
Ever wondered what a mash-up of Banjo-Kazooie and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker might look like? Yes, no, maybe? Well, this mod – The Legend of Banjo-Kazooie: The Bear Waker – by Mark Kurko shows us a location from Wind Waker inside Banjo's game.
The demo (see the video below) takes place on Outset Island – the starting location in Wind Waker – and is the only level currently planned for the final release. The task is a familiar one – collect musical notes, save Jinjos and find Jiggy pieces.

As you unlock more Jiggies, you'll gain access to more of the island. Having all of Banjo's moves from the start makes this task a lot easier. Interestingly, the background music is a 64-bit rendition of the main theme song on Outset Island.
This mod even works on original Nintendo 64 hardware. N64 Today tested it out on the classic system and said the only noticeable drawback was the frame rate – which tends to suffer in the large, open area of Outset Island.
The Bear Waker is a single level Custom Mod that will include 10 Jiggies, 100 Notes, 2 Extra Honeycombs and a Mumbo transformation. It will include a Main Area (Outset Island) and 9 Sub-Areas (The island houses, The Forest of Fairies and some caves).

Special thanks to Nintendo Life contributor, Martin Watts.
What do you think of this crossover? Does it make you want to play Wind Waker or Banjo? Tell us below.
[source n64today.com]
Comments 21
I wish that Banjo & Kazooie were more Wind Maker cel-shaded style.
Next thing you'll know, they will make Banjo-Kazooie play Super Mario 64 Levels.
Otherwise, this looks like a pretty cool Banjo-Kazooie mod.
I wasn't expecting Outset Island to hold so many explorable areas enough to make a "complete" Banjo Kazooie level, but the video proves me wrong
And it looks very well polished on top of that
Loving the stack of N64 Magazines. Looks like my bedroom 20 years ago
The game that nobody asked for has finally arrived!
I would like to see banjo/super mario coming together. The evil with returned. She made a whole to the other universe and mario team is also in danger. She cursed them and turned into stones. Mario and Banjo/kazooie have to work together. Mix both mario/banjo-kaz together levels and voila amazing game
Is that the Wind Fish egg I see on the horizon?
Very cool.
Your screenshots are abysmal. Just take screen grabs of the YouTube footage or something if you can't do better than that. It's not that hard:
See.
@impurekind The screenshots are from running on actual hardware (or at least the resolution). This is how it will look on a N64.
How do we get hold of this when it releases?
As cool as this is, I much prefer rom hacks that use original levels, like Super Mario 64: Star Road, which replaces every level, rather than just one. Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie could use more rom hacks like that.
@HumanDog Just no. It's more like how it would look running on an N64 if output on a modern HDTV without any hardware modifications to actually make it display properly on said TV or something like that--as in just wrong. I'm going to assert that running this game on a proper CRT SDTV as intended with the correct/best cables will look an order of magnitude better than your screenshots. And I say this because [matter of fact] N64 games never ever looked anywhere even remotely close to that bad on my SDTV. The screenshot I posted is actually closer to how N64 games looked when played on my SDTV than what we see in your images--and I've done direct tests of this not that long ago with various SD games running on my SDTV to check with my own eyes, comparing them to your average YouTube video of supposed "representative" direct feed footage and can 100% confirm that screenshots like the ones you have above are sooo far worse than what I am seeing on my actual TV in reality. Now, I'm from the UK and my consoles are connected up with likes of SCART cables to my SDTVs, so maybe that's a factor--but your screenshots just look utterly terrible.
@impurekind this is similar to how it would look on a modded N64 with UltraHDMI, which is the best quality (that is pixel clarity, not blurred). You might prefer the blurred look of analog output though, I had the same with VGA vs SCART on the Dreamcast. Games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 would look ugly on VGA because of the pixelated characters. It looks smooth on SCART(I'm also from Europe)
Nobody? Fine. Allow me.
"Guh-hyaaaaaaaaaaat!"
@JayJ untrue! This is what I dream about!
@HumanDog Well this is not a pixel-art game, and almost every single N64 game was made with the console's anti-aliasing in mind (and indeed used it), so I'd personally say it shouldn't be made to look pixelated or with "pixel clarity" if that that's what's happening here. If that's how the game looks on whatever display/setting then anyone playing it like that is not experiencing this game even remotely close to how it should look. Again, it looks utterly terrible in those images; there is nothing "quality" about how it looks in those images. Looking at it in the video however, which I presume must be running through an emulator or something, well that actually looks good. So, if it's a choice between what it looks like in the screenshots and what it looks like in the video, please God, everyone involved, play it the way you'd have to in order to get it to look as close as possible to how it does in the video--because those screenshots make it look like an abomination.
