Banjo-Pilot

Banjo-Pilot
Developer(s)	Rare
Publisher(s)	THQ
Platform(s)	Game Boy Advance
Release	January 11, 2005
Genre(s)	Racing
Mode(s)	Single player, 2-4 Multiplayer

Banjo-Pilot is a video game for the Game Boy Advance featuring characters from the Banjo-Kazooie series of video games. Similar to Diddy Kong Racing, players can race around various locales from the Banjo-Kazooie universe. Banjo-Pilot was developed by Rare and was published by THQ in 2005.

Characters

Playable characters for the game include:

• Banjo the bear
• Kazooie the red-crested Breegull
• Mumbo Jumbo the masked shaman
• A purple Jinjo
• Humba Wumba the Native American magician
• Gruntilda (aka 'Grunty') the witch
• Klungo, the loyal manservant of Gruntilda
• Bottles the myope mole
• Jolly Roger the frog

There were rumers about the following but they are not true!

• Tiptup the turtle
• Jiggywiggy
• Heggy

Series timeline

Precisely when in the Banjo-Kazooie timeline Banjo-Pilot takes place is subject to debate by many fans of the series. In the original Banjo-Kazooie, Gruntilda was her regular self, as she is in this game, however, the characters Humba Wumba and Jolly Roger were not featured in a game till the sequel, Banjo-Tooie. In Banjo-Tooie Gruntilda had withered away to a walking, talking skeleton due to her being stuck under a rock for two years. Another thing to note is the fact that she rhymes every sentence she speaks in BK, yet in BP, she doesnt rhyme at all.

Tracks

Tracks in the game are based on areas in the three previous Banjo-Kazooie games. A BK next to the track name indicates that it is from Banjo-Kazooie, BT indicates Banjo-Tooie, and GR indicates Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge. No text indicates that the track is specific to Banjo Pilot.

• Spiral Mountain - BK/BT/GR
• Jinxy's Dunes-BK
• Freezeezy Peak - BK
• Hailfire Peaks - BT
• Treasure Trove Cove - BK
• Clanker's River-BK
• Grunty Industries - BT/GR
• Gobi's Valley - BK
• Freezing Furnace - GR
• Mayahem Temple - BT
• Steamy Vents
• Jolly Roger's Lagoon - BT
• Witchyworld - BT
• Breegull Beach - GR
• Terrydactyland - BT
• Cauldron Keep - BT

In addition to these tracks, there are also reversed versions of the tracks.

Trivia

• Banjo-Pilot was originally going to be called Diddy Kong Pilot and feature characters from the Donkey Kong Country series of games. Due to the Microsoft buyout of Rare in 2002, the Donkey Kong license was dropped and replaced with the Banjo-Kazooie license, which is owned by Rare. Ironically, the character of Banjo originally appeared in the Nintendo 64 racing game Diddy Kong Racing, of which Diddy Kong Pilot was going to be a pseudo-sequel to.
• At one point early in development, Banjo-Pilot was going to be titled Banjo-Kazoomie, to keep the tradition of bad puns in the title - Banjo-Tooie is a pun on the number "two". THQ's marketing department probably would have squashed this potential title early on due to fear of people not getting the joke. (A surprisingly large amount of people still ask Rare who the "Tooie" character is in Banjo-Tooie.)
• When Banjo-Pilot was still Diddy Kong Pilot, it was going to feature a tilt sensor similar to the Game Boy Color game Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble. This feature was also dropped - Rare's official reason is that trying to play the game on the original, non-backlit Game Boy Advance was incredibly difficult, due to the player's loss of natural light as they tilted their system around. Another possible reason is that it was dropped due to the cost of the more expensive manufacture price of tilt-sensitive cartridges. The type of sensor that was going to be used in Diddy Kong Pilot has not been used since Tilt 'n' Tumble. Games that use a tilt sensor now, such as WarioWare: Twisted!, use a simplified version of the sensor, that only allows for left and right movement. It does not detect up and down movement of the system.
• Rareware experimented with an impressive Mode 7 Voxel Engine for a short duration during the change from Diddy Kong Pilot to Banjo Pilot. The hardware-pressurising graphics engine rendered realistic but slightly jagged 3D environments by analysing the level's height-map and extruding the now-flat Mode-7 terrain upwards, creating the illusion of valleys, etc. It was an incredible feat of game engineering, considering the power of the Gameboy Advance. However, after releasing a batch of screenshots featuring the engine, Rareware decided to revert to the previous flat landscapes, as once they had added the various level elements, the frame rate took a considerable nose-dive.