Banjo Kazooie - Nuts and Bolts Trailer!!!!!!!!

[Erik Aston]

Stupid of them to "take on Mario" after the critical and commercial success of Galaxy.

The reason platformers are dead is because of 3D. You can't have twitch based gameplay with the main verb being "jump" in 3D. There's no depth perception. That's why 3D platformers are loaded with guns, why the camera is always so important, why "exploration and puzzle solving" has been stressed, even though none of this really has to do with traditional platformer gameplay; point-A to point-B, reflex-based level traversal.

Mario 64 was the first game to get it right, and the Banjo "trilogy" of Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie and DK64 were the best imitators. So that's probably why people are disappointed with this "innovation." They were hoping for a top quality Mario Galaxy imitator. Rare's best work has often been imitating Nintendo and taking it one or two steps forward.

And "innovation" in 3D platformers has usually failed because it just ends up imitating gameplay from other genres which do it better without the split focus on old platformer gameplay. In this case, Banjo is trying to go the user-created content route, and it may just look dumb in the face of Spore.

Rare has the ability to nail the pure platforming gameplay, to nail the open world exploration, and maybe even to nail the user-created vehicle stuff, but the question remains if wrapping all of those different styles together makes a better whole. And if they mess up on either the platforming or the vehicle stuff, the game is shot.

Now that 3D doesn't surprise anybody and it's acceptable again to do things in 2D, a hybrid 2D/3D platformer like Sonic Unleashed may have better luck commerically and critically than a game making the same old mistakes of 3D platforming.