Banjo-Kazooie

Banjo-Kazooie is the story of a bear named Banjo and the somewhat annoying but infinitely useful bird that lives in his backpack Kazooie. The game starts when the evil witch Gruntilda comes down from her lair blows up Banjo's house and steal his sister Tootie. Why? Because she wants to extract all the cuteness out of Tootie and put it into her.

Banjo-Kazooie came out in 1998 for the N64. I played it on X-Box Live Arcade though, controls have been updated to fit the new format (if you remember, N64 had some pretty funky looking controllers). It's still a pretty solid platformer. It still has the same problems though that many games from that era do, mostly concerning camera controls. But this is only a slight annoyance at times. Mostly it's cool.

The goal of the game is to collect puzzle pieces, called Jiggies in the game. There is a variety of ways at doing this. Collect five Jingos in every level, beat a boss or sometimes use the abilities you gain as you progress through the game in a fun and interesting way. With ten levels and an awesome board-style game-show at the end, just before the final boss of course, this is definitely a fun experience for all ages.

Other than the weak camera controls, I really can't complain much about anything else. It's a fun, exciting game that was made before the days of things like level grinding games or free roaming sandbox games were everywhere. It's a fun game and it makes for a pretty good time, even in the frustrating Rusty Bucket Bay level, and especially in the awesome, Halloween-themed Mad Monster Mansion. Also, it's only ten bucks, so just buy it already.

Overall: A. Pretty damn good actually. It's like Mario 64 meets the crazy people who used to work at Rareware. Too bad their games suck now-a-days though, huh? Just reselling their games on XBL or PSN to try and recapture their former glory. Either that or its the only way they can make money anymore, sad.

X-Men Legends

X-Men Legends is a Gauntlet style beat-em-up RPG. It's quite fun, but there are a lot of things I'm going to bitch about. First off, this game is definitely geared towards multi-player, but there are these areas in between chapters where you only have one character, Magma a New Mutant coming into this game as the person who doesn't know anything about the X-Men. So for fans of the X-Men, you get to learn a bunch of stuff you already knew again, if your not a fan of the X-Men THEN WHY ARE YOU PLAYING THIS GAME!?

Along those same multiplayer-with-constantly-having-to-be-one-player bullshit, there are Danger Room modes where you can unlock  the best equpment for each X-Man but, once again, you can only be one character for these moments. Forcing this game to suddenly become one-player mode.


I suppose I shouldn't be complaining so much about that. I mean, I played the whole thing by myself, and it is pretty fun changing out the X-Men constantly, something I'm sure my friends would totally berate me for, but I wanted to get the full experience and use every character. Oh, and speaking of which. Another problem with this game is so many characters are being held back by having one move that totally sucks (or, in the case of Emma Frost, two moves) this is a real drawback since you only ever get 4 moves in total for each character. Jubilee has one shitty move, So does Nightcrawler, I mean, I like Nightcrawler and Jubilee but as the game wore on I used them less and less just because YOU CAN"T EVER SWITCH YOUR FUCKING MOVES!

Another thing, this game runs about 20 hour gameplay, 30 if your doing all the one-player and danger room stuff, but you don't get some characters until right before the end of the game. I mean, as previously mentioned, Emma Frost isn't very good (and it's really annoying when she and Jean Grey are stuck in the Astral Plane BY THEMSELVES, I mean Jean is awesome, but Emma only has one good offensive move and its her Power Move, oh and speaking of Power Moves, you get them level 15 but You can never ever put any skill points into them, meaning that they start out being awesome but never ever get any better, so by the last level they are all mediocre at best) But Psylocke you get right before the final two or three levels, so you hardly ever get to use her.

This would all be forgiven, I think, if there was a new game+ mode. I mean, isn't that the point of these games, level up your characters and beat the game, then level them up some more on a slightly harder difficulty level FOREVER. That's what I always thought anyway, start a new game, not having to go through all the story to get all those characters that took forever to unlock. I don't know, I guess it just totally eliminates any replay value at all for me.

Overall: C, I suppose this was probably a pretty good game when it first came out. Now-a-days, I'd save a game like this for when you have a free weekend and three friends who are all pretty big X-Men fans. Fast to beat, I'm sure you'd get a kick out of it, as long as you and/or your friends can stand watching as someone else plays through the one-player parts.

Critical Failure: "Goldeneye: Rogue Agent"

This is a new thing I'm going to do, whenever there's a game that, for whatever, I just give up playing the whole way through, then I'm going to say they failed.

This is my first failure. Goldeneye: Rogue Agent. And what a piece of garbage this one is.

The story and gameplay is nothing like the original Goldeneye, Rare's N64 game that allowed players to live through the movie in a whole new way, doing missions over and over again on different difficulty levels in order to unlock more objectives, and the multiplayer was pretty tight too.

Anyway, this game sucked. You're an agent, NOT James Bond but some other agent. During the very first mission of the game, you watch as James Bond (Pierce Brosnan version) gets killed by Dr. No, and then a war starts between Dr. No and Goldfinger. Then, you get disavowed by MI6 for some stupid reason but really it's all a ploy to get you working with Dr. No or Goldfinger.

Really, I could forgive the dumb storyline if this game had any redeeming qualities at all. This game is nothing more and nothing less than a straight FPS game. It still gives you missions, like in the first Goldeneye game, but they're always solved on a straight path through the game. No longer do you have interesting missions that you have to figure out on your own how to occomplish. Instead, it's just: go here, shoot some guys, or go here, blow this up, or NO OTHER OPTIONS.

I suppose there's one cool thing, you get special "eye powers." I only unlocked one before I gave up on this game, but it let me see enemies through walls. But really, one decent power isn't enough to save this poorly-crafted
first person shooter.