How Yooka-Laylee struggled to get past its low budget
Yooka-Laylee (2017)
Yooka-Laylee (2017)
You don’t need to know me particularly well to gather that I’m almost allergic to spending money. The way I see it, every little penny that I’ve tricked people into giving me is a hard-earned penny indeed. I’ll squeeze dosh from any man’s coffers - government, ignorant employers, family, the lot. I’ve even eyed up beggars’ cups on occasion - that’s how far I’ll go for a few quid.
But living like this has its disadvantages, dear readers, because suddenly every financial decision, no matter how seemingly minor, becomes a grand-arching game of monetary chess. I’ve got to think twelve moves ahead. “If I spend this Euro here, will I sit and agonise about it later and wish I’d just gone hungry that day?” and so on and so forth.
I snort derisively at people who actually buy bottled water - in fact I’m so miserly, I do the same to people who don’t immediately vroom off once they’ve put petrol into their cars. How silly can they be? All you have to do is evade police capture and you’ve saved yourself a fiver on fuel.
One area where I’m absolutely justified in keeping a vice-like grip over my hard-earned cash is when it comes to concert tickets. Christ, when Def Leppard announced that they were gracing Dublin with their elderly presence, but would be charging each punter at least 65 clams for the privilege, out came another of my now famous snorts. You’re all joking, aren’t you? You were last relevant forty odd years ago, and have never even had a following in Ireland, to my knowledge.
And yet, concert tickets of this price sell like crazy. They’re always sellouts, even if you’re below Z-list, although that might be more to do with the size of most of our concert venues. That, unfortunately, keeps those dreaded shysters at Ticketmaster in business.
We’ve all been there, unfortunately. The tickets go on sale at 8AM in the morning, but if your worthless, lazy backside ain’t on that e-queue before 8:01 AM, then you’ve had it. Your only recourse at this stage is ticket touts and third party merchants (which aren’t Ticketmaster backed in any way, no sir) and that is never ideal.
If your eyes had already been made to water at the initial RRP, their banks will positively burst by the time you weaken and meet the tout’s asking price. Add in VAT and another mysterious “booking fee”, and your eyes may very well pour out of their sockets, along with your soul, until the only part left of you at the actual show on that fated night is your bereft carcass, stripped of its rent money, dignity and free will.
Well so much for all that. Why bother paying the money, what are you actually getting? An unforgettable experience, a chance to see a living legend perform and come away with a story that will last a lifetime? Well, yes, but… why not go to a tribute act instead?
No, I’m serious. We don’t mind going off-brand for bread and milk, the essentials in life, so why not do the same with music artists? I will remind you that, by going off-brand with bread, up to 37 cent can be saved weekly, so I’m pretty sure I’m on to something here. And the mold is fine, so long as you toast the bread thoroughly and possibly eat around some of the more fungal bits. As for that non-kosher milk… you are able to tell green from white, right?
My point is that, maybe the originals aren’t always the best option. Perhaps they can actually be improved upon, or presented better, even if they still carry their own warts. Or maybe I’m being ridiculous and those popular established works and artists have nothing to fear from those who imitate their initial blueprint almost down to the letter.
Well, which of these is Yooka-Laylee purporting to be? Quite honestly, I still don’t know what this game is trying to be in relation to the Nintendo 64’s Banjo Kazooie, the game it most closely emulates. And I’m not sure I’ll ever quite figure it out either.
In a world of moribund first-person shooters, indie detritus and a wacky Nintendo console called the Wii U that wasn’t doing the biz saleswise, a group of the lads from that old banter workshop Rareware all met for a traditional Rareware Friday evening of pub, pints, darts and curry.
“Here lads. Isn’t it a bit galling that Microsoft took us on, promised us little, and relegated us to programming lowly avatars? ” one of the wags opined. “I’m glad I got out,” another of the lads agreed. “‘Ey up, balls to that,” Grant Kirkhope probably shouted, six pints deep.
Then the chaps overhead some Melvin in the toilet going on about Kickstarter and big money donations. Intrigued, they battered poor Melvin for info and then retired home, each wielding a zweihander doner kebab and talking incessantly about ideas for the Banjo Kazooie 3 that they could finally get together on and make.