I mean, let me try to show people the best I can do to give an example of how N64 games are actually supposed to look imo, via photos taken directly from the screen of an N64 game running on a CRT SDTV:
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/pdf/mario64n64.pdf
Now, compare those screen grabs in the magazine to the video and other than the polygon edges on diagonals looking a bit more jaggy they look very, very similar.
And THAT is representative of how those games actually looked when played on my N64 and displayed on my 32" CRT SDTV, and indeed how they should look imo. And, to be clear, zooming in on them on the monitor--because maybe you think you'd need to do that because the pics aren't being shown full screen and taking up your whole monitor so surely things would look worse on your big screen at full size--also makes them look worse than they actually ever looked in reality. I'm saying they generally looked as clean and clear on my 32" CRT SDTV at full scale as they do in the pictures in that magazine without zooming in (as in how you would see them with your own naked eyes if you were reading that printed magazine in real life without any magnification).
Compare those screen grabs in the magazine to your "representative" screenshots above and it's just not even close. They don't even look like they're coming from the same system imo. Your screens make it look like the resolution was [perceptibly] about four times lower that it actually was [perceptibly] and that the overall quality was just an order of magnitude worse--everything is a pixelated unclear mess in your images above. To me, it kinda looks like a low-res Photoshop image output at the lowest bit-rate possible and zoomed up way closer than you'd ever view it in reality or something.
Here are some 640x480 N64 images (as in SDTV resolution) that are far more representative of how N64 games did and should look imo (even when displayed on a large screen, and even though many of the games didn't even run at the full 640x480 resolution--maybe CRT SDTVs just scaled much better):
I'm telling you, there's something very wrong with your screenshots in that they're making the N64's graphics look an order or magnitude worse than they are. It's doing the N64 an injustice imo. And, again, if that's how they genuinely look on whatever screen/setting someone is playing them on now--I say go find another way to view them, and I actually "pity the fool" who maybe believes that's how bad N64 games must have looked for people playing them back in the day or whatever.
I kinda hope Nintendo puts out an N64 Mini now just to show people how "good" N64 games should look, even when output on a modern HDTV and scaled up slightly or whatever.
@impurekind crt's didn't scale better. It just looked blurrier. Try Turok 2/RageWars in low res and hi res mode, and you see the difference. The N64 was not that sharp as in your screenshots. Especially Goldeneye.
The Banjo screenshots aren't wrong, the problem is that you're viewing them on a modern screen. Display them on your CRT and they are exactly how they should look.
A N64 mini would probably use upscaling like all those Virtual Console releases had. Looks better, but far from accurate, just like the video.
The N64 picture quality was pretty bad. The texture filtering, fog effects and 3D were impressive, but the output was muddy compared to the PSX and especially the Dreamcast a few years later (even when comparing 640x480 res games)
That's pretty nice.
@HumanDog We clearly were looking at very different systems and setups or something.
Again, the images in this magazine are actual photos taken directly from an N64 game running on a CRT SDTV back in the day, basically capturing how it looked to the naked eye (albeit much smaller), and they look pretty much exactly like the screens I provide above except a bit softer (due to the way the printing was done):
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/pdf/mario64n64.pdf
That is how N64 games looked/look for me on my SDTV (although they were/are actually sharper and cleaner on my 32" screen in reality)--it's a million miles from the images in this article.
@impurekind magazines used to print screenshots and hi res art, they didn't take photos of the crt screen. Watch an actual capture of Goldeneye running on N64 hardware on youtube and you will see how blurry it actually is. Most games were running in 320x240. We made a lot of progress in the last 13 years.
@HumanDog Back in the day the way they often got screenshots for games magazines was to literally point an old camera directly at the screen and press click (dunno about N64 games though to be honest).
YouTube never shows the games the way they look in reality in my experience. I've done many side by side comparisons to test this in recent times. For example, any YouTube footage you see of Wii games tends to just look abysmal, even videos that say it's direct capture or whatever. And yet I've literally had my Wii running on my CRT TV side by side with the YouTube video on my monitor (and my TV is showing the image at like 4x the size so the YouTube video should have an advantage), and the actual game running on my old TV utterly destroys that YouTube footage. It's just not even close and not truly representative of how the games actually look on a real CRT TV.
People who are not sitting with a decent CRT TV (like the one below) and one of those consoles running on it right there in front of them really don't seem to get it.
What we see on screens now, whether it be consoles playing on modern digital HD screens or direct footage on YouTube videos or whatever, it just does not do old consoles that originally ran on CRT TVs justice at all.
We have made a lot of progress though.
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