With all the discussion of the Banjo-Kazooie series since their return at E3 (a sentence I can't believe I'm typing in the year 2019, praise Sakurai), it reminded me that Grunty's Revenge for the Gameboy Advance existed. I don't know why I never had this one growing up, considering I really wanted it when I first got my GBA. I think I just never saw it in the store when I was looking for new games as a kid and Christmas/my birthday was reserved for asking for expensive console games. I wasn't expecting much, everyone pretty much said it was a decent conversion of the series and at the very least it was better than Nuts n Bolts (which isn't a high bar considering that game literally insults you in the first few minutes for wanting to play a regular Banjo-Kazooie game, but that's a subject for a different thread).
Yeah, it's good, especially considering how bad some of these types of games tend to go. The tone and charm of the series is still there which is already about half of my grading system for a game in this series, but the gameplay is also surprisingly solid. Yeah the top-down perspective means there's a lot of platforms that you won't always guess the height of correctly, but other than that it's the same basic gameplay as the console games, just simplified. All of the moves that I would expect these two to have are here (except for flying, but I can forgive that considering the limitations of the system), it's still a collectathon and even the music feels right (if I didn't know that Grant Kirkhope didn't make the music, I'd have thought it was him). Some "isms" of a lot of handheld spinoffs are here and accounted for, of course. Simple and forgettable mini-games account for a few of the jiggies and some generic/out of place NPCs pop up (I'm looking at you, chickens in the first world who look like they should be in the Spyro GBA games), but those are all pretty inoffensive. This is Banjo-Kazooie on a portable. I really like it.
With systems like the 3DS and the Switch putting out actual console quality 3D games on a portable, these kinds of spinoffs seem to be a relic of the past. That's not a bad thing, obviously, and the moment they release a handheld port of the first Banjo-Kazooie I am emptying my wallet immediately (for the love of god, Microsoft, put it on the Switch). Still I do miss watching that bit of developer creativity (or lack thereof, depending on the game) in trying to put these bigger games into a form that would fit a significantly weaker console. Growing up I didn't have a Playstation, for instance, but I did have Spyro: Season of Ice and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I liked those games, even if I didn't have the games they spun off from to compare them to. Hell, Nintendo probably started this trend with stuff like Super Mario Land (a scaled down but portable 2D Mario, just a simpler and shorter experience than the originals). Even the Gameboy versions of multi-plat games are fun to look back at in this way. The handheld versions of the Harry Potter adventure games and Quidditch World Cup were big parts of my childhood, and I also had the Gamecube versions of these to compare them to. Looking back, I may have liked the GBA version of Quidditch more than the Gamecube one.
Anyway, I'm curious if anyone else has any affection for this era of gaming. What handheld games like this did you guys grow up with? Any you still return to as if it's a normal entry in the series?
Yeah, it's good, especially considering how bad some of these types of games tend to go. The tone and charm of the series is still there which is already about half of my grading system for a game in this series, but the gameplay is also surprisingly solid. Yeah the top-down perspective means there's a lot of platforms that you won't always guess the height of correctly, but other than that it's the same basic gameplay as the console games, just simplified. All of the moves that I would expect these two to have are here (except for flying, but I can forgive that considering the limitations of the system), it's still a collectathon and even the music feels right (if I didn't know that Grant Kirkhope didn't make the music, I'd have thought it was him). Some "isms" of a lot of handheld spinoffs are here and accounted for, of course. Simple and forgettable mini-games account for a few of the jiggies and some generic/out of place NPCs pop up (I'm looking at you, chickens in the first world who look like they should be in the Spyro GBA games), but those are all pretty inoffensive. This is Banjo-Kazooie on a portable. I really like it.
With systems like the 3DS and the Switch putting out actual console quality 3D games on a portable, these kinds of spinoffs seem to be a relic of the past. That's not a bad thing, obviously, and the moment they release a handheld port of the first Banjo-Kazooie I am emptying my wallet immediately (for the love of god, Microsoft, put it on the Switch). Still I do miss watching that bit of developer creativity (or lack thereof, depending on the game) in trying to put these bigger games into a form that would fit a significantly weaker console. Growing up I didn't have a Playstation, for instance, but I did have Spyro: Season of Ice and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I liked those games, even if I didn't have the games they spun off from to compare them to. Hell, Nintendo probably started this trend with stuff like Super Mario Land (a scaled down but portable 2D Mario, just a simpler and shorter experience than the originals). Even the Gameboy versions of multi-plat games are fun to look back at in this way. The handheld versions of the Harry Potter adventure games and Quidditch World Cup were big parts of my childhood, and I also had the Gamecube versions of these to compare them to. Looking back, I may have liked the GBA version of Quidditch more than the Gamecube one.
Anyway, I'm curious if anyone else has any affection for this era of gaming. What handheld games like this did you guys grow up with? Any you still return to as if it's a normal entry in the series?
