When the topic of Nuts and Bolts comes up, I can't help but wonder if an entire generation was fooled into thinking this game was the devil, all because an overreactive e-celeb exaggerated its flaws to the point of drowning out any proper discussion. There's obviously the original teaser misleading people, and fans desperately expecting a Banjo-Threeie, but was the hate truly deserved?

The plot of N&B is about God himself intervening in a potential Banjo-Threeie situation, and declaring that his funny car game would be a better way to settle our duo's bitter rivalry with the witch. Can't exactly say no to God, so this is our lot in life now. Everyone is here, even if they've all been repurposed for various roles in LOG's game.

A good place to start is probably presentation, seeing as the new art style frequently causes people to recoil in terror at first sight. I wouldn't say I prefer it over the original's more outwardly cartoonish look, but I wouldn't call it bad, it even grew on me after a while. It's a good middle ground, carrying over the somewhat blocky look of N64 models. Everything looks like it's been manufactured or scrounged together, which does fit the scrappy tone of making funny vehicles. Even the more "organic" areas like Nutty Acres have giant gears on the outer walls, and metal clouds dangling from wires high above. The real showstopper in this game is Grant Kirkhope and his compositions. The whimsical melodies of the N64 games have been enhanced into these enchanting pieces done by a full orchestra. This style of music fits the bear and bird like a backpack and a pair of pants.

Even when vehicle construction is thrown into the mix, Banjo and Kazooie can't seem to escape their collectathon roots. Funnily enough, the area that does it best is the hub, Showdown Town. You gotta use your trolley to escort crates back to Mumbo's shop to redeem valuable parts, bring Jiggies back to the town square to "bank" them, and take globes out to their pedestals in order to open up new stages. As you defeat Gruntilda in each stage, a new ability gets added to your cart, and the hub opens up little by little. The levels themselves take on a structure akin to SM64 or Sunshine. They're split up into "acts", with each act containing a certain collection of missions. Like the aforementioned 3D Mario games, each act usually contains a slightly tweaked level layout, or continuity with the previous acts' missions.

So, each level is a big empty hub with a handful of NPCs that dole out challenges. Without going into the nitty-gritty, each challenge uses these massive hubs for a surprising variety of tasks. I'd describe mission types in more detail, but I think my blueprint list (in reverse-chronological order) speaks for itself. Same for the workshop; it's surprisingly versatile, and if you can imagine a fucked up contraption, chances are there's a way to make it. That's this game's strongest appeal: Seeing a challenge, and having a twisted spark of inspiration, and personally creating an abomination that somehow gets the job done. This is also why LOG is a shitty game designer! A decent amount of challenges lock you into "LOG's choice" vehicles, which wholly misses the point of making your own funny machines to solve problems. If a mission dictates a "LOG's choice" machine, it will either be pathetically easy or obnoxiously hard and unfun. There is no in-between.

The writing in N&B is as smarmy and quippy as ever, but there's also a ton of self-loathing, commentary on the direction the industry is headed in, and jabs at Rareware's legacy as a studio. It puts a damper on the game's mood, but it's really engaging in the sense that it gives you the idea that something went horribly wrong during Rare's time at Microsoft. Either that, or Rare just saw the writing on the wall and believed that there wasn't going to be a good place for them in the industry going forward. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is frequently the butt of a joke, and the "Logbox 720" stage has several Rare game discs with messages printed on them that are easy to miss. The Tooie disc asks "did you like it more or less?" Viva Piñata is deemed to have earned the award of "best game no-one played". Even Rare feels the need to ask, "will Nuts and Bolts be remembered in a decade?"

While I was still getting my thoughts together on this game, a coworker asked me if he should get Nuts & Bolts. In that moment, I realized just how narrow this game's demographic is. It's still a good game if you just like slapping maddening machines together, but the game definitely expects a certain amount of familiarity and investment in Rare's legacy as well. If you're into Rare, you probably already know what this game's deal is. If you're not, I don't know if it's asking too much to educate yourself on a single studio's entire history before playing. Even without that background, it's still a fun game. Underrated and overhated, that's the mantra I'm going with on this one.

