The bear clings to the ledge, like I once clung to my sanity.
Feels like as good a time as any, right?
I struggle to motivate myself to sit down and write anything unless I can link it – however trivially – to something topical or current. But during the mind-numbing malaise of the 2021 lockdowns, I almost posted a Banjo-Tooie-themed article that had no such link. Almost. The half-written retrospective has sat in my drafts folder for years now, but since Nintendo and Microsoft at last decided to release the game on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack service last week (fittingly two years after Banjo-Kazooie hit the program, mirroring both the original release and story gaps), I have not only a bona fide excuse to replay the game yet again, but to revive, massively expand, and publish that very draft.
Here we go then.
It’s been over five years since Banjo and Kazooie were announced as a joint DLC character for Super Smash Bros Ultimate and their trilogy of corresponding games on Xbox received a slew of 4K-enhanced patches. It’s been five days since the game hit NSO. Now, after I revisited Donkey Kong 64 with a critical eye in 2015 and played all of Conker’s Bad Fur Day in one day in 2018, I present to you the next entry in the library of opinionated late-90s Rareware platformer coverage on this site: my unsolicited, recently-refreshed musings on the slightly divisive sequel to the star-making, Jiggy-collecting Banjo-Kazooie.
Just… so 4K.
Screenshots from both the Switch and Xbox versions will appear throughout this article; can you tell which is which? There are literally no prizes for guessing correctly!
A decade ago not only was home console gaming supposedly dying, but it was an even greater certainty that the dedicated portable had been nailed to the wall by the smartphone and all its wonderfully innovative promises. And for good reason: I distinctly remember even the 2010-model iPod Touch making such industry shockwaves with its impossibly high-res screen and array of imaginative games that I could feel them in my hands over the next couple of years. From the simple tactical goodness of the original Plants vs Zombies, to the innovation incarnate within Flight Control, to the addictive simplicity of Jetpack Joyride, to the delirious roguelike highs of the impossibly pretty Infinity Blade; it felt like a genuinely viable new gaming device with a serious future backing up all the well-documented speculation.
But while mobile gaming has certainly made a gigantic pile of money for a select few developers and publishing companies, it’s probably fair to say that for markets outside the free-to-play sphere, it ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. The smartphone did not quite kill the handheld console, but it did leave it on decidedly shaky ground for years; the PS Vita’s awfully misguided 2012 launch didn’t help matters and the 3DS took at least a year to recover from its own initial mistakes. Then half a decade later the Nintendo Switch came along and, well, I’m not going over that story again. The point is the hybrid console was so successful that it has inspired all manner of portable pseudo-competitors: we now live in a world where I can play just about any current-gen game from any of the major videogame ecosystems, on a screen that fits in my lap, with actual buttons and everything. And that was a truly insane thought just a few years ago.
Let’s dive into just how the scene is shaking out for portable enthusiasts in 2024, through the lens of three devices I’ve been using.
In the Green Corner…
AyaNeo Air Pro
Just one of the many, many products of the explosion in popularity of handheld PCs this decade – spearheaded by the amazing Steam Deck – the AyaNeo Air Pro is not the Chinese pocket PC company’s most powerful SKU: in fact, in the 14-15 months since I bought the machine, it has already been superseded within its own niche – twice. What the Air Pro does have going for it, however, is that it’s tiny – as in, narrower than a Switch Lite, though it is much thicker – and yet still leaves Nintendo’s console for dead in terms of processing power. It also boasts a gorgeous 5.5-inch OLED panel at an overkill-worthy 1080p resolution, a comfortable shell design, and hall-effect thumbsticks that physically cannot develop drift problems.
2020 began with the promise that the next generation of mainstream videogame consoles (and by extension PC hardware) would at long last grace our homes by its end. At multiple points throughout this year, such a promise seemed about as far from reality as conceivably possible. The stop-start hype cycle, packed as it was with guesswork and noise, was nothing short of exhausting. Yet here we are. Despite two distinctly bitter flavours of worldwide preorder drama, the PS5 and the dual-threat Xbox Series exist in real life; they are out there in the wild and after almost two weeks spent with each, I’m here to talk about how they look out of the racing blocks. Strap yourselves in – this is a big one.
Seven years ago I posted a similar article comparing the PS4 and the original Xbox One. In many ways that feels like yesterday, but going back over it in preparation for this round I was struck by just how many shiny plates were spinning on both sides of the main home console divide in 2013. Gimmicks and talking points abounded: futuristic Kinect voice commands and hand gestures running on a tile-based solid-colour Windows 8 interface versus PS Vita remote play, the abandonment of Sony’s trusty “cross media bar” and Playstation’s most radical controller shake-up ever. Both consoles felt functionally fresh and experimental. They were missing key features their predecessors had taken for granted and neither one showed any interest in backwards compatibility with older-generation games, but at least in those first few months there was a sense that each cut had made way for something tangibly new.
Which is why that launch also feels like a hundred years ago. The still-young gaming industry has continued to change in many ways since 2013, and the feverish year of marketing and punditry behind us would have you believe there’s a growing ideological gulf between Microsoft and Sony. But the dawn of the ninth home console generation has a somewhat surprising streak of quiet confidence about it. Make no mistake: The PS5 and the Xbox Series X feel like marked leaps ahead for the home console experience, and they are quite different despite clearly learning lessons from one another during the last go-around. But neither Sony nor Microsoft has come off looking quite as insecure about it this time around.
Clash of the Titans
Let’s start by talking about the elephants in the room. It’s been well-documented (love an understatement) that 2020’s new boxes are a bit on the large side, but much like the pocket-friendliness of last year’s Nintendo Switch Lite didn’t hit home until I held it, the stature and weight of the Xbox Series X and PS5 feels like little more than a meme – until you actually have to try and fit them into your entertainment setup. I distinctly remember transitioning from PS3 to PS4 painlessly because they shared identical cabling and a similar stature, but the PS5 is so gargantuan that the tape measure had to come out more than once during the multi-hour entertainment unit reshuffle it demanded.
Visually the PS5 looks like it belongs firmly in the middle of the 2000s, right next to the lightly-toned, vertically-marketed day-one model Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Despite being larger than both combined, it would’ve fit right in among that semi-space-age design trend. It marks a huge departure from the last decade of flat, straight black lines that aim to draw attention away from the consoles they adorn, arriving instead with a weighty form factor wearing a brilliant white coat, collar popped like it was made by a company that just sold 100+ million PS4s. It doesn’t care that it needs a chunky (included) stand for stability; it wants to be the first thing anyone looks at in your living room.
Vagrant Rant 