20 Beloved Video Games That Have Aged Terribly

19. Banjo-Kazooie

Banjo-Kazooie is a beloved collectathon platformer by the legendary studio Rare that defined the 1998 era of video games.

The game’s charming visual style and exploration-focused gameplay inspired many “clones” of Banjo-Kazooie, like Ty the Tasmanian Tiger or A Hat in Time in recent years, that followed its formula to a tee.

But while this may speak volumes about the quality of the first Banjo-Kazooie game at the time of its release, it unfortunately doesn’t mean that the game holds up.

For starters, Banjo-Kazooie suffers from the same camera issue as many other N64 titles. The camera movement is slow and janky, making the once fluid-looking motions of the characters appear slow, grinding the pace of the game to a halt and casting light on another issue that emerged with Banjo’s age—the shallow gameplay.

By today’s standards the challenges in Banjo-Kazooie are just too simplistic. Most of the game consists of just moving around and fighting the camera to find your next objective.

The game also appears to have a lot of different movesets, but when you look at them from the modern perspective, most just appear to be stylistically different versions of the same few running and jumping actions.

The game still holds up stylistically, but behind the appealing cartoony graphics, there’s barely any substance by today’s standards.