dungeon that the game will force you to re-explore every time you come back to it. At the top of her lair but want to quit for a while? Well, if you were playing on native hardware, that meant starting over from scratch getting back to that point the next time you boot it up. Mario 64 was the same way, as mentioned, but, unlike this, Peach's Castle wasn't a confusing mess. It doesn't help that there's no in-game map or anything to find your way around this place.

Worse still, finding the levels isn't enough to progress. You see, the level and the location that unlocks the level are actually two different things, and sometimes on different floors of the lair entirely. The player will need to hunt around for puzzle pads, where they can use puzzle pieces called jiggies that they find in the levels to put down the pieces needed to activate a level's entrance, allowing them to backtrack and explore it. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the hub was well-designed, but, as mentioned, the lair is a giant dungeon that lacks a sense of flow or cohesion to it.

I will say, at least, that there's an impressive amount of stuff hidden within the hub. Cauldrons can be found which will allow the player to fast-travel between specific points in the dungeon. The player can find codes and messages that will help them to unlock items and secrets elsewhere within the lair. The hub also has its own set of jiggies that need to be unlocked via secret switches within each of the levels. There's also Brentilda, the benevolent fairy godmother and estranged sister to Gruntilda, who frequently shows up throughout the game to throw shade at her sister by sharing facts about her that she finds disgusting. The reason for all this seemingly random slander isn't apparent at first, but the player will want to pay attention, since it ties into one of Banjo-Kazooie's nastiest late-game tricks.

I'd also like the briefly complain about the saving and quitting process itself. Every time you do, a lengthy animation plays out that shows the player failing in their quest, and Gruntilda succeeding in her mission to steal Tooty's beauty for herself. This makes no sense contextually, for one thing, but, being unsure if the game was saving before or after the unskippable animation played out, I often found myself sitting through it before leaving the game.

Banjo-Kazooie is aptly named, since the two characters act in tandem over the course of their adventure. Only basic actions are available from the start of the game, as players will need to gradually unlock their needlessly huge moveset by talking to a mole named Bottles in various levels. Usually the level is designed to take advantage of whatever moves they happen to unlock, but as the game goes on, it begins introducing elements in earlier levels that are impossible to complete until they find moves in later levels, forcing the player to backtrack. The process of backtracking back across the lair and into specific points in earlier levels is, frankly, tedious as hell. I also didn't care for the bloated arsenal of controls by the time you unlock all of their abilities, since it can sometimes make it difficult knowing how one is supposedly to interact with certain objects and enemies.

The bigger problem, though, is that the act of moving itself is clunky and unpleasant. Despite being a relatively younger fifth generation title, B-K lacks the sort of responsive, dynamic movement that made controlling characters in games like Super Mario 64 and the Spyro trilogy on PS1 such a joy for players at the time. It certainly doesn't help, then, that B-K's levels are unnecessarily big and filled with empty space that you'll need to plod through over and over as you hunt for collectibles.

Movement becomes a vastly bigger issue in the water. Now, 3D platformers have never been known to have joyous water movement, but B-K's sluggish water controls are next level in this regard. It was almost physically painful trying to navigate my big, stupid bear through the water. And, wouldn't you know it, B-K actually has a big focus on swimming around various levels! You also have to manage Banjo's oxygen meter, which is a great joy when combined with large spaces and awful controls.

The one thing I'll give B-K is this: flying in this game is a significantly better experience than it was in Mario 64. I'd actually say the game controls best when you're in the air. Although the need for consumable items to stay aloft and the pinpoint accuracy needed to kill enemies who will actively lob projectiles at you drains even this area of the game of any potential joy it might have provided to the player.

What makes Banjo-Kazooie not just an awful experience, but a uniquely awful one, is the way it keeps finding new methods of torturing the player. One level, for example, requires you to climb a large tree that's filled with narrow platforms and iffy jumps. What do the designers decide would be funny, then? To fill the tree with enemies who will pop out of holes and knock you all the way to the bottom of the tree unless you unleash a specific attack with very specific timing. Others might require you to engage in supremely boring item collection tasks. The game is also fully willing to hide certain late-game levels behind bizarrely cryptic progression methods. So, for example, one of the things you can do in this game is transform into different animals and objects if you collect enough mumbo tokens to give to the game's vaguely racist depiction of a witch doctor character. One level required me to knock down a fence in a graveyard, backtrack into an older level, transform into a pumpkin, leave the level, find some abandoned shack with a hole in it, creep in as a pumpkin, un-transform inside to hit a switch, re-transform in order to leave, untransform again so I could backtrack to the area where the puzzle pad was located, but, and this is the cherry on top, in order to locate it, I needed to attack some totally non-descript surface in order to reveal it. The game is throwing Dark Souls puzzles at me just in order to progress!

