The "hub world" in Nuts & Bolts is called Showdown Town. I don't particularly care for it, since it's bustling with cutesy creatures trapped in their own uncanny valley between Animal Crossing and something Tim Burton would produce. It doesn't help that I have to drive around Showdown Town in what it essentially a shopping cart. On the off-worlds, I can drive awesome tanks and gyrocopters and jetbikes and hover-transports, all of which I've built myself. But here in Showdown Town, it's always back to the stupid shopping cart with its lawnmower motor and jinky handling.

However, Showdown Town is full of little gated sections. You have to hit various milestones in the game to unlock new areas. Showdown Town is a busy place, densely packed but carefully laid out to tease you with what you can't yet reach. And reaching new areas is usually a matter of beating one of the boss battles. Usually. But then there's uptown.

After the jump read about how I finally became an uptown bear.

I don't think I'm supposed to be here yet. For a moment, I'm afraid I've broken Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts. I drove my shopping cart though a secret tunnel into an enclosed area smack dab in the middle of uptown, where I discovered open doors to a new never-before-seen world. The doors were within spitting distance, but on the other side of a gate closing me in. I had to get to those open doors!

At first, I tried parking my shopping cart against the gate and jumping onto it. That was close. But not close enough. My stupid bear didn't quite have enough oomph to clear the gate. So I grabbed some crates and stacked them into the cart. I then carefully drove into the enclosed area, which involved some fussy back-and-forth to drain a flooded tunnel. With the crate in the bed of the cart, I had enough extra height to jump the fence.

And now here I am. I can't imagine this is how I'm supposed to get here. Now that I'm here, I've activated the warp gate. I also found a drawbridge that I knocked down so I can drive up here whenever I want. The most convenient route is still blocked off by a latticework of pink security lasers. Fat lot of good they do at keeping the riff-raff out.

I suspect I'll unlock the laser gate shortly, which will probably be the point that Nuts & Bolts actually wants me to get here. But until then, I'm having a great time being somewhere that it feels like I'm not supposed to be. That's actually a lot of the appeal of this game: the feeling that I'm subverting it.

Tomorrow: More hardcore subversion! I laugh in the face of an aggravating jumping challenge!