Banjo-Kazooie
is a 3D adventure videogame for the Nintendo_64. It was developed by Rare and published by Nintendo in 1998. Known by the project name ''Dream'' until it was first shown at the 1997 E3, it received a significant amount of hype, partly due to being marketed as the game that would be to the N64 what Donkey_Kong_Country was to the SNES in terms of an advancement in graphics. It became one of the most popular games for the console.Story
The game stars a bear and a bird, ''Banjo'' and ''Kazooie'', who set out on a quest to rescue Banjo's sister, ''Tooty'', who has been kidnapped by the witch ''Gruntilda''. Along their journey, Banjo and Kazooie receive help from ''Mumbo Jumbo'' the shaman and ''Bottles'' the mole.Gameplay
Banjo-Kazooie adopted many of its central gameplay mechanics from Nintendo's groundbreaking title Super_Mario_64. For instance, the player must similarly explore non-linear 3D worlds and gather tokens (''jigsaws'' in Banjo-Kazooie, ''stars'' in Super_Mario_64) to unlock new worlds. While some considered Banjo-Kazooie an evolution of Super_Mario_64, others have criticised Rare for lacking innovation in this respect. Certain features were however perceived as novel at the time; including the ability for Banjo and Kazooie to transform into other creatures (aided by Mumbo's magical powers), the ability for the characters to learn new moves (as taught by Bottles), the games extensive use of textures for surfaces where other N64 games would have used plain colors, extensive lighting and bump-mapping and the music that dynamically changes style in order to reflect the environment. Another large feature of gameplay is that the characters make limited speaking-like sounds when they talk, no game on the N64 had had any sort of character voices during speech due to size limitations due to the small size of the caridges which ranged from 8MB to 64MB. The voices were not real speech however, but rather a looping of voice like sounds when text bubbles were displayed, this added considarably to the atmospere of the the game and boosted it's uniqueness. Besides the technical aspects Banjo-Kazooie's rich characters were what really made the game come alive. Gruntilda the witch always spoke in rhymes such as "you're feathered buddy that you've brung, useless like a pice of dung", Kazooie was always very annoyed at Bottles the mole and various other smaller characters made memorable appearances.Related products
A sequel to the game, called in a limited_edition. An unusual and intriguing feature of Banjo-Kazooie was that the game contained several items and areas which could be seen but not reached; a successful completion of the game would tease the player with some additional glimpses of them. Rare announced that these areas were only to be reached by completing certain tasks in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, and linking that game up with the original in some unspecified way to unlock them. While the code for this presumably exists in the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge, the rest of it was apparently never implemented in Banjo-Tooie; no way to link the games has ever been found and Rare has said nothing more on the topic. Ways to reach the secret areas in Banjo-Kazooie have been found by entering certain GameShark codes, and in-game 'cheat codes' have been discovered to unlock access to the secret items (though unlocking more than two items by their cheat codes will result in the saved game data on the cartridge being erased as a penalty).Awards
External links
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