Nuts & Bolts was the hero we didn't want nor did we deserve. Listen to my insane ramblings for a bit; Nuts and Bolts is a better game than Banjo-Tooie in virtually every way and is an admirable follow-up to Banjo-Kazooie if you give it an honest chance.
It's a game that on the surface is wildly different than its predecessors, but the fundamental gameplay loop is the same. Nuts & Bolts has all the charming whimsical weirdness of its prequels, with a beautiful presentation of strange cartoony worlds accompanied by fantastic music. The game made me laugh out loud at some of its sharp writing, and the game even takes a mocking stab at its roots in the opening, claiming that people don't want collectathons anymore. This is either a proud declaration of intent or a scathing indictment of its past.
The funny thing is that people hyper-fixate on the vehicle-building portion of the game as if it's the problem. And make no bones about it, it's certainly a different approach. But it's a different tool to answer the same question the previous games asked, which is how much nonsensical minigames can we make people do and how much shit can they collect before they get tired of it? Because in Nuts & Bolts, you're still serving the same means of the last two games, but instead of learning new moves from Bottles or doing some asinine minigame from Tooie, you're building vehicles to do that same thing you've been doing in previous games. Which might not be everyone's cup of tea, sure, but it's still the same mission-statement the last two games had; do some wacky shit to collect some trinkets. But now said wacky shit involves making penis vehicles with jet engines in the balls and a laser cannon in the shaft, and then blowing shit up, which I think is probably in the spirit of what Rare was expecting of its players.
Judging the three games, B-K gets further and further away from its platforming roots with each successive game and replacing it with weird minigames and exploration. Tooie tries to have its cake and eat it too, and as a result is a bloated mess of a game with too many collectable trinkets, and big empty worlds to explore supplemented by the occasional minigame. At the very least Nuts & Bolts knows what it is, and it perfects what Tooie tried going for by making it a fun adventure game with a variety of silly shit to do.
If a game like Tears of the Kingdom can somehow tack on a building mechanic nobody asked for and be judged less harshly for it, I think Nuts & Bolts deserves to be revisited and exonerated at some point. It was still clearly a labor of love for Rare and also a daring deviation from expectations. I still adore it, arguably as much as the original game.
It's a game that on the surface is wildly different than its predecessors, but the fundamental gameplay loop is the same. Nuts & Bolts has all the charming whimsical weirdness of its prequels, with a beautiful presentation of strange cartoony worlds accompanied by fantastic music. The game made me laugh out loud at some of its sharp writing, and the game even takes a mocking stab at its roots in the opening, claiming that people don't want collectathons anymore. This is either a proud declaration of intent or a scathing indictment of its past.
The funny thing is that people hyper-fixate on the vehicle-building portion of the game as if it's the problem. And make no bones about it, it's certainly a different approach. But it's a different tool to answer the same question the previous games asked, which is how much nonsensical minigames can we make people do and how much shit can they collect before they get tired of it? Because in Nuts & Bolts, you're still serving the same means of the last two games, but instead of learning new moves from Bottles or doing some asinine minigame from Tooie, you're building vehicles to do that same thing you've been doing in previous games. Which might not be everyone's cup of tea, sure, but it's still the same mission-statement the last two games had; do some wacky shit to collect some trinkets. But now said wacky shit involves making penis vehicles with jet engines in the balls and a laser cannon in the shaft, and then blowing shit up, which I think is probably in the spirit of what Rare was expecting of its players.
Judging the three games, B-K gets further and further away from its platforming roots with each successive game and replacing it with weird minigames and exploration. Tooie tries to have its cake and eat it too, and as a result is a bloated mess of a game with too many collectable trinkets, and big empty worlds to explore supplemented by the occasional minigame. At the very least Nuts & Bolts knows what it is, and it perfects what Tooie tried going for by making it a fun adventure game with a variety of silly shit to do.
If a game like Tears of the Kingdom can somehow tack on a building mechanic nobody asked for and be judged less harshly for it, I think Nuts & Bolts deserves to be revisited and exonerated at some point. It was still clearly a labor of love for Rare and also a daring deviation from expectations. I still adore it, arguably as much as the original game.
NOWITSREYNTIME17
3 months ago