Since I don’t want my free time to be spent entirely in WoW, but the PC is still substituting for my Linux box, I fired up the 360 and figured I’d start something light, like the original Banjo-Kazooie. It came out for XBLA recently, I never played it when it first came out for the N64, and I like platformers, so what the hell.

And it’s your typical platformer, with a lot of jumping around, puzzles to figure out, some enemies to fight, and stuff to collect. And oh boy are there ever a lot of things to collect. Jigsaw puzzle pieces, musical notes, some shaman’s skull tokens, eggs, honeycombs, these little sprite-like guys, 1ups… A lot of them aren’t optional either; you have to collect at least a certain number in order to unlock things you need to progress.

It’s decent enough, though. Comparisons to Mario 64 are obvious, though it seems to take more of a linear approach and each world is fairly large and can be scoured in a single pass, instead of being revisited a bunch of times. I’ve only completed the first world so far (of nine, I think) though, so maybe it opens up later on.

I’m also tempted by the new B-K game, though it’s a fairly different style. I already wrote something about the demo for it before.