Banjo-Kazooie and Grabbed by the Ghoulies

 Recently I bought myself a copy of Banjo-Kazooie for the N64. I mainly did this to try and justify my purchase of an N64, because I haven’t seen a proper return investment of experience from that console yet. For example, when I bought a second-hand GameCube a few months before, the first game I got was Metroid Prime; unfortunately I couldn’t get into that because the control scheme was fucking atrocious, but later I came across a copy of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a much better experience that made the purchase of a GameCube totally worth it. Recently I’ve been trying to get a similar experience out of the N64. The first game I had was GoldenEye 007. I’ve been a fan of Perfect Dark (which I have of XBLA) for years and of TimeSplitters for as long as I can remember, so seeing as Perfect Dark is the spiritual successor to GoldenEye, and Free Radical, the developers of TimeSplitters, were formed of former Rare employees who worked on GoldenEye, it seemed to be the perfect first choice; not to mention the reputation it has in its own right as the foundation for all console-based FPSs that have come since (with a few exceptions).

Once I started playing, I wasn’t exactly disappointed with it; it was fine, played well, but I wasn’t exactly as drawn into it as its successors. After I got about half-way through, I thought I’d seen enough of it to stop playing, so I never actually finished it. So it was okay, but wasn’t exactly worth the 20-30 quid I’d paid for the 64. I’d have to find something else to be my 64’s Eternal Darkness. Next up was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and earlier shooter that was more akin to the PC shooters of the time like Doom and Quake; in that you run at the land-speed record, run around mazes, picking keys, opening doors, and, of course, shooting all of the things with a really big gun. Unfortunately, I found Turok to be unplayable because the controls were inverted and there was no way to change them. I’ve been using uninverted controls for over a decade; I’m not going to change any time soon. If I move the control stick left, I look left; if I move the control stick up, I should look up, but I didn’t in Turok.

Also, this problem was exacerbated by another problem that I also found in GoldenEye, except it was more manageable in that game. The N64 controller is kind of... shit, and badly designed. Let me try to explain. For first person games, you need analogue controls for camera movement; player movement can be done digitally. When you use mouse and keyboard on PC the analogue mouse is always for camera movement and the digital keyboards are always for player movement. Similar can be said for gamepad controls. I was using the left side of the N64 controller so I could use the left-hand side directional keys. I’ve always used my left hand for player movement, so this made the most sense. The problem came from the fact that this caused to hold the controller at a slight anticlockwise angle, so whenever I looked up, what I was actually doing is looking up and slightly to the right. This combined with the inverted sight made Turok unplayable to me and this made me assume that FPS games are simply unsuited to the N64. GoldenEye may have been popular but... (I’m going to have to say it, aren’t I?)... it really hasn’t aged well (I fucking hate that saying)...

Anyway, coming to this conclusion and not having seen a return investment on the 64, I then turned to the platformer. “I use digital camera controls in some third person games” I said to myself, thinking mainly of Munch’s Oddysse on Xbox OG which I use the left thumbstick for movement and the D-pad for camera control. “And I have no problem with them” it dawned on me. So the first one I got around to was Banjo-Kazooie: an unbelievably saccharine title from our old friends at Rare.

Banjo-Kazooie features the titular bear Banjo along with his equally titular friend, a bird named Kazooie who he keeps in his back pack for some reason, setting off on an adventure to rescue is cute sister Tooty from the evil witch Gruntilda, with the help of Bottles the mole and a few other weird characters. After a brief tutorial level where you learn some basic moves you cross the bridge to Gruntilda’s Lair, which is of course, a hub world. Banjo and Kazooie must traverse through 9 worlds, each with a different theme, and collect enough jigsaw pieces and musical notes to pass on through to the next world.

Unfortunately, I never got very far with Banjo-Kazooie, because despite the delightful soundtrack and the good gameplay, I found that after 2 levels that I was just absolutely paralysed with boredom. This game is a huge collect-a-thon; you get to a new world, and are asked to collect the 100 musical notes, the jigsaw pieces, Mumbo tokens, feathers, eggs, and once you’ve finished one world you can do it all again in the next world. Let me remind you: 100 musical notes each in 9 levels. I’ll do the simple maths for you: that’s 900 musical notes to collect in the game. 900.

