A bittersweet moment - the marking point of my end with World of Warcraft. I have finished what I set out to do and prove myself as a competent PvPer. After gaining an elite set for each of my classes in Solo Shuffle now that I don't need to queue up with retards (like 9 or 10 classes, don't remember), I've completely lost the drive to keep going. That sense of needing to prove myself has completely gone.

I always thought it was about the FOMO, but it was always about that underlying desire to be good.

I don't think I will ever come back to WoW, I think the Chapter has closed. I have zero interest in the new expansions already announced, and if I ever come back it won't be for new content, it will be to replay old stuff or roleplay.

Mega brutal.

Much better than the OG thanks to the new controls imported from Crash 2. Much less floaty.

Don't do time relics unless you hate yourself.

Better than Maz 64 soooooooo ez. Review over.




__________

Okay, okay.

Wow. What a fantastic game - I have a new autistic obsession.

Banjo-Kazooie is a game I missed as a kid because I was in a Playstation family, and we never owned an N64. This is one game that makes me feel like I really missed out.

Banjo-Kazooie is a charming little game by a British development team called Rare that features a wholesome bear trying to stop his little sister, who wants to go on an adventure, getting used as fuel for Gruntilda's bimbofication machine.

Usually I can gush about games I like but I feel as if I can't contribute anything new to the conversation - this game has been praised to the high heavens and beyond and it's easy to see why.

If you're like me and you don't understand the collectathon youtuber hype, you might be a bit confused as to why this game is so popular when you play it. In fact, I can wager your experience might end up a little something like this:

Starting the game - Yeah its alright.
Early Midgame - Eh, i'm not understanding the hype.
Midgame - Okay, I can see why people like this.
Late Midgame - This game sucks, its frustrating and unfair. I'm going to stop playing (this is where I imagine the 6/10s come from for most people, as this is what I was going to rate it).
Lategame / 100% - Holy shit, this is peak gaming.

I think this has to do with a few things - this game is quite brutal at times. It's not afraid to hit you with the learning curve and it hits you hard - hell, at the midgame the beehives (where you heal yourself with honeycombs - it's so charming), will fight back when you break them. At first, this seems stupid, counterintuitive and annoying, but once I figured out how to deal with them (shoot them with an egg to break and then Talon Trot to collect all the pieces), I never got hit by a swarm of bees ever again.

Another huge outlier is the go-to of wall-enemies. By god, they are annoying, and their hitboxes are ruthless, knocking you off edges when you weren't even next to them. And even though theyre in the game from the second or third level, they really ramp it up when they start throwing like 20 into each level later in the game. It really makes you want to stop playing, getting knocked off over and over and killed by cheap hitboxes. That is, until you realise that they are easily killed by a jumping attack from Kazooie. When my wife accidentally done this at the end of the game, my jaw literally dropped and I said "bruh". I had been stopping at these things like traffic lights the entire game and you're meant to just jump into them and kill them right as they leave their tunnel. Bam, never got hit again from that point onward.

This game hugely rewards you for learning its nuance and I think that's something most games just don't do. The game is unforgiving and brutal but if you know how to deal with everything it throws at you you'll knock it out of the park every time, and that's a fantastic feeling when you get it down. Unfortunately, I think it's a hindrance to the enjoyability of the overall package, especially for a first time playthrough, that you can go so far into the game without working some of these things out (maybe its just me being stupid).

There are some genuine issues here though - the camera, my god is it shit. It might be the camera of all time. You start to remember where it happens by the time you 100% the game, but jesus christ, this game likes to hard troll you with the camera mega pivoting to the other side of you against a wall, or enemies being hidden just out of sight of the camera when you're doing a difficult platforming segment. It's a definite, HUGE downside to this game that absolutely warrants a remake.

Another thing that I think is counterintuitive is how poorly the lives system is handled. For some reason, you lose your 1-ups every time you Save & Quit the game - not that this will be an issue, since you'll die so constantly you won't ever get to see that until you've thrashed the game anyway, but I thought it was weird regardless. The bit that is annoying, is that you have 1-ups, but they only serve to save you the hassle of running back to the level. The game gives you ONE chance to get everything in it in one go, the first time you get there. This challenge makes it so unenjoyable in certain levels. You have to collect every note in one run of the level to get all of them, but you have to make sure you do it to a certain extent otherwise you won't be opening any doors. In hindsight, if I was to recommend this game to anyone, I would suggest making sure they get as many notes as possible FIRST before attempting any jiggie challenges to make sure they don't get cucked out of progress, and then come back and hit the jiggies and the jinjos after, if you didn't manage to get all the jinjos whilst collecting the notes. I've heard that the XBOX version of this game saves the notes you've collected but I don't know if I like this or not - I enjoy the challenge of collecting them all in one run, it's just frustrating if you're trying to do the jiggies aswell. If you were to solely focus on getting the notes, it's a lot more manageable and less frustrating.

