N1njaSquirrel

Yooka-Laylee: Rare-viving the animal duo platformer that we've all yearned for.

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Remember the N64 Rare heyday? Before they got bought by Microsoft and then banished to make avatars that nobody liked or wanted?

 

I do. My fondest gaming moments as a kid revolved around Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Jet Force Gemini.

 

Now a bunch of old hats from Rare have come together to create Playtonic games, who have sucessfully kickstarted their new game, Yooka-Laylee (geddit?), and boy does it look a delight.

 

Honestly, this gif makes me more excited than it really should:

batbite_anim.gif

 

Is it just me, or does it ooze the Rare magic that has been missing all these years?

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Banjo-Kazooie was the first game my brother and I got with our N64, so I have very fond memories of it, although his are fonder. He's back the Kickstarter, I believe, so I'll be interested in following this.

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Gonna be brutally honest and state that I fucking hate the way this looks. The colors are all garish and everything is so flat...why is everything the dull color of a Now and Later wrapper? 

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I don't think Banjo-Kazooie hold up, either, so a throwback platformer that's a collect-a-thon from the days before Donkey Kong 64 is going to have a limited audience.

 

On the other hand, it's Kickstarter, the place to go for limited audience work.

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Gonna be brutally honest and state that I fucking hate the way this looks. The colors are all garish and everything is so flat...why is everything the dull color of a Now and Later wrapper? 

 

I disagree and think it looks lovely. Of course, bear in mind that this is extremely early footage of a game that's barely begun development and isn't due to come out until the end of 2016. I think that the characters are already looking great, but the environments clearly have a long way to go — but I still like the aesthetic, which I guess maybe you just don't.

 

Hopefully they'll be innovating and not just retreading what they did with their 90s platformers, but the tone of the Kickstarter and surrounding media seems to imply that they're carving a new path this time rather than reusing that old collection-heavy formula. Additionally, these guys are pretty much the creme of the Rare crop so I'm quite optimistic that there'll be some splendid quality oozing into this.

 

One thing that I'm really happy about is that because it broke its £1.5m stretch goal, we get live instruments and orchestra in the soundtrack. It's being put together by not just one but three of Rare's best composers, which will hopefully be a wonderful collaboration. David Wise is my favourite and he's put together an early demo track:

 

http://davidwise.bandcamp.com/track/yooka-laylee-jungle-challenge

 

But there's also these guys on the job:

 

 

 

I can see how this is all probably lost on those who weren't total Rare/Banjo addicts in the 90s. :D

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BK definitely holds up! I'm looking forward to this game, and I'm also glad I don't need to help fund it. Yay!

In other news, A Hat in Time should be finishing up soon I think.

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I really dislike the character design--it comes off as uninspired to me. It possesses none of the charm of the DKC games, and the color palette looks like like an assortment of unrelated crayons. There's a way to make a game vibrant and lush without resorting to this.

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I guess not liking the character design is subjective, but I don't think it's uninspired. I love the design of this guy, Trowzer the sale-snake:

 

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I do really think the colour palette is more refined than, say, Viva Pinata. To me it looks like the BK cover/advert art, but now an actual game.

 

Also, yeah, BK definitely holds up today. I remember obsessing over the eggs and Ice Key when I was a kid. Was it only me who found Tooie to be really dissapointing?

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I wasn't gonna say anything because I didn't wanna rain on anybody's parade, but since we're all doing it...

 

I have a strong feeling this game is gonna be disillusioning for a lot of people who grew up with Banjo-Kazooie who will have to come to terms with the fact that those games were terrible.

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Okay, having a character be a literal trouser snake is clever. I'll give them that much.

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Banjo-Kazooie takes the Mario 64 formula and completely misunderstands what made it work, basically. Jiggys are just lying out in the open, instead of being the focus and direction of the level as the stars are. The 5 collectible animals that give you a jiggy smack of having more places to hide things than things to hide. The decision to make each level have a static number of collectibles, and then tie that to unlocking the world map, and then setting the total required to something like 95% of the available notes, means that the game is guaranteed to have you running around a level you've already completed, looking for the one passage you didn't take. You've also got ability gating mostly to pad the game out, because it's not like the game really needs it or does anything with it in the way that, say, Super Metroid does.

 

Also I'm not thrilled that this isn't an indie Kickstarter so much as a satellite Kickstarter. The devs are in orbit around a publisher, so they're not really independent, but getting fans to pay to prove a point means the publisher gets to outsource its risk.

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BK takes Mario 64 and goes in a different direction. That's why they can both be good for different reasons!

 

I can easily play and enjoy both games today.

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BK takes Mario 64 and goes in a different direction. That's why they can both be good for different reasons!

 

"Remember the 100-coin stars in Mario 64? The worst parts of that game? What if the entire game was just that!"

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Also I'm not thrilled that this isn't an indie Kickstarter so much as a satellite Kickstarter. The devs are in orbit around a publisher, so they're not really independent, but getting fans to pay to prove a point means the publisher gets to outsource its risk.

 

Are you getting that from somewhere else?  Because there's nothing in the Kickstarter to indicate that. 

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I really dislike the character design--it comes off as uninspired to me. It possesses none of the charm of the DKC games, and the color palette looks like like an assortment of unrelated crayons. There's a way to make a game vibrant and lush without resorting to this.

 

I really like how the characters look, and also think it's cool that they've tried to give a cutesy look to kinds of animals that aren't particularly... cute. It's so easy with a bear and bird.

 

The DKC games remain my favourite of all of Rare's output, but Banjo had a much different art direction and this is more in keeping with that. If it's just the vibrancy of the colours that turns you off, maybe you could lower the saturation on your screen — although from what I've seen of the very early in-game shots the vibrancy isn't so pronounced. :tup: Purple and Green are pretty much universally considered good complementary colours and are used together all the time, so I don't believe there to be anything wrong with the choice of colours.

 

I won't disagree with you guys pointing out BK's collection-heavy play bogging it down at times, but I think you're overlooking that a big part of the game's appeal came from its humour and exploration, not just the the core gameplay. Quirky humour is something that Rare has always excelled at, and I think that we're all hoping for a bit of that here. Heck, Rare themselves have poked fun at BK's huge amount of collecting on numerous occasions, including in the tragic misfire that was BK: Nuts and Bolts.

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I also like the 100 coin stars in Mario 64, but I don't think they make a good parallel for what you do in BK, the entire level design in that game is built around exploring and collecting things, while the 100 coins challenge in Mario 64 seems like a bit of an afterthought.

EDIT: Also, jiggies are often not in yhe open! You have to complete some sort of objective to make them appear.

Yeah I wanted to say this, too, but I was on my phone at the time. It's not just a game about running around collecting things, although that is of course the core of the game. But it's not arbitrary. There's purpose to it. Collecting things leads you places, and going to places leads to collecting things.

 

Also plenty of the stars in SM64 are out in the open.

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This game looks pretty great. I like the colors. I like the character designs. I like collectibles. But mostly, I like the colors. They are so vibrant and happy looking and not grey and brown.

 

I'm honestly having a hard time seeing what the problem is with these colors and how they are garish. Is it the vibrancy?

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I haven't played BK in a long time, but I think my brother went back to it recently and still enjoyed it. Anyway, I think there's a lot of design space left in Mario 64-style platformers that hasn't been explored in at least a decade. Presumably these folks will have at least some sense of what worked and what didn't with those games.

 

Also, throw me into the "I like how the characters look" bucket.

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