What can you say about this game? Pure childhood delight in its most concentrated form. This took my love for overworlds (which I suppose prefigured the complete immersion of MMORPGs and social networking games and all of those other, more modern things) to the max with one of the greatest of all time. This had some damn great levels in it. While Mario 64 probably had technically better levels, Banjo's had more charm. This game was all about crazy charm, full of loud noises and squawking, and it was pretty damn big for its time.
My favorite level was Rusty Bucket Bay, for its size and difficulty. Click Clock Wood, the final level, was ambitious enough to have four different stages corresponding to the seasons of the year. Clanker's Cavern was epic, because you could dive down seemingly hundreds of feet into the water to get to the main portion of the level, which was inside a huge mechanical fish. God, just talking about this makes me want to play it again so bad. I plan to DL this on my Xbox soon.
When talking about this game, it should be mentioned that for unknown reasons (that I'm sure could be explained if we were just a little older at this point) Daniel and I received VHS tapes about this game in the mail, which only added to its legend. I will stand by my opinion that this had the greatest platformer levels of all time. There have been more innovative ones through the years, but I haven't played many other platformers that actually made me want to live in their world.
In any normal year, this would've been the game of the year, but in '98 another game came out that would change our lives. It was....
--Edward
Also, did I used to have a crush on Tooty, Banjo's sister? A little bit.
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