Sales data released by the NPD Group today reveals that the games' experience on store shelves couldn't have been more diffierent. Fable II was a surprising success, by January 1 selling a respectable 1.2 million copies in the US. Not too shabby.

But Banjo? Seems Rare's stab at innovation by introducing customisable vehicles to the game was a flop with consumers, as the game had only sold a meagre 140,000 copies by new year's day. Eek.

NPD: Fable II hits 1.2 in US, MGS4 goes platinum [GameSpot]

I'm sorry that we weren't able to address this issue as nothing would please us more than turning all your complaints into gleeful responses, but it's simply something that's too expensive in terms of time, resources and money to alter.

Wouldn't have been so expensive if someone had thought to check earlier in development, and...oh, that's not helping, is it.

Rare: No fix for Banjo SD TV issue [CVG]

Build awe-inspiring vehicles and tackle the Jiggy challenges in any way you see fit! Show your creations off over Xbox LIVE.

See? All kinds of vehicle building and challenge taking on to be had by all, two weeks in advance of the game's release. Enjoy!

Demo: Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts [Xbox Live's Major Nelson]

Rare's being especially bullish about online — creating a team dedicated to multiplayer — and about the game's creation aspects. In the age of LittleBigPlanet, competition is stiff, but Rare's confident in all the various vehicles players can make in Nuts and Bolts. When asked if there's the possibility for one proverbial user-created vehicle that could break the game, Betteridge replied: "I hope not. We are confident that we built a substantial world... No, it won't crash."

It has been ten years and two console generations since the team of Banjo and Kazooie stormed the Nintendo 64 to rave reviews and not much has changed, at least not much for platformers, or so say Rare.

"We felt the platform genre hasn't really evolved much," said one of the developers showing off Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts to the press yesterday. "Up until recently things really haven't evolved much."

The team decided they wanted to tweak the formula, adding "fun physics" to the franchise and making it more about vehicles than traditional platforming. The change seems to be turning the franchise into what appears to be a sort of platformer on wheels that is centered more around challenges than a linear storyline.

I say appears to be because we were only shown a small part of one level of one of the game's five worlds. In it Banjo and Kazooie have to complete a short challenge for one of the game's characters. The challenge can be completed on foot, but it's not really meant to be. To complete it quickly you have to use a vehicle. It's the customization of these vehicles that seem to be the heart of the game.

Customizing a vehicle is a relatively quick. You can either build or customize vehicles in the garage, by selecting components and slapping them onto one another.

After the relatively short demo of the single player game, we were walked over to a group of 360s to try our hand at a Sumo match of multiplayer. In this particular mode the object is to keep your vehicle on a raised platform longer than everyone else.

My first try at the mode was done in a pre-fab vehicle that I added a few things to, like an egg machine gun, steel-gloved ram and bigger engines.

After quickly losing the match, I tried my hand at creating a vehicle from scratch. First I grabbed a bunch of body parts, essentially hunks of variously shaped steel and slapped them down next to one another to form a rectangle. Next I selected four Monster Truck wheels and quickly attached them to the body. Then I picked two jet engines which I placed on the top of the rectangle and then filled the gap between the metal squares with gas tanks, to hold plenty of fuel. To wrap the thing up I added bumpers to the front, which spring things away when they make contact with a wall or vehicle.

After creating this vehicle, which took less than five minutes, I took it for a quick test drive to see how well it worked. Which it didn't, but that's not the point. The point is that creating these vehicles, with the myriad of options was a lot of fun. You can add weapons, bat-like wings that pop-out of the sides of a vehicle at the touch of a button, gadgets, just about anything you want.

While vehicle creation is a ton of fun, it was hard to tell, without really seeing multiplayer and not knowing how single player is going to play out, if this game will be a hit with gamers, let alone Banjo Kazooie fans. Early impressions leave a lot to be desired and more than one person who saw the game asked the developers on hand if these single player challenges and vehicle creation was all there was to the game.

The reply: "Creating vehicles to complete the challenges is the crux of the game."

Mayles also is anxious about how Banjo loyalists might receive this overhauled installment, hoping that those surprised by the new flavor will give it a chance. All in all, Mayles says the Rare team is hoping the third installment will act as something of a franchise reboot:

We've kind of taken a step back from that and tried to make it a simpler, cleaner approach, obviously with this new mechanic in place. I guess we're all hoping for a clean start, that's what I think it'll do. It's kind of, 'There's your old Banjo games, let's put those in the past, you can remember how good those were, this is Banjo for the future'.

Mayles also suggests that comparisons to Super Mario Galaxy will be unavoidable:

And what do you think of Mario Galaxy?

Mayles: Very good.

That's it?

Mayles: I'm still playing it in my spare time. I thought it was an exceedingly polished, traditional platforming game, and frankly quite difficult to beat. If you were going to go along the similar lines, going for a very traditional, fixed-abilities, fixed-task kind of thing, I think it certainly would have been a massive challenge to try and go one up on that.

I think we're trying to approach it in a different direction. Obviously we will be compared to Galaxy, we can't get around that, but I'd like to think we offer something a bit different to Mario Galaxy and hopefully stand alongside it but for a different reason in terms of a different way of approaching things.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts Q&A [CVG]

In the late 90s Rare established themselves as a top-tier studio, producing such classics as GoldenEye and Donkey Kong Country for Nintendo. But in 2002, Microsoft bought up the company and prepared to have the studio start work on some of the marquee titles for their upcoming Xbox 360.

I told Kim that back before the Xbox 360 launched I had heard that Rare's Perfect Dark Zero was meant to be the platform's launch title, the reason gamers would take notice of the 360 and decide to buy into the new platform.

When the game finally hit, with the launch of the 360 and Rare's other title Kameo, it was met with a mixed reception, certainly not the sort that Microsoft had bet on.

Is Rare, I asked Kim, a developer that better suited to the audience and platforms of Nintendo gaming?

The short answer, Kim said, is no. But he did acknowledge that Rare hasn't yet met it's full potential on the Xbox 360. Neither Perfect Dark Zero or Kameo were the massive hits that Microsoft expects and Viva Pinata, he said, was a game that attracted a casual audience but was much deeper than that sort of gamer expected or was interested in playing.

But Rare's upcoming titles could turn that around. Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, for instance, hopes to fix that disconnect between the audience it attracted and its accessibility by adding online and local co-op and tweaking gameplay.

And while Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts isn't a true sequel to the franchise, its concept, a vehicle platformer, was entirely the idea of Rare and its developers.

Hopefully today will give me a chance to see if Rare has been able to turn it around and get back to making games like Goldeneye rather than Grabbed By The Ghoulies.

A poster, who appears to be from Danish gaming site GameReactor writes that vehicle creation is similar to building with LEGO blocks, that players can edit their creations at any point. The poster explains how a truck creation was incapable of delivering the required amount of coconuts to finish a level, but that a helicopter more suited to coconut carrying was. In other words, if coconut schlepping is your thing, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts will fit the bill.

New games at MS Gamer's Day: Banjo 3 and Vina Pinata 2 pics leaked [NeoGAF]