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 24th, 2008 by Daniel Duncan

Images via Rare