Banjo Kazooie Secrets

hey guys guess what i like banjo-kazooie breaking news alert some guy on the internet likes banjo-kazooie holy [ __ ] everybody drop what you're doing and come check this out yeah i know well rather than doing yet another in-depth review of the game where i talk about the gameplay characters music and all the normal reasons everyone likes it i'd rather focus on one specific element of the game that particularly captivated me as a kid and it was the main reason i spent dozens of hours playing the game well after i had already beaten it and that would be how mysterious the game is now what the hell is so mysterious about banjo-kazooie a bear fights a witch it's literally one of the oldest stories in human history well when i said i played the game for dozens of hours after reading it i didn't just mean on a new save file i would spend hours exploring my already 100 completed file i just always felt like there were more things to learn about the game and more secrets to uncover let's start with what i guess is technically the first secret you can discover in the game when you first gain control of banjo you can immediately turn around and go into his house there's no reason to do this i know pointing the game where you ever require to go inside the house is just there for a little flavor but that's nothing special i mean plenty of games have little areas like this at the start what's interesting is if you look at this picture of bottles in the first person it brings up a little dialogue box where he says you can't access this hidden feature until you get the jiggy from the sand castle so after you wait a minute what the [ __ ] why does banjo have a framed portrait of bottles in this house they don't even meet until the start of the game that doesn't make any god damn sense if wait actually in the opening they established 2d already knows bottles so i guess maybe she hung it up but wait does tootie actually live in this house the opening of the game shows approaching the house you think there'd be an easy consensus on what this means but apparently people can't agree on whether she was coming for a visit or if she was just out playing or whatever i checked the banjo wikia and they're not even in agreement over there some pages say she lives there some say she doesn't well luckily this is one mystery which actually does have a conclusive answer according to the manual she does in fact live in this house with banjo where does she sleep i don't know presumably out by the garbage cans anyways with that settled i suppose it's technically theoretically possible that tootie hung up a portrait of bottles in their home and banjo just never bothered asking who it was but this just didn't sit right with me something seemed off about this whole thing well some people have actually theorized that at some point earlier in development this was originally going to be a picture of donkey kong instead of bottles this may be why kazooie refers to him as barrel boy if you look at the picture before the sand castle in beta screenshots of the game we can see there used to be a portrait of dk in the house although yes it's not in the right spot in this picture the screenshots seem to indicate that the final picture locations were still a work in progress as 2d's picture is currently above the fireplace so what actually is the deal with this picture well once you've got the sand castle jiggy looking into the picture will unlock a bonus mini-game where you have to place the puzzle pieces into the right slot within a time limit there are 7 stages total it starts out easy enough but by the end it actually gets pretty hard i know it doesn't look that difficult it looks like some kind of baby puzzle but trust me it's hard the pieces start rotating and the backgrounds get less distinct even if you never found this secret minigame this still might look familiar to you because they refined this mechanic and used it in tui as part of the process to unlock new levels for each stage you beat bottles will give you a code which you can enter into the sandcastle floor so what do these codes actually do well they're all just silly cosmetic changes nothing too special but let's still take a look at them bottles bonus one it's pretty funny i mean plenty of games of this era had a big head mode like goldeneye so it's not super unique or anything but it's still pretty good bottles bonus two big hands and feet yeah this looks pretty stupid i like this one not bad bottles bonus three big kazooie yeah it's all right i mean it definitely looks pretty weird but so far it just seems like these bottles bonus codes are just making part of you bigger it's not that amazing bottles bonus four alright baby now we're talking tiny head and weird elongated tube body this is basically hot dog banjo and it's awesome i totally love this it's completely my style i could do a whole play through like this bottle's bonus five hot dog banjo with the big hands and feet pretty funny if a little derivative but this might be the weirdest looking one and finally big bottles bonus as you might expect this code gives you the effects of the first three all at once so you got the big head hands and feet and kazooie i like this goofy looking bobble head version of banjo and kazooie but personally i still can't help but feel the hot dog banjo is the best out of these options however