After a strong third day I was determined to plough on through Banjo Kazooie, and ideally complete another series of snapshots for one of the older titles, which I’m slowly starting to appreciate… slowly.

Let’s see how I got on…

Check out the previous days here.



Milestones

Banjo Kazooie: I got to the level I’d been really looking forward to playing, Mad Monster Mansion. One memory that has stuck with me since originally playing BK in 1998 was that I could only ever get 99 musical notes in the haunted level, and so I was eager to go back and put that to rest.

The atmosphere in this level is great, the music is great, and the visual style is great – I love everything from the enemies to the different buildings to the maze. I don’t know if I’m just a sucker for Halloween/spooky themes generally, but it’s a pleasure to roam around and just exist in this level generally. None of the Jiggies gave me too much trouble, though it took me a while to figure out how to sneak up on the sleeping monster. Thankfully I got all 100 notes; it’s hard to tell which one I must have missed back in the day, but oh well. Another childhood demon slayed.

Next up was Rusty Bucket Bay, and I distinctly remember not completing this level due to the frustratingly difficult nature of some of the Jiggies, and the constant falling into poison water.

I didn’t find the Bay to be as bad as I remembered, with the only Jiggy I had to retry a few times being the infamous propeller one, with its unforgiving time countdown and tricky engine room. Overall it’s not the greatest level and lacks some of the charm of the others, but the increased difficulty is welcome.

What I’ve come to realise that Rare did really well with this game was scale the difficulty. Each level is a touch more challenging than the last, with no jarring difficulty spikes anywhere. This is particularly noticeable when you play the levels close together.

Slalom: I grabbed another milestone in Slalom, which required me to ski over 5k in total. A pretty easy one considering how many maps there are, and I imagine I’ll cover far more than this before the end. There seems to be a real increase in the challenge after the first mountain, so we’ll see how this goes.

Snapshots

Snake Rattle’N’Roll: I managed to power through the Snake Rattle ‘N’ Roll snapshots. After acclimatising to the controls I did discover some charm to this game, as the controls are much more fluid than some of the other early games in the collection.

Once you figure out that the controls are slanted, in that up actually means diagonal-right-up, and to move completely vertically you actually have to hold diagonal-left, the game becomes quite easy.

Certainly not a classic, and I’m not particularly looking forward to the milestones, but at least it’s not a complete horror-show to play. The snake himself has character and charm that adds a lot.

RC Pro Am: I grabbed two more stamps on the little racer. It’s fun and challenging, the stamp I’m stuck on asks you to shoot five rival cars and win the race. Tricky.

Overall not too much progress in this session, but good to sign off another game snapshot-wise. That’s 4 complete. Coming to the end of Banjo too, with just the legendary Click Clock Wood left to Conker (see what I did there?). I suppose I’ll move onto Banjo Tooie next, which I’ve never played, so I expect it’ll cause me more trouble than the first.

Stampers Forever progress: 25%