We Like to Wii

To all the Rare-haters out there: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (the latest in a series that's scarcely been heard from since the Nintendo 64 days, barring a pair of Game Boy Advance spin-offs) puts the ailing developer on the road back to relevancy. Nuts & Bolts' single-player structure, addictive multiplayer, and intricate vehicle-crafting system handily show that this isn't just another generic cute-n-furry platformer.

Nuts & Bolts does an excellent job of blending minigames with a fun-to-explore world. Now, most of these challenges do have ridiculous premises (like collecting giant coconuts or saving a city from a gargantuan floating dinosaur), but their goofy nature feels right at home in the titular character's colorful world. Winning challenges awards jiggies -- the series' standard "shiny collectible object" currency -- and accruing specific numbers of jiggies unlocks more and more areas (and challenges). And while you can just access the minigames through a boring list, Rare's crafted a delightful and charming world you can't help but want to explore. Lots of little bonuses throughout -- like arcades where you can play old-school-style games reminiscent of the original Super Mario Bros. -- go a long way toward making exploration a treat rather than a tedious chore between minigames.

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