The Banjo-Kazooie games have always been insufferably angled towards kids. Even more so than developer Rare's other titles. I can get into their Viva Pinata games, partly because under all that saccharine there's a brutally adult ecology: mortality, predators, the drive to reproduce. It's all in there. Viva Pinata is really about sex and death. Plus, it's a good sandbox/strategy game.

But the Banjo-Kazooie games have always been garden-variety platformers built with Candyland cartoony graphics and burbling with non-localized baby-talk accompanied by baby-talk-text. The baby-talk persists, although the platforming is mostly gone. The following is from Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, the latest in the series: Get Jiggies at the Jig-o-Vend for the Jiggy Bank, and free Jinjos and capture Minjos, then do Jinjo Challenges to get Jinjo Bingo Tokens for King Jingaling, and see Mumbo and Humba Wumba for bwoo-prints and the wuffy duffy hooey mabooby dooey patootie--

I'm not feeling too good. I have to go lie down. I cannot stand that stupid bear or the bird he's got in his backpack.

But first, I should point out that there's a fundamental disconnect between the way Banjo-Kazooie talks to you and the gameplay in Nuts & Bolts. This is a serious hardcore-ish physics puzzle game about building different vehicles to perform different challenges. I cannot imagine who thought this was a good combo of tone and gameplay. Anyone young enough to think a "Grunty Jiggy Game against Piddles the Cat" is cute isn't likely to appreciate the deliberately paced challenges and physics-based controls. And anyone old enough to care about the trade-off between wheel base and turning radius isn't likely to suffer all this hoo-ha about jinjos, minjos, and Humba Wumba. It's like a Legos competition - no, make that Playmobil - it's like a Playmobil competition for professional engineers.

And in this series of game diaries, I intend to stick with it to see just what the heck is up with Rare's penchant for kiddie-ness.

Tomorrow: Serious idiocy. Seriously.