Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (Xbox 360)

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Could Banjo-Kazooie be the 360's answer to LittleBigPlanet?

While Nuts & Bolts doesn't currently allow you to share vehicles in the same way that Spore lets players share created creatures or LBP lets players share platforming levels, that situation may change.

"There's still some debate about wouldn't it be cool if I could share the vehicle even if only in the test track and not in the full game?" Mark says when we ask if you'll be able to share vehicles, not just blueprints. "There is still talk about exactly what you just said. We're still in the balancing and polishing stage of the game at the moment. There's not a 100% decision on it really."

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Sounds a bit vague to us. Let's see if we can't pin him down. Is there a possibility the finished game will allow players to share vehicles? "Yeah, possibly. If we think it's a definite worthwhile improvement on it." So there you have it.

We're delighted with what we've seen and played of Nuts & Bolts. Players looking for a modern day remake of the last Banjo game (Nuts & Bolts is set eight years after the plot of Banjo-Tooie) shouldn't be put off by the emphasis on vehicles, on driving and on flying. They will find a vast, gorgeous and in many ways very traditional platforming experience if that's what they're looking for. There is a central hub world where players will gain access to the five worlds that connect to it. Players will need to collect Jiggys and complete tasks to unlock the worlds, but you won't, in classic platform game style, have to do all the tasks to unlock the next world. "It's kind of like an upside down pyramid of options that opens in a typical Banjo sense," says Mark.

Nuts & Bolts is due out this November - we can't wait.

But playing Nuts & Bolts in this way will be like only swimming in the shallow end. There's a much deeper, and richer experience promised if players want it. And we reckon they will want it.

"We've had some interesting things internally," says Mark. "There's a sport level called World of Sport, which is like a big amphitheatre. It's a simple challenge. All it is is a ski jump. All you have to do is build a vehicle, go down the ski jump, furthest wins. They had a limit of fuel though. Certain challenges have limits of different types. So people thought about making a fuel efficient car, a car that uses more fuel but goes faster off the end of the ramp. There was one-upmanship, I'll make one with wings so I can glide a little bit further.

"One of them came completely out of the blue. Where the seat is they made a ball around the seat. There's curved body parts; they're not angular, they're actually rounded and modelled rounded, so they made a ball essentially over the front and around Banjo. That was attached to a vehicle which exited the ramp very fast, used its fuel very quickly. And there's a part called the Detacher, and that was that part that can fire body parts off, so they came off of the ramp, detached the rest of the car and ended with Banjo in a ball that just rolled and rolled and rolled and went twice as far as anything anybody had done before.

"A lot of the times we've found younger people, children, have less pre-conceived ideas about how you should do something and a lot of the creative aspects of it come from seeing how they would play. Literally get electronic Lego, if you could, put it together and see how it flies. That's the aim of what we're trying to do here."

We can't wait.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is due out exclusively for the Xbox 360 this November.

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