that's actually not all the codes as i mentioned earlier there are seven stages in total after you unlock big bottles bonus you'll say you've unlocked everything but that cheeky bastard is just trying to trick you so look at the portrait again to do the final puzzle to unlock the code wishy washy banjo the bottle's bonus codes are nice and cute and all but this is the real treat yes if you beat all seven puzzles you unlock the ability to play through the game as a washing machine there's something so delightfully stupid about that that they had this ridiculous idea in the first place and then they actually went and put it into the game something about that just really tickles my funny bone and as a kid i thought this was the best thing ever just like the other code transformations you retain access to banjo's entire moveset however the washing machine actually has slightly different properties from regular banjo you can walk in piranha water hot sand and freezing water all without taking damage but you can't use the boots or speed shoes and you can't carry certain items like blubber's gold also because his model is changed your attack range is slightly reduced it's hard to quantify this exactly but it results in some weird [ __ ] like being unable to break the egg in bubble gloop swamp with a beak barge also a weird quirk of the washing machine mode is that mumbo transformations are free for some reason not sure what that's about probably just a glitch i was going to do a full playthrough of this just to figure out what exactly you can and can't get however this top bloke on gamefaqs already did it for me maybe i'll do it anyway sometimes just to double check his list and see if maybe he got some things wrong according to this guy you can't get enough jiggies to finish the game come on speedrunners it's time to make washing machine percent a real category yes i'm asking you to do a route of the game that includes this entire dreadful mini mini-game i don't care make it happen even if you never did this mini-game you still might have seen washing machine banjo there's a very small chance mumbo will turn you into a washing machine as a gag when you go in for a normal transformation well you don't get to play is when he just immediately turns you back in fact there's another joke transformation where he says he's going to turn you into a t-rex but then he changes his mind to the last minute because he wants to save it for the sequel funny enough there really was a t-rex transformation in the sequel as well as a fully fledged washing machine transformation which has its own moveset i like when there are secrets that just have a really low percent chance of happening i know people have beat banjo-kazooie multiple times and have never seen this easter egg besides these mumbo jokes there's also the rare chance that when loading your save file a silly alternate animation will play i'm not 100 sure i can articulate exactly why i like this kind of thing so much but i just do somehow it makes the world feel more alive alright well truth be told the bottle's bonus secret really isn't that obscure to be honest maybe you wanted to actually learn something new about the game huh well did you know you can kill snacker with eggs or golden feathers how about that huh sure plenty of you already knew about that one but i guarantee there are a few people out there who had their minds absolutely blown how about skipping past dialogue the game never mentions this but if you press l r and b you can flat out skip past most dialog boxes in the game obviously if you're a speedrunner you knew about that one but weirdly enough this feature was removed in the otherwise excellent xbox port of the game just as a quick side note this is actually a really great port of the game and it fixes one of the only things i didn't care for in the original by removing the note score system and just turning music notes into normal collectibles apart from a few weird little audio issues the tui port is also fantastic as that game absolutely chugs on a real n64 let's take a moment to talk about the honeycomb not empty honeycomb pieces you use to upgrade your health bar but the regular honeycomb collectibles that enemies drop that restore your health sometimes enemies will be programmed to drop two honeycombs if you kill them in a specific way like beak barging the crabs actually the crabs drop two honeycombs if you wondering them too but you probably aren't using wonderwing that much in treasure trove cove since you don't get it until planker's cavern something i always liked about banjo-kazooie is that the honeycombs don't despawn once you kill the enemy it stays dead and that honeycomb will stay on the ground you can go run around the stage for an hour and then come back and it'll still be there both letting you know that you've been there before and have already killed the enemies and that you can collect it now when you actually need it much better than a game like oh say donkey kong 64 where enemies respawn after only like 20 seconds to the best of my knowledge honeycombs are a finite resource once you've killed all the enemies in a stage and broken all the beehives that's it there's no more health you can get although actually you can still refill your health by talking to bottles if you're playing on a stage with him in it but you can't get any more honeycombs well