10 Video Games That Owned Themselves

What's more fun than completing a jigsaw, than completing a jigsaw that forces you to find all the pieces on a beach, desert and even a haunted house first? For fans of the N64's bird-and-bear 3D platformer Banjo-Kazooie, the answer was nowt, with the possible exception of completing a jigsaw with googly eyes.

Unfortunately for them, developers Rare decided to completely shake up the puzzle for their first Xbox Banjo game, following Microsoft snatching the underfunded software darlings from Nintendo in 2002. Though originally planned as a remake or direct sequel, by this point designer Greg Myles was utterly shagged out from making collectathon after collectathon, the most recent being the tepidly received Starfox Adventures, and decided to go in a new direction.

The outcome was a peculiar build-your-own-car/platformer hybrid, half Lego, half the abysmal Gummi Ship sections from Kingdom Hearts. However, the game begins by breaking the hearts of item enthusiasts, sharpening their box-ticking pencils, everywhere. A rotund Banjo, having let himself go through years of inactivity, is forced to whip himself into shape by floating Pong spirit the Lord of Games (don't ask), by "collecting as many pointless things as possible." The world is then filled with thousands of spinny gold trinkets, but before the flabby fuzzster can even take a step, the LoG declares it tedious.

It's somewhat ironic then, that years later, Playtonic, a team made up of many former Banjo staffers, released Yooka-Laylee - a collectathon de force. It also, unsurprisingly, if unfairly, was criticised for being the oldest of hats.