[Inaudible-Whisper]

First details about the new Banjo Kazooie game. My hype for this game just tripled:

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (360)

- You create vehicles with parts you find around the levels. Game Informer says their first vehicle was a 4 wheeled kart which they attached a spring to the bottom of that allowed them to jump things. They later found a helicopter blade that allowed their kart to fly. Later they added balloons to the vehicle and put the blade on the back and created a hovercraft.
- RARE showed them a vehicle that was a monster truck that was able to detach its chassis to become a mini bike. When the bike ramped off a cliff it revealed collapsible glider wings and started flying.
- There will be 1,600 parts including weapons that you'll be able to attach to the vehicles.
- The town is called Showdown Town.
- GI says that despite the large focus on vehicles it still features platform elements from the previous games like traditional platforming, tight rope walking and jiggy piece collecting.
- Showdown Town is 16 times larger than anything RARE has ever created before.
- Every level has a different intro. Nutty Acres begins with a credits spoof of 80's soap opera's like Dallas.
- Building vehicles is basically like playing with LEGO. You can always, at any time in the game, jump in and out of the vehicle editor and come right back to the game with the new design.
- Parts are easily placed and moved around. You don't have to worry about connecting the motor with the wheels for example. Just place everything so they stick together and don't get in the way.
- Vehicle designs play a large role in missions. We saw one where you had to collect coconuts from a field and a small truck was built with a sucker to suck them up. Unfortunately you couldn't fit all the coconuts in the truck. A big barrel was noticed near by... we were then shown how you could create a helicopter with a hook, that could pick up this large barrel, fly to the coconut field and fly low to scoop the coconuts in the barrel. With 1600 pieces of vehicle, you can imagine the different ways this could have been tackled. Everybody is going to be playing this game differently from one another, and discussing how they got past certain objectives.
- Physics are awesome in this game! With one design I placed the foot-in-a-box weapon behind a propeller, and when I tried to use it, the foot/boot couldn't get past the propella... well, until I used it enough times to actually kick the propeller off the vehicle, watching myself plummet.
- You can design pixel art for your vehicles. Imagine the possibilities (Rare already had an example of this, paying homage to a certain plumber)
- Multiplayer is great fun with the ability to either chose from pre-fabricated vehicle's, or completely design your own. It showed great promise.