actually there's one specific case in the game where you can generate an infinite amount of honeycombs and i have never heard anyone mention this before now i know i'm not the first person to discover it or anything there are a couple clips of it on youtube none of which have many views remember these super annoying snowman enemies that everyone hates well check this [ __ ] out that's right you can punch their snowballs out of the air and it creates a honeycomb then on the damn banjo-kazooie wikia i checked you can do this as many times as you want but after 10 they'll start despawning wow getting to see a honeycomb d spawn that's a rare sight probably less than 0.01 percent of banjo players have ever gotten to witness such a rare event consider yourself blessed before i discuss the secret from banjo-kazooie let me briefly go over a similar story from banjo-tooie so late in the game there's a trivia quiz section where you have to answer various questions and used to represent the answers to these questions are the talking head icons of random characters found throughout the game however one of the heads you can see is that of a devil bottles that seem nowhere else in the game bottles dies during the intro sequence and remains in a ghostly angelic state throughout the entire game until the very end where he's brought back to life at no point does he ever appear as a spooky devil so for years people wondered what the hell is up with that devil bottles face certainly kept me up at night anyways years after the game came out some of the literal geniuses over at the rare witch project a prominent rare fan site and community hub for banjo-kazooie related research discovered that there was a cut two-player mode that was virtually complete but left unimplemented but with a simple game shark code you can try it out for yourself the mode is called bottles revenge and using devil bottles the second player can possess the closest enemy and use it to attack banjo you can even use the possessed enemy to attack other nearby enemies as a weird sort of pseudo co-op mode the feature wasn't fully debugged and has some minor glitchiness to it which is probably why it was dummied out for the final release as i know it doesn't cause any sort of major glitches but it's not quite complete in the sense there are a couple normal enemies in certain worlds that definitely should be controllable but aren't for whatever reason originally they said they were planning on letting bottles control the bosses too but since the bosses are often reliant on predictable attack patterns having an actual player control them led to it being too hard so they scrapped that idea in the final version devil bottles just has some dialogue where it goes away during the boss fights overall i think it's a really cool feature and i wish more games had something like this like how you can control the ducks and duck hunt with the second controller alright in order for me to properly explain stop and swap the most infamous banjo-kazooie secret allow me to briefly set the stage for you while playing through the game you're likely to notice this giant inaccessible ice key in the level freezy peak try as you might there is nothing you can do to collect it but of course it's not as if the game never addresses it completing the game with all 100 jiggies changes the ending cutscene to one where mumbo shows banjo secret pictures of things you missed secrets used in the next game and then he shows off three different clips of banjo entering areas that are inaccessible in the main game to collect two different mysterious looking eggs as well as the ice key this really got my noggin chagan how could items from one game be used to affect another were we gonna see the return of some kind of lock-on technology despite all this the ice he continued to elude me just sitting there and spinning taunting me do you know how much of a [ __ ] tease it is to make a collect-a-thon and then dangle a single inaccessible collectible in front of us it's this damn key and eggs that kept me exploring the game for hours and hours after completing it so two years later it's the year 2000 and banjo-tooie comes out and i'm wondering how the eggs and ice key are going to factor into this game of course it takes place in an entirely new set of levels it's not like you can just return to freeze easy peak and get the ice key indeed while you can return to grunty's lair only the first room is accessible and the rest of it is blocked off so what's up where are they well in one of the most truly bizarre fourth wall breaking moments i have ever seen in a game you actually have to track down hidden banjo-kazooie cartridges and then smash them open there are three in the game containing the two eggs in ice key the ice key is used to unlock the vault which contains the mega globo which is used for the dragon kazooie transformation and the eggs can be taken to heggy who will hatch them for you peggy will also already have a yellow egg waiting when you first visit that kazooie will need to hatch yourself upon hatching this egg you will unlock the jinjo character in multiplayer hatching the pink egg unlocks the bregal bash move which is quite funny but not terribly useful and hatching the blue egg unlocks the homing eggs cheat code but don't get me wrong dragon kazooie is pretty cool and stuff but overall i felt extremely underwhelmed