By the way, I mentioned transformations. Have I mentioned that flying around as a bee is the most awkward thing I've ever done in a video game? When I wanted to land somewhere specific, I needed to launch into the air and then hug a wall until my character was low enough in elevation to land somewhere, because your bee form apparently can't manage to go down on its own.

Have I mentioned that the game doesn't remember how many music notes you pick up in any given level when you leave? These music notes are a requirement for progressing in the game, but the number collected resets when you re-enter a level. So if you don't collect them all the first go around, you have to do it alllllll over again.

By the way, remember those random trivia facts about Gruntilda her sister tells you throughout the game? I hope you wrote those down, because, leading up to the final boss fight, there's a sort of game show where, I kid you not, you'll be asked weirdly random pieces of information about this game? What's under Gruntilda's dress? What sound does this random enemy make? It'll even go so far as to show you some fuzzy environmental texture and then ask you to identify what level it came from. There are a TON of these questions, and, every time you answer incorrectly, you're damaged. Lose too much health and you start over.

What fun this game is!

The final boss is also some brutal nonsense, so I hope you're good at dodge-rolling through hundreds of fire balls launched out almost without cessation as you attempt to navigate your clumsy bear protagonist to victory.

If nothing else, the game is a huge step up visually from a lot of early N64 games. Well, in most respects. Some character models look lazy and overtly polygonal, whereas some clearly had a lot of work put into them. Either way, this game represents a massive visual improvement over first-party titles like Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. Environments are technically impressive in terms of how big they can be as well (even if it's to the detriment of the game itself).

So, the graphics were nice, but sound is an even more important aspect of the game's presentation, and this is where the wheels fall off on even this part of the experience, as the game's sound design is so bad that I'm inclined to call it a full-scale assault on the player's eardrums. The music itself is passable at times, but what really does it in are the sound effects. The characters make awful, repetitive, ear-piercing noises when they're performing various actions, and the noises they make when they're speaking are somehow even worse. It all combines to make this a game I HAD to keep muted half the time to preserve my sanity.

Here's 14 minutes of character voice clips. Listen to just a few seconds of them to get a sense of what have been like to spend an entire game listening to this:

Here's an insanely long video of Kazooie making the noises she makes when running around. Now imagine listening to this for long periods of time as you're running around a level:

At least's it's less offensive musically. But still not great, and sometimes it combines with the sound effects in such a way that the total impact of the sound coming from my Switch ended up being even worse.

Apologies for subjecting this thread to ANOTHER rantview, but I had to get this one out of my system. Banjo-Kazooie is one of the most disappointing gaming experiences I've ever had, and, for once, I'm utterly at a loss as to how people could have ever tolerated the pure tedium that is playing this game. I've seen a number of people in gaming media point to this as an example of collect-a-thon game design done right, but, frankly, I couldn't disagree more. It's difficult to imagine how much more disastrously designed a game of this nature could have been.

I'm not even going to rate this, as I don't trust myself to be objective. But, suffice to say, it does NOT come recommended.

@RogerRoger It's fine. Your commentary doesn't matter enough to me to taint my fond memories.

For me, it was MGS4 and Uncharted. MGS4 might still be the single greatest gaming experience I've ever had. I'd love to be able to get a PS3 again in order to see if it holds up. Unfortunately MGSV was a disappointment for me overall, although I played it for well over 100 hours and finished it, so it's not like I hated it by any means either. Kind of an Uncharted 3 situation where the expectations were so high.

Sniffles.... lol

If they would reboot the series in a sense with their daughter (Cassie) as the main character, I'd be all for Nate being Sully. I'd be much more for that than 3 different Last of Us games or whatever they are doing right now.

@Ralizah I actually love a good “rantview” as it makes for great reading, even if it’s painful to be the player experiencing the game. 😄 Thanks for sharing!

Not having an affinity for platformers, a lot of what you describe just absolutely gives me heartburn to even think about playing. The iffy controls (your description of the underwater segments alone is enough to make my eye twitch), cheap tactics like hidden enemies, having to repeat levels… sounds rough. I actually think the mini quiz part at the end is a neat idea, but it sounds like it’s just poorly implemented with too much trivia and pointless info.

Well, it’s too bad this crashed and burned for you. On the bright side, at least now you don’t have to wonder about the game any more!

@RogerRoger Thanks for the positive feedback, and for the ensuing spontaneous related discussion about Nathan Drake. I am still planning to continue my replay of the UC series, so I wonder if I’ll have a similar change in perspective, because I can completely see where you’re coming from.

@Th3solution Thanks! I remember wishing a while back that I could find games I could just unload on. And now I've found two in a row. Be careful what you wish for!