But whoops, they obviously didn’t have the rights to hire in the now largely neglected bird-and-bear. But no problem, Rare just had to make a new nice-to-a-fault main characters, and give him an endlessly sarcastic female sidekick. Mind you, it has to be said that Yooka the Chameleon is more than a bit of a personality vacuum, and Laylee the Bat falls into a common pitfall that traps most of the game’s cast - constantly self-referential meta humour.
But rejoice, fans of nitwit game elements - every single character in the game, and many more non-characters besides, use the classic garbled sound effects as their speech noises. And it’s almost worth playing the game just to how hear how each of the different snowmen pipes up.
That’s one good part of the game wrapped up, and now time to talk about the bad… but only mildly. Yes, for the same reason that I am too weak and mousy to devastate solo or indie developers by attacking and spitting on their babies, even a game with as much developing pedigree as Yooka-Laylee gets leeway from me. Mind you, the game made in excess of two million dollars from Kickstarter, eight times the initial goal of £175,000 once currency conversion is taken into account.
God knows how far they could’ve stretched a game budget of 175 grand and still made it 3D and HD, because even being at my most generous, I’d have to say that there are a few times in Yooka-Laylee where that lack of all-important polish makes it frighteningly easy to point out where the money had run out.
It’s also a shame that there’s only 5 levels against Banjo Kazooie’s 9, although they are quite large, if a little aimless. By example, when I first rolled and flew (and more often than not, uncontrollably slid) around the first gameworld, where probably half the budget and dev time went, I was beginning to think that some structures and platforms simply weren’t loading or rendering for me.
I tried to use my camera efficiently to see if I was missing anything here, but the camera snarled back at me like a pitbull terrier at all my attempts to cajole it into helping me, almost like it was in disbelief, couldn’t believe the disrespect I’d given it. So I pretty quickly stopped trying to get a good look at where I was going.
I also rapidly learned that, almost from the moment you enter a new world, you can spend Pagies (the main collectible) to expand the world and make more elements appear. This would often bless me with those hallowed platforms and deathly structures that I was so badly missing previously. It’s an interesting little feature, but at least let me know the score beforehand, guys.
And don’t have me fight through an isometric-styled ice maze for a half an hour, before being confronted by an object that looks veeerrryyy suspicious, and will have me throwing my fragile chameleon at it for ages - only to find out that this requires a special move that I won’t be picking up for quite some time.
Backtracking is perfectly fine in a game, I encourage it even, but all the way to the deepest, forgotten parts of a massive earlier level? Leave it out. And I don’t even want to talk about the Rextro Arcade “Games” or the ubiquitous Mine Cart challenges, as they are both quite simply ghastly, and ought to be used as a form of neo-medieval torture.
Hmmm… plenty of faults here, isn’t there? But it’s not all bad, I promise you. In terms of the Banjo Kazooie template, it’s got varied and expansive worlds, it’s got the humour (a lot of it hackneyed, but what were you expecting?), it’s got loads to collect, it’s got new moves for you to learn, and it’s got boss battles, although they’re actually as ghastly as Rextro and the mine carts, so let’s scratch that.
On top of that the game’s got challenge, and thanks to its backers, it’s got the longest credits screen in the whole world. People wanted this game very much, that’s for sure. But loose controls, especially where the transformations are concerned, a particularly belligerent camera, some dreadfully frustrating segments and an overall lack of refinement all add up, I’m afraid.
Just when you thought 3D collectathons were back to their best, they turn out to be… moreorless exactly that, if Super Mario Odyssey is anything to go by. That came out the same year, and was one of the generation’s best. As a tribute act to Banjo Kazooie and other 3D platformers, Yooka throws out bum note after bum note - but is still such a refreshing sight that it gets your toes thumping.
We could both go on about its faults, but likewise we could gush about how it reignited memories of those N64 classics Banjo and Donkey Kong 64. Perhaps Yooka trades on little more than nostalgia. But as an experiment, a proof of concept in 2017, or even as an unashamed throwback, that’s good enough for me. At a budget price, this is one tribute act definitely worth the cost of entry.
12 January 2024