by this whole thing years of hyping up those eggs and keys and that was it it was tremendously unsatisfying to me for one i could still load up my old banjo kazooie save and see the damn ice key still sitting there taunting me never to be collected and more than that i wanted to go inside shark food island myself i wanted to visit that weird room in gobies valley and collect the egg myself i wanted to jump up this thing why i don't know just because it's in the game somewhere even back then i could tell that this couldn't possibly fit what they were originally intending so what happened well in 2001 some months after the release of tui the boys over at rare witch project discovered a huge amount of hidden in-game cheat codes in the original banjo-kazooie you see in banjo-kazooie there's this spell book named cheeto you can find him three times throughout the game and he'll offer you a cheat that you can enter into the sandcastle floor however his cheats are more just like a permanent upgrade to the carrying capacity of your eggs or feathers don't get me wrong it's quite helpful but when i think of cheat code i think of something like infinite resources or infinite health you know upgrades just kind of feel like upgrades so i was always sort of disappointed by the game's lack of traditional cheats well it turns out the game did have real cheat codes all along cheats for everything infinite lies eggs feathers health mumbo tokens even air first you have to enter the word cheat which would make mooing sounds and then type out the rest of the cheat code which is usually quite long in some sort of little rhyme you might not seem like these cheats are that long but running between each letter and ground pounding takes a few seconds each so it can take up to a couple minutes per cheat depending on the length they're also so long that you just want to hurry up and do it fast but you have to be precise because there's no visual or audio feedback when entering the code so you won't even know you messed up until you get to the end and nothing happens in addition to the infinite whatever cheats there was also a plethora of ones which removed obstacles in grunty's lair seriously every door every stage entrance nearly every single random obstacle in the lair has a corresponding rhyming qi to remove it there are even separate cheats for finishing the level pictures and just flat out opening the world for some reason but one of the most interesting things about these newly discovered cheats is that if you enter two of them grunty will warn you to stop cheating if you ignore her warning and enter a third cheat bottles will tell you that using three cheats will cause your save file to be erased i'm sure plenty of players assume that this was just a bluff because after all bottles can threaten to erase your save if you repeatedly talk to him at the beginning of the game after skipping the tutorial but unlike that idol threat this is no joke he asks if you're sure you want to do it when you press a grunty will inform you that she has deleted your save well they keep saying game pack but it only erases one save file you might not even realize she's being serious at first since you can continue to run around and play the game all you want but once you restart the console you'll see your save file has truly been deleted which is pretty wild i'm not sure how many games have the balls to actually delete your save as a form of punishment but then again they did warn you however more interesting than any of the infinite items or grunty's layer sheets were the discovery of the stop and swap codes unlike the previously mentioned sheets you can enter these all in without any sort of negative consequences these coaches did things like race shark food island open the door in gobies valley and remove the ice barrier and freeze easy peak after waiting for years i could finally actually collect the damn ice key even though it quite literally does absolutely nothing i cannot explain to you how good of a feeling it was to pick this thing up but the coolest part of this discovery was that there were four additional eggs never before seen a red one in the captain's cabin of rusty bucket bay a green one in lagos mouth and mad monster mansion a cyan one in the basement of mad monster mansion and a yellow one on nab nuts table in the winter part of click clock wood collecting these items actually unlocks another menu screen which displays them under a heading stop and swap people had actually discovered this name years earlier thanks to a simple moon jump or levitate code which allows you to get past the ice wall in wazo's cave and pick up the ice key as a wee lad who spent hours running around these stages who knew every damn nook and cranny just being able to see these new areas and collect these items was like a dream come true felt like all those hours of running around had finally paid off even though i knew technically it had nothing to do with this so while getting to finally collect these items was extremely cool and satisfying it was a little bit sad because it was not like you'd ever be able to actually transfer these items over to tui and use them in the way they originally intended people would continue to speculate for years wondering about the original purpose of these items and what the original plans for stop and swap were at first they were coy about it