It's been nearly 8 years since we've seen a real Banjo Kazooie game, back on the Nintendo 64 it was one of Rare's brightest stars. Now on the Xbox 360 the sequel Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is set to release sometime in the next few months. To celebrate, Rare and 4J Studios are bringing the game that started it all to Xbox Live Arcade in all its glory.

So how does the game look 10 years later? Surprisingly very solid. While the character models and worlds are very much the same, the games HUD and text have all been upgraded to be clear as crystal. All of the games pickups, from your classic Notes to the Mumbo heads, have been given a bump in resolution as well.

Outside of that, the game looks just like it did before, except now in a higher resolution, in glorious wide screen and without the horrible Nintendo 64 Vaseline filter blurring everything up. The level textures have for the most part been left alone, perhaps bumped up a little bit, but it may just be the lack of blur clogging up the view of the game.

Everything runs along at an incredibly smooth framerate - fixing one of the main problems for the original game and N64 games in general, and the fog distance for enemies and objects has also been improved.

I was able to go through the equivalent of the trial game - Spiral Mountain and Mumbo's Mountain - and it's just as fun to play through as it was 10 years ago. The trial game is very well done, allowing you to get a maximum two Jiggys within Mumbo's Mountain. If you're smart you can get any of the Mumbo's Mountain Jiggys, including using Mumbo's Magic to turn you into an Ant to climb up the hill.

It plays just as well as it originally did. The camera controls make a very smooth transition from the original C buttons to the right analog stick, and doing Kazooie's Talon Trot requires you to hold both triggers, it all fits right at home on the Xbox 360 controller.

From watching the demo footage at the title screen, levels such as Freezeezy Peak, Gobi's Valley and Mad Monster Mansion (a level I had completely forgotten about) continue to look great in high res. I went back to my own cart version of Banjo Kazooie, and the change is just night and day.

Finally, there were rumors that Banjo Kazooie would not be touched in any way - including the Nintendo 64 logo at the beginning and the word "Nintendo" on Mumbo's Xylophone in the intro. Both of these have now been omitted, with Mumbo's Xylophone now sporting the "Microsoft Game Studios" logo. Whether the mention of other Nintendo characters in the final battle has been kept in is currently unknown.

This is more than just emulation - its a great port of a classic platform title that the kids of today missed out on. Banjo Kazooie is set to be released on November 26th 2008 for 1200 Microsoft Points - or you can get it for free with a preorder of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Its sequel Banjo Tooie will be available in early 2009.

If you would like to see video of Banjo Kazooie XBLA in action, head over to IGN.com for their video preview.

The Bear and Bird are back! Big thanks for George K. at Rare for getting permission to do this preview.