The trivia is interesting conceptually, but in practice, it just sucks. I'm so happy I didn't play this on actual N64 hardware, as I'd probably be slowly googling all of the answers after dying multiple times, because who on Earth remembers this stuff?

While I haven't played a tremendous amount of it, I do recall the spiritual successor to this series, Yooka-Laylee, doing something similar, only better, because it integrates smaller trivia sections throughout the game instead of one gigantic one at the end.

Actually, it's hilarious how that poor game got stomped into the dirt for the EXACT issues Banjo-Kazooie also suffers from. Nostalgia bias is a terrifying force.

Yeah, bright side is that I don't have to feel like I'm missing out on a classic anymore. Now I can be properly annoyed anytime someone insists it's this amazing gem.

I recall there being a bit of a re-evaluation of Mario 64 after the game was re-released in the 3D All-Stars collection. I hope Banjo-Kazooie enjoys something similar, as, IMO, it's far less deserving of its status as a gilded platformer masterpiece than Mario 64 was.

@RogerRoger Your portmanteau has definitely stuck.

Yeah, like, Mario 64 is a little bit of a pain to play today, but the way it innovated how people interact with games was so total and profound that I can't help but be impressed by it. It's literally the first major commercial release that showed off what a modern third-person camera viewpoint would look like in a fully 3D game. It was skating at the bleeding edge of game design, and was arguably as important to subsequent 3D games as the original Super Mario Bros. was to 2D games back in 1984.

This has more problems than that game did (sans the horrible graphics in SM64), and it's years newer. Its approach to 3D platformer game design was also unique in its own way. The game is creative. But the actual act of playing it is tedious beyond compare.

People always talk up Rare, and, like, I'm just never impressed by their games (sans the delightful 360-exclusive Viva Pinata, although by that time the people most associated with Rare's legendary releases on SNES and N64 had already left), so I'm glad to know I'm not alone here. Sometimes, when I play widely regarded stuff and can't stand it, I have to wonder if it's a me problem. And I've considered that angle. But, at some point, I just have to trust in my own judgment about the product.

Wow, you watched four minutes of the voice clips? I'm so sorry. Combine the sounds and noises from those videos and you can imagine what a racket it must be. I was actually playing it in handheld mode when I was spending time with a friend recently, and had the sound up, and after a moment I saw him looking at me, and we both laughed about the horrible noises that were issuing from my console!

Next two reviews will be glowing. Triangle Strategy is SO good, and while I don't think the new Kirby is the equal of Mario's best adventures, it's still a properly delightful experience.

Thanks for reading!

@RogerRoger My grand plans for replaying the series have stalled after the first game. So next up is UC2. You’ll probably recall that I was pleasantly surprised how much my UC1 replay maintained my fond memories of it, so if history holds then I’ll enjoy UC2 even more. However, having spent a couple weeks up to my chin in TLoU2, I don’t know if I want to try another ND game for a while. I figure I’ll get to UC2 late May maybe, and UC3 perhaps in June, UC4/LL in July… although I’ve got the proverbial backlog millstone around my neck which might pull me who-knows-where. There’s the wild card of the new PS Plus in June, and I’m terrified of how that might affect my backlog — effectively exploding it wide open if I choose to upgrade. 😅

@LN78 I actually haven't bothered posting them over on NL since I started this thread on here, for whatever reason.

With that said, I've been whining about Banjo-Kazooie non-stop on NL as I've been playing, so the same criticisms are on there, dispersed over dozens of posts, and I've had some productive discussions about it with other people.

@RogerRoger You're right, of course. I've played it, talked about it with others, can articulate my disappointments, have tried approaching it from a few different angles, and that's enough for an educated opinion on a thing.

At the end of the day, though, as a piece of entertainment, it's either engaging or its not. Even if I did consider some mitigating factors (it's old, it tried new things, etc.), that wouldn't change that I didn't enjoy playing it, and that truth has to be reflected in the way I talk about the game.

@RogerRoger Nice write-up! Apple Arcade, huh? I thought the screenshots looked like something from a mobile game when I first skimmed your post. But a lot of surprisingly solid games are previous Apple Arcade exclusives, and, tedious progression structure and lack of content aside, this sounds like it was probably one of them. Given the spy theme of the game, I can understand why you were probably attracted to it.

Sorry to hear the story didn't make much of an impression, either. Honestly, from the sound of it, this game would have benefitted tremendously from going full arcade with it. Ditch the story, bump up the amount of content, and keep it a pure gameplay experience, as that sounds like the sole redeeming factor of this title.

This looks like the sort of thing that'll be $3 in PSN/eshop sales within a year or so. Probably a better grab closer to that price, then!

btw, congrats on that LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga platinum trophy. How long did you end up having to play the game to snag it?

Welcome to the club!

