What Modern Games Can Learn From Yooka-Laylee

Banjo Kazooie was one of my favorite games as a kid okay that's not quite true growing up I was terrifying the way the level transition into that [ __ ] painting it scared the [ __ ] out of me the giant head just looking at you and there happens again are the music that plays when you're in the water and the [ __ ] shark starts chasing you it still makes me tense up thinking about it the see mine with eyes that hated you so much he would go for you and explode and die just to take a single honeycomb off your life bar gave me actual nightmares as a kid I'm not even joking banjo kazooie ruined my life tons of people remember the quiz section at the end of an Joe kazooing as being kind of unfair but really importantly tons of people remember the quiz which is more than can be said for any section of any of the old platforming collector thongs at the time do you even remember tonic trouble or bomberman hero or that shite ass earthworm jim game that came out that was 3d does anyone remember gex enter the gecko let's get it on its tail time didn't tail tang pitch tail time this tail time what its tail time I know what you're thinking it's tail time I'm gonna need an explanation for this we can't we can't go on like this this is this is madness flash forward to 2017 it's been a really long time since these games came out and almost as long as the 3d platformer was really in fashion with basically only Mario as the last man standing with this kind of gameplay outside of course of indie stuff one such piece of indie stuff is a ukulele created by platonic games composed of folks who left real where after seemingly getting sick of working under Microsoft making Kinect sport games and putting out ports of their good stuff ukulele is in a really difficult and weird place in going after a genre of game that was seemingly outgrown well over a decade ago is bringing back these mechanics and systems really enough or other ways to adapt the formula to a modern setting and make it better than it was even back in the day like Doom recently did for its originals what the [ __ ] is it tail time mean what the [ __ ] does it mean does the lizard [ __ ] rob coen lead writer of gas enter the [ __ ] gecko does the lizard [ __ ] why would you do this Robert why [Music] I had a really good time with ukulele you need to regain your hair oh god oh Jesus Christ [Music] [Laughter] the controls are incredible the basic walk feels fast enough to get you where you want to go as opposed to the originals where you would end up always using the talent rod the game's version of the Trant uses energy now but it does this because it's now even faster and controls very differently from just a standard run you have something for turning radius getting good at using it just feels good the game makes mobility itself create a good feeling in a way I haven't seen in quite a long time there's so much charm to almost every little thing there's so much variety to the character designs and their personalities in a way that completely fits the original there's a bunch of snowmen in the snow level and one of them dresses like green fields are used to and talks and rhymes their acute puns and all the names all over the place I especially like the sign who confuses you for a gardener or redecorate or every level that he's called like planker and then there's little things to like the noises laylee makes when you're doing the roll move it's beautiful it's it's just cute the stories kind of cool you can really feel the seething hatred for the time the creators spent working under Microsoft the villain is a giant corporation run by capital B do you get do you get it do do you understood the Catlett capital B's company ivory towers has built a giant sucking machine much like Microsoft and it's still ukuleles book to get it back they have to infiltrate Highbury towers to find and collect all the pages that fell out of it it's a pretty classic and simple setup but it works and I enjoy the massive jabs at corporate structure that it takes I didn't expect that when I see trouser the snake I wonder how many years they waited to make that joke like I imagine him being on the cutting room floor of conker or something and they were like one day we'll make the greatest anthropomorphic dick joke ever in the sequel if we ever get one and now 32 years later here he is kirkhope wise and Burke have done a fantastic job of blending the modern capabilities of game soundtracks with the sensibilities that made their work on the older games console so special in the first place while it never feels like it does something truly beyond what the originals could do it feels like it's doing the sort of thing the originals would have done if they'd had the chance the creator's patched out audiobook salesmen and white nationalists John trans dialogue from the game which is a shame because if there's one thing jontron is good at it's making meaningless incoherent noise into a microphone it must suck to discover that your favorite guys have been infected by communism the game is ultra faithful to the design spec of the works it's throwing back - but the thing about this faithfulness is that it means all the problems I have with the previous games all the glaring issues that are even more clear in retrospect are still present all this time later people who don't like the original games going back to them without masala or who never really got them at the time will not get ukulele either it's another one of those games good and bad however there are some things about ukulele that are really interesting in faithfully recreating a dead John er it resurrects gameplay elements that were fun or good or useful but got lost in the mists of time so I thought I'd explore some of the elements that might be worth keeping around and reincorporating back into modern design take for example the level transitions the originals needed a transition because you literally couldn't fit that much of a level in data a standard trick in game development at the time was to have the inside and outside be two separate areas entirely with a loading zone between them or put a zone between two sections of the same area when it can be justified in banjo-tooie the sequel this makes the ascend of the Isle o hags even more impressive because the developers are successfully simulating climbing a giant mountain with numerous quite small areas where modern games could just put the whole mountain there and have you climate ukulele is made in an era where you don't really need loading screens modern consoles and PCs have much more memory and processing power and using strategic loading and unloading you can have an entire seamless world with careful loading between maps without ever having to actually stop but ukulele still has these transitions this shortcut at the top of a mountain is a transition when both pieces of the game world are physically there and nothing really needs to be loaded in and out this passage leads inside the mountain into a relatively small area you could have just modeled inside the mountain and had you walk inside this design sensibility is throughout the game but the thing is this isn't just reusing antiquated solutions to problems that don't exist anymore this kind of level design still has a kind of value of its own you could have a passage inside the mouth of this cave leading all the way up to the top but then this shortcut would be significantly longer wouldn't it you would have to physically climb or walk or wait in an elevator the teleportation of sorts you get from having it just be a dark cave you walk into and come out at the top it's a really convenient time-saver something you want from a shortcut keep notes from software something this era of games always did very well was lie to you you went into a building and it was bigger on the inside was this a mistake an accident did someone [ __ ] up on the blueprints no they did it because they thought it was better that way they didn't have to be constrained by what the outside of the building looks like because you were in a different map ruled by different constraints the world of banjo kazooie was almost a literal cartoon whose shape changed as it was needed to suit the gameplay the inside of Dukes temple is a different shape and size from the outside something only manageable when both areas are bespoke and separated by a transition so even though these design elements were used to avoid limitations of the original Hardware there is a genuine noticeable advantage in these elements even when those limitations are removed the other thing these games have is purposefulness in their controls you are fully responsible for everything the character does modern game design seeks to simplify a lot of the experience of controlling a character this looks really cool doesn't it I'm holding forwards [Music] archeology [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] not support [Music] game-design you run Ezio or I'll tie here or any of the shitty and memorable characters that came afterwards towards a Ledge holding the do cool [ __ ] button and he runs and jumps and clones all over the shop this isn't game clay Assassin's Creed is almost the closest thing the collectathon has to a successor what with all the collecting you're doing but it's really unengaging because most of the work is done by altair zero for you you just point him at the thing the same is true of games like Uncharted or Tomb Raider and so on these games aren't necessarily bad but they've moved the simple fun of controlling the character to navigate challenges into the background and that's not always a good thing in old platformers every move was deliberate you have to keep yourself on a Ledge here it's easy to fall off or miss a jump and this makes landing the jump correctly satisfying the supposed simplification of the mechanics of a game has removed some of the more crunchy and interesting and satisfying elements of the actual games I honestly spent the first couple of hours of ukulele feeling flabbergasted that for the first time in ages I was pressing a button to jump and then moving to where I wanted to move using my own abilities to control the character instead of pointing them at the thing and letting them do whatever and also like when I first replayed banjo kazooie a little while ago I kept staring at the corner of the screen I wondered why but then when I was playing shady Mordy to get this footage I realized why I was looking for the mini-map to tell me where to go to do the stuff I was supposed to do I think one reason the levels in these games are more memorable literally stick out in your mind so well you could take a quiz about them is because they're built around leading you around with their design and encouraging a real sense of curiosity about them it's very rare for any aspect of the landscapes of modern games to really pop out on you existing as mostly giant empty spaces you navigate with a GPS telling you where all the interesting stuff is already making your world interesting to simply explore and look and see and find things for yourself instead of the thing you pass through on the way to the interesting stuff marked on the map is a really good idea which outside of ukelele and breath of the wild is a practice going unfortunately forgotten in many modern game genres the game itself isn't perfect even though I really enjoyed it and was full of looking past the floors the way I look to pass them back in the day it deliberately embraces many of the trappings and conventions of a genre that probably went away for a reason but it contains elements of design and execution that can still be learned from the wealth of design possibilities opened up by placing level design and convenience for the player over physical coherence the joyful freedom of a simple but nice feeling control scheme that takes skill to master properly the memorable adventure of exploring a space and scouring it to stuff by yourself without anyone telling you where anything is I think to actually look using ingenuity to find consequently forcing you without even noticing to memorize the landscape of a location until you can see it in your head when you shut your eyes well first and most importantly putting eyes on everything everything everything those are just eyes they walk around and they find stuff to possess and then it becomes their body Jesus cause even the [ __ ] logo has eyes now is everyone all right down there a plate on it do you need help can I help you perhaps the collector thongs of old can't really exist in the modern day without being altered so much they don't really resemble themselves anymore but within that old style there lies all kinds of useful little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of gaming that are worth keeping around ukuleles choices are just another page in the book of game design ha 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Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 550,248

