I have put off writing this for a few days because I’ve gotten caught up with working on some personal projects, but I was just playing the new BK (nuts & bolts) and I’m afraid my current frustration towards it will persuade my thoughts of the original. So, I’m going to put it up now. For those of you who didn’t pre-order Nuts & Bolts, I don’t believe you can buy this one yet on XBLA. However, I did pre-order it, mainly because I got this one for free if I did, here’s what I thought.

I had never beaten the original BK, I had played some of it, but turns out not much. So I was unfamiliar with most of the environments and how to get the jiggies in them. I must say though, the game encourages exploration greatly. I felt the same feeling everytime I entered a new world, that feeling was being overwhelmed. Then I just took off in a direction, found something to do, did it and continued on. Eventually there was only one or two jiggies remaining in the level to find.

I liked this approach over say Mario 64 (which is still one of my all time favorites). Mario constantly pulling you out of levels was annoying compared to being able to just go at it in this. I understand that Mario changes the physical layout of the level based on what you are supposed to be doing, but I think making the levels the way they did here took more thought and creativity. Plus, it let you stay in the action and you knew that when you were in the level everything was there and available, you didn’t have to return later to it to get the last piece.

The collectables were pretty straight-forward as was the platforming. Though I thought they were both pretty solid. The 100 notes per level were easy if you actually explored everywhere, as were the jinjo’s and as I said above, the jiggies. There was an extreme lack of boss fights. I would have expected more, but I’m not sure where they would have been now that I think back. On top of that, the last one (the actual fight, not the quiz show) was quite annoying! Thankfully if you’ve actually collected most everything you get some nice bonuses going into it.

Really though, most of you probably know more about the game than I did and probably already know if you want to get it or not. So on to the important stuff, how is the port?

First and foremost, they put in a full camera system. Unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to invert it, so suck it up if it’s not how you like it (like it was for me) and some areas still fix the camera on you. But all in all, playing a game like this with full camera support instantly made me want ports of my other 64 favorites (mainly Zelda and Mario) because they become just that much better.

It was nice to see that they also used more of the buttons so it was easy to pull off different moves. Like I said, I wasn’t previously super familiar with the old one, so I don’t know how they did certain things. But the controls felt up to par with todays standards.

There was one big, big problem with the game though; frame rates. How can a 64 game possibly run so slow, so often? I’m baffled about this. I tried to figure out what was causing it, but I think the bottom line is that it wasn’t just one thing, but many things. It seemed that about once every 10 minutes, especially while running around the witch’s lair, the game would drop to under/around 10 fps. This is extremely annoying. It happens almost every time you jump into water. It happens almost every time you come out of a world. It’s just a glaring issue that makes this game almost not worth it due to it’s higher price tag compared to other titles (if you didn’t get it free :).

All in all, I did enjoy Banjo-Kazooie and I did everything there was to do in it to show that I enjoyed. If you decide to do everything, you’ll surely nab all the achievements. But it will take a decent amount of time if you don’t have the game memorized already. At 800 points I’d recommend this game to anyone, but at it’s price tag I’d say make sure you have a good idea what you’re in for first.