@RogerRoger …And true to form you had the wind take you to a road less traveled with Agent Intercept. 😄
I enjoyed reading your take on this, particularly since it is a mobile-turn-console game and I think we are starting to see these come over more and more; I can’t believe how well Among Us did on console. I’ve always been skeptical of this particular cross-platform porting, and it’s good to know my fears are both substantiated and misplaced at the same time. 😅

I suppose the best thing is just to know what you’re getting into with a game that started out mobile, and temper expectations accordingly. Heck, I’ll admit that Fruit Ninja is one of my guilty pleasures and that I’ve actually paid good money to play the big screen version at the arcades before.

Anyways, a nice balanced review of a game which I would guess hasn’t been played by the vast majority of console gamers.

@RogerRoger The review and the discussion is definitely worthwhile. As you say, the crossover between console and mobile is happening at an increasing pace.

I haven’t really participated in mobile gaming in a couple years. And I should clarify, I guess, and say “phone gaming” because I certainly dabble with my Vita occasionally and still flirt with the idea of the Switch. But I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with phone gaming, just due to lack of having the full array of joystick and button controls from a pad.

Looking at the Apple Arcade store, there are oodles of games in there, many of which look familiar from consoles. I was just thinking the other day as to whether I’d enjoy playing some old console classics on my phone, especially those I’ve never played like the old Final Fantasy’s, Chrono Trigger, etc. The price barrier will probably get in the way though, as it just feels like I’d rather spend the $15 on something playable on the big screen. I’ve also read that the phone ports of those games are often poorly implemented.

There’s no question that the mobile phone market is enormous, and there’s money to be made. With billions of phones out there, it’s no wonder that Zynga Games is worth over $12 billion, much more than what MS paid for ZeniMax or what Sony paid for Bungie and Insomniac.

Anyways, it’s a separate discussion all together, but I think it’s good to see that these ports can be done with a certain level of quality.

Horizon Forbidden West

-Is this my new favorite PS5 game? Yes
-Do I think Forbidden West is better than Zero Dawn? Yes, in basically every way other than traversal
-What score would you give it? 9/10, which would be the highest score I've given any PS5 game so far if I did reviews. I would have given Zero Dawn an 8/10
-What did you think of the final portion of the game starting with Gemini? I think they nearly nailed everything with the story starting at that Quest....

As for everything that followed, I'd say most of it was good. The scene of Aloy flying in and bombing Regalla's machines was pretty epic. My only really uncertainty is I'm not sure how I feel about the next game being up against a creation that was pulled out of thin air in Nemesis, but I have confidence in Guerrilla to do it well since they've done really good with Horizon's story so far.

My only real problem gameplay wise was traversal. Climbing up and then magically being blocked from climbing up further only because Guerrilla said no was continuously annoying. Basically, certain things in the game you had to do the way they want you to and their way only, with traversal being a part of that. Besides the already mentioned developer blocking, the "Guerrilla Rules" also applied when you would be struggling to find where to go exactly in say the Relic Ruins. You'd see an opening or something that you could easily get through, but because they didn't program you to be able to, you just jump into an invisible wall. Missing a jump because they want you to hit Circle to jump backwards when you could easily just turn the camera and jump normal yourself was also annoying. Basically, my biggest gripe with the game could have been summed up quicker by just calling it "Guerrilla Rules" from the start, but oh well. It's an open world game, and yes there was plenty of freedom, but I'm not sure if they did that try to limit glitches or not.

They improved the game in several key areas, with the facial animations being a huge improvement over Zero Dawn. They also deserve a lot of credit for going out of their way to make every character look and sound different. The amount of voice actors in the credits was astounding. I just hope they make substantial strides with traversal for the 3rd game. Then we could finally have a true 95/100 on Metacritic caliber game to potentially close out the story.

@KilloWertz I appreciate your summarizing thoughts on Forbidden West and congrats for finally finishing it. In fact I would suspect (and I’m only guessing since I haven’t played it yet) that most players didn’t even find the amount of inaccessible places in the open world that you reference, since I imagine you were very thorough in your long playthrough since launch.

Good to know it surpasses HZD for you in nearly every way and so l’ll most definitely enjoy it one day.

@KilloWertz Heh, I don't dare click on those spoiler tags.

The first game was one of my favorites on PS4, so if this is actually a decent improvement on that, it should still be one of the best games of the generation. Although it's disappointing to hear the traversal still disappoints, considering they made a point of highlighting improvements early on in the promotional period. When I saw the glider and grappling hook, I immediately thought they'd put significant work into improving Aloy's ability to tear through the world, but I suppose that didn't end up being the case.

I remember there being a lot of negativity regarding the facial animations when HZD was first revealed, but it seems like that mostly didn't end up being an issue when the full game came out. Although I guess it's good to hear they've improved on that.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.