Banjo-Tooie flaps onto Nintendo Switch Online next week
The bird & bear are back, with Banjo-Tooie, their second Nintendo 64 adventure, flapping onto Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack next week.
Coming almost three years after the first game was added, Banjo-Tooie will be available in the N64 app for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers from 25th October. It’s the first time that this has been available through a Nintendo emulation system, which is pretty exciting for those who missed out on the original, or don’t have an Xbox for Rare Replay.
Originally released for N64 in 2000 (and in April 2001 in the EU), Banjo-Tooie was at the tail end of the N64 generation and was in many ways the culmination of Rare’s time with the 3D platformer genre – Conker’s Bad Fur Day was a lewd fever dream that came out the following year, and bizarrely a week before the EU release of Tooie.
Building on the original game’s riff on the Super Mario 64 formula, and filled with a collect-a-thon of Jigglies and musical notes, Banjo-Tooie takes things to the next level in a number of ways. Rare was able to bring back some cut content and ideas from the original, but pushing the N64 even harder by featuring direct connections between its worlds for a more contiguous adventure, where the original had you teleport into each level. That’s featured in some of the game’s puzzles, which span multiple worlds.
The game also features multiplayer for four players, adapting the competition mode from the single-player to give first-person shooting, football and other minigames. It’s not entirely clear that this is included in the Switch Online version, but will be interesting to see.
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