Yooka-Laylee is a game being developed by Playtonic games, former developers of the video game company Rare. Yooka-Laylee is being hailed as an official spiritual successor to the popular Banjo-Kazooie series meaning it is being made in the same mechanics and feel. Yooka-Laylee looks and feels like playing Banjo-Kazooie in every way except for the lead characters. This is enough to get people interested and invested in the game. Just in 40 minutes of launching funding for the game on Kickstarter, it has met its goal of $270,000. In less than 4 hours it has reached over one million. The current funding is over one million pounds (over two million in USD). People are excited to play this game as well as relive some nostalgia playing Banjo-Kazooie years back.
I wouldn't blame them. Banjo-Kazooie was a phenomenal game when it came out. During Nintendo and Rare's golden age with the Nintendo 64 it was a great year in gaming. Rare and Nintendo was a match made in Heaven. Banjo-Kazooie was a success and it seems that almost every game Rare came out followed its format. Banjo-Tooie seemed like it was a bigger success. Aside from a couple of hand held titles like Grunty's Revenge and Banjo-Pilot, the franchise went dark and left a hole in our hearts. That was until we got Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts which left us shocked, in a bad way. I'm going to defend Nuts & Bolts a bit by saying it was a good game, it was just a complete 180 from what we expected from a Banjo-Kazooie game. It wasn't what we were used too and what we wanted. It was like seeing your best after losing weight, you didn't recognize it. Rare tried to do something fresh and new and they failed. They failed at recognizing the main rule of game development, if it isn't broke, don't fix it!
But why is it that we are so invested in this so called new spiritual successor? Why is it why we love Banjo-Kazooie so much? Banjo-Kazooie gave us what we wanted to as children. We wanted to explore and have adventure. We were exploring different worlds as well as exploring the evil lair of a witch to save the day. It was fun not only getting all the Jiggies and notes and exploring the secrets if Grunty's lair, but also fun discovering all the secrets in the game like Bottle's picture game and finding out about Stop and Swop (points if you actually figured out what Stop and Swap was). Banjo-Kazooie was almost better than Super Mario 64 almost giving you more adventure and fun. With Banjo-Tooie, we had that idea magnified times 100. Hopefully Yooka-Laylee and Playtonic can keep this in mind when making this game and understand why we loved the predecessor in the first place. And also learn from the mistakes of Nuts & Bolts.
No comments:
Post a Comment