October 5th, 2008 by Tyrant_Reborn
A recent update over at GiantBomb gives fans a 12 minute look at Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts gameplay with a focus on Nutty Acres and Showdown town.
I have to say it, the game looks beautiful but the return of escort missions makes me a little quezy.
July 30th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
Portion of an interview with Music4Games…
M4G: First of all please tell us about your audio background and how you got started working in the video games industry?
Robin Beanland: I was working freelance and writing music for TV as well as writing music for library companies KPM and Bosworth. In 1994 I saw a little ad in the back of Edge placed by a company in Twycross looking for musicians. I applied and got the gig…along with a young go getter called Graeme Norgate (Noz) who is now one of my bestest mates.
Dave Wise: When I was growing up, my brother had piano lessons. But I had to wait until I was the same age as when my brother started, before I could start piano lessons. So at 6 years of age, I had to learn by ear. I decided to move to the trumpet in my early teens, playing in a Brass Band. Later, joining a Punk Rock band in my late teens, having taught myself drums. In my early twenties, I was demonstrating keyboards with some of my own tunes in a local music shop, when Tim & Chris Stamper dropped by. They didn’t want a keyboard, but offered me a job instead.
Steve Burke: I went to King’s College London to study music, wanting to learn as much as I could about composition, playing the piano, conducting and orchestrating. I then went on to study for a Masters Degree in Composition at the Royal College of Music. This gave me a lot of opportunities to work with orchestras and scoring music for student films. After college I stayed on in London for a couple of years working as an assistant to film and tv composer, and in 2001 there was an advert in Edge magazine for an in-house audio job at Rare. The showreel I’d built up working with orchestras and on tv projects landed me the job at Rare.
July 18th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
July 17th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
A bit of footage and discussion on Rare’s Avatars, Trouble in Paradise, and Nuts & Bolts here.
July 17th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
Some additional talk here about the training gym for Banjo and Kazooie and sidequests and hidden characters in Showdown Town. Really interesting!
July 17th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
Today marks the 10 year anniversary for Banjo-Kazooie in the UK. To celebrate this special occasion, Computer&Videogames has the opportunity to speak with Rare’s Mark Betteridge and Rich Cousins about the anniversary, Banjo Arcade, Gregg Mayles wearing Banjo shorts, Nuts & Bolts, and the future of the franchise. This is the complete interview as well as a small portion of it below…
First of all, congratulations on reaching Banjo-Kazooie’s 10th Birthday. How does it feel to reach that milestone?
Mark Betteridge It’s great. I suppose ten years is a long time with anything in the entertainment business. We’ve taken Banjo in a slightly different direction in Nuts ‘N Bolts which we’re able to do because of the increased performance of the 360. It’s given us a platform in terms of gameplay that we can built up on, give longevity to and take forward.
We think the time is right for Banjo to be a mascot character for the 360, that’s the key point. The price of the box is less than it was at launch, there are more casual customers buying consoles, so I think there’s now a really good opportunity there. It’s a unique game in the 360 line-up, it’s a game that the 360 needs.
Is that the objective then? To make Banjo the Mario of Xbox?
Betteridge: Yeah. Certainly as a mascot character Mario is fantastic and that would be wonderful to have Banjo mention in the same breath as 360 in way that Mario is with Nintendo. That would be wonderful. That’s certainly an aim.
July 16th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan
E3 isn’t quite over yet folks! It’s always a really busy time of year and since Rare was finallypresent again, news is abound from every front. Here we have another new interview, this time with head of Rare Studios, Mark Betteridge, speaking with Eurogamer. A portion of that discussion follows:
“Some players will spend many hours fine-tuning their vehicles - or making things that you wouldn’t even consider vehicles,” Mark predicts. “When we gave the game to testing, they really opened it up! A significant part of the game is the community aspect, the ability to trade blueprints and see what else other people have built. Within a few hours, our testers had built things as diverse as a space shuttle that actually took off vertically, someone else made an aircraft carrier… Someone else made a Godzilla, complete with breathing fire and laser eyes! They all actually worked, as vehicles.”
“When you think of vehicles, there’s a tendency for people to think of a plane, a boat, a car or something of that type,” he says. “There are many, many different aspects to this, though, and once we’ve had this game on the market for a while, I think we’ll be all stunned by the variety in what the community comes up with.”
If you want to read the rest, best be heading over to Eurogamer. It’s a nice read, so don’t be shy!
June 12th, 2008 by hylian1
Many media outlets were allowed the opportunity to breach Rare HQ to get an exclusive look and hands-on time with Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise for the Nintendo DS. Below are a jumble of interviews, hands-on impressions, and previews:
Kotaku Hands-on Impressions
IGN Preview and IGN Interview
Play.tm Interview and Play.tm Preview
Videogamer Interview
Spong Interview
Total Video Games Hands-On Impressions
March 6th, 2008 by Tyrant_Reborn
Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking a step away from Rare games themselves and asking Gregg Mayles directly about what it takes to get involved in the Games Industry and about how he first got his start in game design. Definately worth a read if you are interested in getting into the games industry.
Read more…
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