but over the years through interviews with former rare employees and such it was eventually determined why this feature was called stop and swap the original plan was going to be that in certain points of tui they were going to give you the sandcastle codes to unlock the items in banjo-kazooie you would collect the items in kazooie then with the system still turned on quickly pull out your copy of kazooie and insert your copy of tui hence the name stop and swap rare discovered that when you take a game out there's still about a 10 second window where the contents of the original game's memory the ram was still accessible so they decided to implement a system where items could be transferred from one game to another using this kind of technology unfortunately they didn't tell nintendo about this plan until late in development and when they did they were informed that it wouldn't necessarily work for every n64 specifically newer models wouldn't retain ram for 10 seconds it would be closer to one second so ultimately rare had no choice but to scrap the plans but some remnants of it were still left in the game obviously something very interesting is that there's actually evidence which suggests the ice key was originally not meant to be used in banjo-tooie but rather donkey kong 64. hidden within the game's code the text string ice key can be discovered and in beta footage of the game you can see there was some kind of fridge or locker with banjo-kazooie's face on it in dk's house and moreover there's an unused cutscene which warps the player to this giant ice wall in crystal caves but before warping the camera pans over to where this fridge would have been of course years and years of speculation and asking rare employees about it eventually led to stop and swap becoming something of a meme in the 2005 gba title banjo pilot if you collect 999 cheeto pages and beat the rare time trials in every race you're allowed to purchase an item called stop and swap upon doing so he simply says so you want to know about stop and swap eh i hope you're ready here goes why don't you stop annoying me and swap this game for a nice book or something there was also a reference to it in their game grabbed by the ghoulies and of course yooka-laylee featured a reference to in the form of a giant ice key but without a doubt the game with the most references to stop and swap is of course banjo-kazooie nuts and bolts there are so many little ones i really don't have time to go over all of them but two of the most amusing ones are the option to purchase stop and swap truth from bottles for 6 000 notes a joke since they're only 5 230 notes in the whole game however if you edit the game's code to give yourself enough and buy it anyways he has the following to say i could tell you but then i have to kill you and we couldn't show that in a game with this rating put it out of your mind and think happy thoughts thanks for the notes the other very cheeky reference to it is during the quiz portion of the game in spiral mountain when the lord of games can ask what was the name of the supposed secret link between banjo-kazooie and banjo-tooie that some fansites still won't shut up about interestingly enough nuts and bolts actually featured stop and swap compatibility with the xbox live version of banjo-kazooie if you started a new game with nuts and bolts save file on your machine you'd find that the stop and swap areas had already opened up and upon collecting the items and starting nuts and bolts again you'd find that special vehicle crates would spawn at the corresponding item locations each containing a unique vehicle piece like dice or a disco ball however what really caught my attention was the xbox live arcade release of banjo-tooie in 2009 nearly a decade after the original release stop and swap functionality between kazooie and 2a was finally functional you could collect all six eggs and the ice key in kazooie and then use them to unlock things in tui however the original two-way only had three eggs and now there are six so some extra rewards had to be whipped up really quick the new rewards include banjo kazooie dashboard theme and a gamer pick i'll be honest these rewards kind of suck but i don't even care i'm just happy to have stop and swap used in the game and the final reward for attaching all the eggs is the cheekiest [ __ ] yet after all this time the final reward you can unlock with stop and swap is stop and swap two yep that's right since you get all six eggs from the original game now the banjo-kazooie game packs contain the bronze silver and gold eggs which are part of stop and swap 2. in addition to collectibles part of stop and swap 2 involves in-game achievements like transform into every wumbo transformation and beat the boss rush in under 15 minutes and even die 40 times to the boss rush so what does stop and swap 2 actually do well no one knows i guess we'll find out in banjo-3e this whole idea of save data from one game affecting the other would eventually become more common one of the first times i remember seeing it was how you could unlock certain trophies in smash bros melee by having the right save data on your memory card i'm sure to some people the whole idea of cross game interaction is completely banal and uninteresting but it was such a mind-blowing concept to me as a kid especially since banjo-kazooie didn't even use a memory