Anyone who praised Tears of the Kingdom because it focused on building funny vehicles needs to apologize to Nuts & Bolts.

"As a French studio addressing a global audience, the game does not engage in any foreign policy and is not inspired by any real-life events."

Oh no.

What's the point, then? If you're going to be telling a story through the perspective of a bodycam, should the medium not be the message?

I'm willing to give these developers the benefit of the doubt, maybe there will be more to this than that. But as it stands, that kind of statement attached to a game with a premise like this is only slightly less on the nose than EA or Ubisoft making a game adaptation of Bumfights with hyper-realistic graphics where you play as both the cameraman and aggressor and then claiming that the only bit of reality mirrored in it is that the homeless exist.

proud repulsion; the wriggling extremities of capital and hyperneurotic shoot-to-kill police horror viewed thru a queasy dutch angle. the malignant hypnotic wave of the gig economy, conditioned response, consumer slop, microplasticked newborns, get-rich-quick schemes, and salacious newsreel highlights as accelerated further thru nihilistic excess

indebted to bataillean self-laceration and mystic economism; transformative violence, sacrificial hedonism, and refusal of poise undercut by knowingly grotesque laughter. trauma and transgression as freefalling elevators toward the most terrestrial outcomes; absurd monuments erected to the unwell; flickering lighthouses and garbled siren songs drawing shipwreckers into the same crashes again and again until they find an exit

organs spilling out and lining your pockets, stock markets juddering senselessly and pointlessly, bank accounts engorging and deflating. every exchange, every action inherently transactional in nature; shared psychosis hitting fever pitch

work/life balance as infinite on-call uniformity

body as pure reflection of environment

self as perfect corporate weapon

writing this before i finish the game and if they dont play The Man Who Sold the World during the credits I'm gonna be so disappointed
UPDATE: GOD IS REAL

This game feels pretty disconnected from most of Metal Gear but I honestly don't mind. This is definitely the best stealth game mechanically that I've played probably ever. Being able to approach missions in so many unique ways is just so fantastic and it's executed amazingly. Also, love having cassettes for music, because there is a KILLER soundtrack here.

I could give this a 10/10 on fun factor alone, but there are a lot of issues for me. My biggest problem is the linear story missions. I don't really think they work. A lot of the fun of this game, for me at least, is throwing shit at the wall at seeing what sticks. There were just too many missions that were overly scripted and didn't really have room for player expression. Bosses are pretty weak, too. Repetition is awful, and it genuinely feels so detached from the previous games to have such high amounts of vapid filler.

I will make an exception for the last stretch of main missions though, they really hit the narrative highs the series is known for. But the requirements to unlock those missions are just complete filler. Having to repeat missions is, very unfun. Especially with the tacked on challenges.

And that intro being so long is just inexcusable. Ground Zeroes is basically already a tutorial, the intro could've been a cutscene, and a much shorter one at that.

Overall though I think MGSV is... good, and a milestone for stealth games in general. Worst numbered entry though, and could've been improved by not having the terrible AAA design.

I'm gonna replay the MGS quadrilogy and review it soon :P

There was something magical about games back when I was young and didn't understand how they worked, didn't understand their limitations. Back when I thought there would be secret areas out of bounds, behind doors you couldn't open, back when I convinced myself that games just went on forever if you could just run fast enough to break through the walls in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, walk through walls in Pokemon Gold to find Celebi, or go underneath Ganon's castle to find the Triforce in Ocarina if Time. I feel like retro game design, and how so little was explained to the player in-game, fostered that imagination in me, and I have been searching for games that spark that same kind of intrigue, and that is the key thing that made Dark Souls so special to me.
No other game has given me that feeling of childlike wonder so strongly before, and it's a big part of what makes me dislike the later Souls games and Elden Ring in comparison. The feeling of being completely lost and slowly trying to figure out how things like covenants worked, why I would only get invaded sometimes, what a Gravelord is, what that weird white circle that looks like the lock-on icon is, what the little crab phantom I only saw once was, all completely blind, no guides or prior knowledge of the game, took me back to a state of mind which I never thought I could return to again. The slow pace, obtuse mechanics and carefully curated snippets of story make this game ironically feel magnitudes more grand than a game like Elden Ring to me.