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| Banjo-Kazooie Review | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A lot of people writing off Banjo-Kazooie is a Super mario 64 clone. Now let's think about it for a bit, Mario 64 was a revolutionary game. It defined what people wanted from a platform game. Banjo-Kazooie follows in the footsteps of Mario 64. It deosn't stray to far from the formula, but it makes logical progression you would excepect from Nintendo. The storyline is typical. Banjo's sister Tooty, has been kidnapped by the evil witch, Gruntilda. Gruntilda is hoping to use some wacky contraption to steal tooty's youth. It's up to banjo and kazooie, the grumpy bird that lives in banjo's backpack to venture into Gruntilda's lair and stop the witch before it's to late. Once inside you'll find an insanely huge overworld and nine levels to contend with. Mario stars have been replaced with jigsaw pieces. these "jiggys" are used to open each level. Red coins have been replaced with notes. You'll need to have a certain number of notes to proceed troughtout the overworld. Collecting all the birds in a level will give give the you a jiggy, Each level contains 100 notes and five birds. The first thing you'll notice about Banjo's is his size. The game is much bigger than Mario 64. The overworld is huge, and the levels a spread pretty far apart. Usually the puzzle that opens up a level isn't near the level's entrance. The gameplay in Banjo- Kazooie follows Mario, but Banjo and his bird have a lot more moves than Mario ever had. Luckily ther are some great tutorials in the beginning that teach you the basic punching, jumping, and swimming manuvers. You'll learn the rest (flying,how to use certain items, etc.) as you need them. While banjo has several different attack moves, I found that his basic roll is usually more than enough to take out all the run-of-the-mill enemies. Graphically Banjo-Kazooie takes it to another level. The game maintains the look and feel of Mario 64, but instead of Flat, shaded polygons, Banjo-Kazooie uses a lot of textures. you would think that the size of the levels would slow the game down a lot, but it runs nice and smoothly. The camera control has remained the same, but due to Banjo-Kazooie's many tight enclosed areas, the camera sometimes fails to show the action from a plyable perspective. Expect to miss some things that would normally be incredibly obvious, due to a bad angle. Also you'll have to control the camera a bit more than you should have to as it deosn't track perfectly. The sound and music are really welldone. The soundtrack is Infectious, and the characters voices are very cool. All the "speech" is done in a charli brown's teacher sort of way. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mortal Kombat 4 Review | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Mortal Kombat series is one of the preimer gaming series, which until now utilized digitized actors to give the game an extra layer of realism, has been the topic of comic books, movies, action figures, and even senate hearings. The fourth time around the game has gone polygonal, giving the developers much more leeway when it comes to adding new moves, holds, and characters. Also, weapons have been added into the mix with each character possesing a different sword, club, staff to beat his enemies with. In the storyline of MK4 picks up the loose ends left behind by both MK3 and MK Mythologies: Sub Zero. With Shao Kahn deafeted, Shinnok picks up the slack as the main bad guy. However, he is also a selectable character which left arcade players with no big boss to look forward to. To remedy that the home version contains MK1's four armed bad boy, Goro. Goro looks terrific in 3D, he moves very fluidly and has all the great moves as well as a few new ones. He isn't selectable from the start, but he will be through a code. Returning characters include Scorpion, Sub Zero, Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya, and Raiden. Most of the old characters maintain their old moves, and add a few here and ther. The new characters fit very well into the MK universe, a welcome change from most fighting game seguels. The graphics of the N64 version aren't as good as the arcade version.That's pretty much given. But they still look very good, they make great use of lighting sourcing and run at a very high speeds. There are a few moments were the frame rate would dip, but not enough to cause a problem with the gameplay. The sound is definitly the high water-mark for N64. The music sounds very nice and the game has all the speech from arcade, including the intro amd endings. This is quite a surprise considering the large amount of speech in the game. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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