the most rancid, accursed odor a game has ever had. memories of a time when boys in your grade would laugh at Smosh videos and fight over yogurt tubes. of when eminem was the mainstream face of rap. a time where tobuscus was a guy who made epic parody songs and wasn't a guy who sexually assaulted people and melted his brain on drugs and conservative tweets. when pizza hut was fine dining. fruit gushers shared in humid computer classrooms. a time of pixar DVDs your mom's friend's husband burnt. a time of accursed rituals n goosebumps books n shit. just rancid.

now that we've gotten some distance from its final update, i think Smash Ultimate was ultimately a disappointment for me. years of updates later and the netcode is still hogshit, the balance is all over the place, and i feel like the game never changed or evolved meaningfully outside a few busted character additions. DLC roster was a major letdown personally, they got really homogenous and didn't have many interesting fighters. of the 11 DLC picks, only 2 of them aren't from an RPG or fighting game and of those is the guy from minecraft. combined with the lack of online infrastructure during a global pandemic, the lack of quality single player content (spirits and the WoL are stinky dawg), and the huge gaps in playability between characters there wasn't much of a reason to really return to this. it has a ton of content but i believe its roster size impeded it from really making meaningful updates, tons of fighters are basically unplayable above a casual setting and some characters feel incredibly overtuned in comparison. when there's like 80 dudes, it's hard to really give them all the attention they need and so many characters here remained practically untouched throughout its life. i respect the dev team and Sakurai all a lot but i'm not huge on this one. i did cry when they put Banjo in it, tho.

installing flesh augmentations to mine biocoins by drilling hundreds of holes into your teeth and filling the holes with Walmart™'s Biomass Filler®. getting hired to use your skullgun on the owner of a ski resort by his children. extremely pornographic ultra hyper suck and fucks. grapple with your appendix. the CEO mindset. stripping the organs from the residents of suburbanite households to sell on the stock market. the 640x480 resolution gifted to us by God. mass-produced sex slaves bred to serve their corporate overlords who can only scream and be fucked. teeth with teeth with teeth, take a bite.

tiring. written and directed by a goofy stooge inspired by how 'palestine is evil too!!!' the game part isn't anything special this time either - third person shooting, x to melee cutscene, light crafting elements, and hours of sections where you walk slowly and characters talk at you while you hold forward - it's legally a video game. no aspect here is used for any creative or characteristic benefit of the medium, this game is begging and pleading to be a TV show. it's very serious, so it can't be very interesting mechanically. the focus here is the story - a story that, were it not in a game, probably wouldn't receive the acclaim it has. there's a very misguided attempt to show the "two sides" of its conflict and it does this by making you retread the same beats of the other already way too overly-long story again, but its central conflict is dull unless you liked the boring dad guy from the first game. i do commend the games industry for finally making a revenge story about a deadbeat dad who's a girldad Horny 4 Revenge (until she isn't) this time but i really don't think that story needed to be TWENTY-FIVE (25) hours long! any sense of impact this could've had is lost in the indeterminable sludge of its pace, especially when the gameplay is so basic. it's a story you've seen before if you've ever once watched/read a dreary post-apocalypse story where the author's idea of humanity is only seen through the lens of exhaustive, immature brutality. unironically positions killing children as a good thing in case they grow up to be terrorists mad at you, which i thought was just "morally grey" stuff but this was created by a zionist so it's likely sincere. it gets to a level i find campy in the same way that really dorky batman vs superman movie was. when it's trying to be serious it's showing you how effed up and twisted humanity and VIOLENCE are by making you kill a dog and then showing a flashback of that dog being happy. this is not serious, like what are we even doing here. people with jobs will watch and enjoy the TV show version but won't remember it after eight months. despite what critics said about it, it's certainly no 'We Love Katamari' (2005)

Banjo Tooie expands on everything the original did. Its levels, music, movement, story, visuals, racism, and every other element is brought up in scope and ambition here. I was worried Tooie had aged similarly to Donkey Kong 64 with its tedious constant gated collecting and backtracking, but save for a few elements (Mumbo and the new racist caricature) the pacing was smoother than i expected.

Most of the new shit here rocks, fast travelling makes the larger level sizes comfy and the new moves you get are fun as hell. I actually really liked the FPS sections too, they didn't go on that long and they control really well. Unfortunately, whenever the game makes you shoot while flying or swimming I wanted to die, that fucking cursor is absolute evil. playing as Banjo and Kazooie separately is fun though not very impactful and I wish you had a menu to do it anytime. if this game had a radial menu on the dpad that allowed that alongside switching to Mumbo or the transformations you unlock this could beat the original in terms of pace.

I think the biggest improvement Tooie makes is with the story and presentation. this game's lighting is unholy for Nintendo 64 and its cutscenes are really good. the writing and tone is a lot darker and comedic than the first game's in a way that kicks ass. Bottles just immediately fucking dying is one of the funniest things I've seen in a game. Kazooie is why i support women's rights alongside women's wrongs and if this came out now she'd probably be a popular furry porno character but she kinda lucked out. Tooie's world is just a lot more fleshed out and imaginative than the first game's.

oh, also I was playing the XBLA version. but uh, I never actually finished it. I was at Grunty Industries, 100% up to that point, and then my save file just decided I was back in Glitter Gulch and would not work again. So really this is only a review of most of Banjo Tooie, with the rest played on an emulator while really wishing i was playing the XBLA version, but I had a great time overall.