Overall, this is a challenging, fun, only occasionally unfair, quintessential platformer. In fact, as of this review, I believe this is the best 3D platformer (especially of it's kind, the 3D open-ish world collectathon) to ever exist, and even if it is topped by another someday, it was certainly the best at its time and for a long, long time. The issues Banjo Kazooie has are great in strength but few in number, and the game is massively carried by its beautiful levels, art style, sprawling and fun to navigate hub world, and my god, the British sense of humour in this game has me chuckling even at dialogue i've seen before. If this gets the N.Sane Trilogy treatment with improvements this could easily be improved and tweaked to perfection.

Oh, and the final boss is peak. One of the best in gaming history, especially if we're talking about 3D Platformers - challenging, brutal, but fair and fun to master, as I feel all final bosses should be.

This game is disgustingly mid. I'm horrified to admit that I played through this game about 12 times as a kid before my save file got corrupt and it would've been even higher if it hadn't.

What was I cookin'? Literally half of the game is just annoying, frustrating mess. Insomniac continues the trend of trying to mix up the gameplay and making it worse for it, whilst having some of the best characters in the series.

Probably only played it 12 times to hear the courtney gears song.

Insomniac continues the trend of making the game more wild and varied whilst simultaneously making sure the quality and enjoyability of each is varied just as much.

Seriously, it's like.

Spyro 1 - Consistently just alright
Spyro 2 - Better characters and better levels but also more shit ones
Spyro 3 - fuck it, what if we have the most charming levels and environments in the series but also have some mega trash like flying penguin segments who makes you want to break your controller

thanks man

Insomniac takes 2 steps forward by addressing the uninspired boring from the first game, and then 2 steps back by making it a complete mixed bag of really good moments, lots of mediocre ones, and really really bad moments.

Everything this game gains in its characters and charm, it loses by making progressing through its levels a slog by just how boring some of them are. Regardless, the controls are tight and fun as they always were, and flying challenges are always good fun.

Have completed multiple times in full.

I'll give this an easy 6, which feels strange to say because it doesn't quite have the glaring flaws other 7's on my list have.

In fact, everything is essentially perfect for what it is. Spyro controls well, the collectathon element is well-executed, not aggravating and unfair, and fun to complete. I have completed all three Spyro games multiple times to full completion.

The problem is that despite its mechanical greatness, it's kind of devoid of that special something that makes it amazing. The levels are uninspired, enemies are boring, and just generally you sort of have a sense of 'Eh'. Even the end of the game and the final boss are lackluster. By the time you hit the credits you don't really feel a lot, you just did it because it felt good to do.

And that's okay, but it doesn't make it the masterpiece that people claim it to be.

Before I went on holiday I was playing this, and I was like "this could be a 5 or 6 because of some of the fun moments", but coming back off holiday and detoxing while playing some good games and getting back into this! Wow! It is bad. Don't even bother trying to sate your curiosity. I played Banjo 1 some years ago and whilst I don't remember it living up to the dunkey hype, I remember it being nowhere near this bad.

Avoid like the plague.

Avoid like the plague.

Mom, can we play Crazy Taxi?

We have Crazy Taxi at home!

Crazy Taxi at home:

-

The game offers little in terms of depth. It has a vaguely addicting gameplay loop which is fun, but I don't know. Theres something about the voice lines that really start to get grating after a while. The controls are Crazy Taxi but worse - the whole 'through' and 'jump' mechanic is entirely gutted for this game and it shows, since the whole excitement of ramping up high combos and getting faster and faster and getting higher combos getting respectively harder was what made Crazy Taxi so timeless to begin with.

Not to mention, what are these Sonic 06 ass loading screens?

If you have access to Crazy Taxi I wouldn't bother touching it. Maybe for big simpsons fans, but even then its a mild one at best because the dialogue isnt real conversations so you get zero good moments unless the one liner happens to be funny.

Its a perfectly serviceable game which is fun to play and it was just as fun as I remember it being as a kid, surprisingly. The issue is just the lack of depth and the wonky controls.