Rating: 4.6158242 out of 5

Keywords: hbomb, hbomberguy, yooka laylee

Id: P2mGHeCAJOs

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ChipOTron]

This is a really terrific analysis once it actually starts, but he doesn't start talking about "What Modern Games Can Learn From Yooka-Laylee" until 6 minutes in. The first half of the video is more of a review/general impressions intro, which may be a bit too long for some viewers.

That criticism aside, I really enjoyed this. He makes a lot of great points that I hadn't considered and does a good job pinning down some of the design choices that make Yooka-Laylee feel very much like an N64 game despite coming out this year.

It's also fun to hear more positive commentary on Yooka-Laylee when most YouTubers seem to dislike it. It's nice to hear different perspectives.

[u/UnlimitedJems647]

Look I'm not gonna lie but why the hell was there so much fluff? Just get to the point of the video and stop trying to be funny about it. Ugh maybe I'm just getting old but, DUDE, It gets irritating after a while

[u/megaapple]

His argument on level design and character control is good. Having levels that are memorable in such a way that you could have it at the palm of your hand, and that the controls should be in such a way that it's fun traversing around said levels.

That said, I can't say this same about his argument on transition screen. How many games outside some few 3D platformer games are going to use them?

[u/Flutterwander]

I like HBomberguy, but this was a very....padded video. I love a good, long video essay but it has to be tighter than this...

[u/Mr_Ivysaur]

Odd to see such a positive commentary about Yooka-Laylee, I was so expecting another video bashing it.

Still, I'm not sure if I should create a hype or not in that game. I really want to try whenever I have a chance, but feels that I'm gonna be disappointed. But then some videos like this one makes me think otherwise.