Few would argue with the statement that Banjo Kazooie is a perfect game, but when it comes to its sequel, the debate gets a bit more heated. Personally, I loved Banjo-Tooie and thought it did many things better than its predecessor. The fact that it’s just been announced to appear on Nintendo Switch Online next week is excellent news.
The environments are bigger and the stakes feel more dire in this game. If Banjo-Tooie feels darker than Banjo-Kazooie, that was intended. According to a staff interview with Nintendo Life, development for B-T began around the same time Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid were released, and the moodiness of those titles affected the tone of theirs. “Games just seemed to be growing up a bit,” said programmer Steve Malpass.
There are some questions that hover around this release. The original Banjo-Tooie pushed the N64 to its limit…in fact probably further than Rare should have gone. It shipped with some of the nastiest framerate issues I’ve ever seen in a game. When things got messy it was common for the game to turn into a slideshow. The XBox port fixed the framerate issues, but introduced new ones: since the music score in the cutscenes assumed the slowdown was there, it became out of sync with what was happening. Will the NSO release fix one issue, or the other? Hopefully both.
We do know that, like Perfect Dark, this game had a widescreen mode (yes, back in 2000) and that will be fully supported in the NSO version. You have to use the NSO menu to set it, though, not the in-game one. Banjo-Tooie comes back October 25.




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