I find the collection quests in Assassin’s Creed to be dull and tedious, but at least I’ve finished the game by the time I start collecting all of them, if I do so at all. Banjo-Kazooie feels like the collection side-quests of modern sandbox games reworked as the primary objective of an entire game. If I had started getting bored by level 7 or 8, I would be far more lenient, but I couldn’t get past the second level of this game for fear that my brain was drying up.  I couldn’t go on any further... so I played Grabbed by the Ghoulies instead.

To say one thing about Rare, their games often include some fantastic soundtracks and Banjo-Kazooie’s soundtrack, while great in its own right, was really reminding me of the soundtrack for Grabbed by the Ghoulies, a game they released on the Xbox OG after their acquisition by Microsoft. It’s also one of my personal favourites, although mainly for nostalgic reasons; and yes, ghoulies refers to testicles.

Grabbed by the Ghoulies puts the player in the shoes of Cooper, a boy of about 12 I think, it’s actually hard to tell with the cartoony graphics, who must enter a big scary mansion in the middle of the woods after his girlfriend is kidnapped by the titular ghoulies. No, not disembodied testicles. In this case the ghoulies refer to the monsters and creatures that inhabit the mansion. Speaking of the mansion, known as Ghoulhaven Hall, it is one of my favourite video game mansions of all time, beating even the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil. I’ve always secretly thought that if I become a billionaire I would have this mansion built exactly as it appears in the game as my dream house... moving on.

Upon entering the mansion Cooper is attacked by the ghoulies who have been awoken by the evil Baron who is clearly a fan of Biggles and has a nasty habit of kidnapping kids and locking them up in uncomfortable positions around the house and it’s grounds. It’s not explicitly stated that the Baron is a paedophile, this is a children’s game after all; but come on, those children have clearly been-- ANYWAY, the ghoulies as it turns out are kind of pathetic when Cooper is being controlled by an adult with nearly 2 decades of gaming experience on his shoulders. You attack mainly barehanded, but are able to pick several sturdy items or pieces of furniture to utilise as weapons and at several points in the game the you are handed a variety of gun-like weapons by one of the handful of friendly servants who also inhabit the mansion. The games takes place over 100 levels each taking place in a different room of the house, although some rooms are revisited several times. In most rooms you will be greeted with a challenge that you must complete in order to open the next door, most of the challenges will involve either finding a key, defeating all the ghoulies in the room, or defeating all of certain type of ghoulie. But there are a number of rules that may be in play that complicate the challenge, such as only use fists, only use weapons, don’t kill any ghoulie of a certain type, or, don’t damage anything in the room.

This is probably why I couldn’t get into Banjo-Kazooie, but really like Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Both are ostensibly children’s games, but Grabbed by the Ghoulies has some actual challenge to it. It’s a fairly easy challenge to anyone who has entered double digits and still possesses both thumbs, but a challenge none-the-less. The only challenge I found in Banjo-Kazooie was “collect everything”, and that kind of thing ought to be a secondary objective to something more nuanced. I had a similar problem with Spyro the Dragon for the PS1 not too long ago, the only objective was to collect stuff and after a few hours I just had no interest.

I suppose my distaste for these kinds of 3D platformer collect-a-thons comes from the fact that I’ve got little to look forward to, except maybe the theme of the next world I unlock, but that’s really not enough to grab my interest, because I know that once I get there I’ll take one look around, soak in the atmosphere and then spend the next half an hour collecting things. Grabbed by the Ghoulies on the other hand, I’ve got interesting things to look forward to; what’s the next challenge going to be like? What’s the next monster type going look like? When am I going to get to the next boss fight? And how hard will it be? Whereas, playing Banjo-Kazooie I was only ever asking “when am I going to be able to collect a load of things again?”