card of any kind all the data was contained right there on the game card itself anyways i guess the whole point of this video is just to reminisce about how cool it was as a kid to actually have this sense of mystery to these games where you just wondered about stupid [ __ ] for years on end nowadays it seems like every time a game comes out you can just go online and someone will have dumped the entire contents of the game data looking for secrets which is cool too don't get me wrong as you can tell i'm the kind of guy who likes learning about these kinds of things but uh i just do kind of miss back in the day when it felt like games could be hiding these unknowable secrets for years on end i guess really i just missed being a stupid kid the kind of kid who was dumb and naive enough to think something might actually happen if you beat the elite four a hundred times the kind of kid who thought there had to be a way to get behind bill's house if he just looked hard enough the kind of kid who wondered what the [ __ ] was up with this [ __ ] truck seriously [ __ ] this truck why is it here it's the only truck in the whole [ __ ] game and it's nearly impossible to find and it doesn't do anything i originally thought you had to trade for a pokemon with cuts so you could bypass the ss and but later i found out you can just intentionally lose a trainer battle so you can black out and get sent back to the pokemon center after you get the hm then come back way later once you know surf and there it is the damn bastard truck why would they put in a unique graphic in a normally completely inaccessible area just didn't make any sense there had to be some kind of purpose to it this thing was the source of a truly unfathomable amount of rumors i'm sure every elementary school in the country had their own entire ecosystem of stupid fake pokemon rumors but obviously the most prevalent one with the truck was that you could push it with strengther by performing some arcane ritual or something and underneath it would be mew of course nothing ever happened no matter how long you tried and game freak even decided to put a little item here in the remake just as a little consolation prize so i gotta say i appreciate it when devs go out of their way to put weird spooky hidden [ __ ] in their game like all that gaster [ __ ] in undertale which at least attempted to evoke that sense of some rare crazy unbelievable occurrence in a game if undertale came out 20 years ago that [ __ ] would have driven people crazy with rumors i don't know lads i'm not some sort of technology hater but i feel like with the advent of the internet and sites like youtube secrets and video games have just lost some of their magic you know imagine hearing some rumor where if you beat a game with no continues in less than 25 minutes you'll fight a super secret boss and the only way you're gonna know if that was true or not was if you sat down and did it yourself now check it online to make sure you're not wasting your time no watching a video on youtube first if you wanted to see it you had to make it happen i mean it's not like there's any way we can get those days back right what's that i think we could blow up the internet i know i had the exact same thought but upon further research it turns out the internet is actually one of those things that you can't blow up so that's that then no way to get the magic back anybody ever seen that movie pie i guess i could end of the movie pie myself see if that works i mean maybe i'm wrong or just over exaggerating or whatever game still have secrets that can go undiscovered for years i mean there was that one room in batman arkham asylum that teased the sequel that went undiscovered for so long the devs had to just come out and tell people it was there i feel like the more modern approach to having a really obscure secret in your game is to design some kind of insanely convoluted arg which requires the community of people working together to solve which is cool too i remember watching something like this unfold in the binding of isaac community when people had to come together to figure out how to unlock the lost it required a bunch of people working together dying in specific ways to unlock the tiniest shreds of data which they were working to piece together and then someone just demanded the answer and released it much of the disappointment of the game's creators i guess at the end of the day the nature of secrets in games may have changed but the spirit is still there plus it's not like you just dump every game online for some newer games it's not necessarily an option and for certain online games secrets can be kept server-side to keep things hidden from players and stuff i'm sure mmo's been dealing with this kind of thing for ages and there are still people making new discoveries about decades-old games to this day it's better to be alive for the internet age and be able to share these kinds of discoveries with each other even if a little bit of the mystique has been lost along the way

Channel: Cybershell

Views: 569,418

Keywords: Cybershell, Cybershell13, Banjo, Banjo-Kazooie, Kazooie, Banjo Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Tooie, Banjo Tooies, Secrets, Stop n Swop, Devil Bottles, Nintendo 64, N64, Eekum Bokum, Mumbo

Id: NJYrs2C967g

Length: 27min 10sec (1630 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020