Games developed by Rare, Ltd.
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Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge Missions
Few corners of retro gaming feel as perilously adventurous as the ExEn project that allegedly hosted Banjo Kazooie Gruntys Revenge Missions in 2005. This imagined spin on Rare’s celebrated platformer treats the Nintendo DS as a canvas for an ambitious port using the ExEn engine, a middleware favored by hobbyists seeking to transplant console classics onto handheld screens. What emerges is less a polished official release and more a curious artifact of fan ingenuity: a compact adventure that recasts familiar landscapes as bite sized puzzles for stylus play.
Developers credited in whispers built Gruntys Revenge Missions around mission arcs rather than a single epic quest. Each stage braided exploration with quick objectives: snag a key, activate a rune, outwit a rival, or chase a glimmering Jinjo through a corridor that twists with the DS instinct for two screens. The control scheme leaned on the stylus for precision and the D pad for pacing, while button combos recalled Banjo Kazooie classics. The result felt nimble, a hybrid born of heritage and experimentation.
Level aesthetics borrowed from familiar locales yet traded polish for portability. Gruntys lair wore a mosaic of tilework and choppy polygonal silhouettes, while worlds opened with gadgetry rather than gloss. Sound tracks mimicked Rare’s whimsical cadence but translated through chiptune channels to suit the handheld medium. Boss encounters demanded pattern recognition and memory, tasks that rewarded patient exploration. In this imagined package, Grunty herself loomed as a boss with a shift in tactics, testing players on timing, route choice, and resource management.
Critics and fans often described the project as a curiosity rather than a finished product. The ExEn approach offered tantalizing possibilities while exposing limitations: frame drops during busy sequences, text that threatened readability on small screens, and collision physics that sometimes misread intent. Yet the charm endured in moments of clever problem solving and clever mission design, where handheld constraints sharpened creativity. The affair became a talking point in retro circles, a reminder that prototypes sometimes outshine their mechanical cousins in memory and meaning.
The legend of an ExEn Banjo Kazooie mission lives on in forums and preservation projects. Fans revisit the concept as a case study in design and history. While not an official release and never widely distributed, the idea shows how resourceful communities stretched a console into storytelling terrain. It remains a whisper of what could have been, urging creators to imagine more.
Wheel of Fortune Junior Edition
Wheel of Fortune, one of the most successful game shows in history, is a wildly popular television program that catapulted Vanna White to stardom as one of the most recognizable television celebrities.
For those who have never seen the show, WOF is a language game that requires both luck and skill. The object is to solve a mystery puzzle similar to a hangman's puzzle. Three contestants compete, taking turns spinning a huge wheel divided into sections containing various dollar amounts, as well as spaces such as 'BANKRUPT', 'LOSE A TURN' and 'FREE SPIN'. If a contestant achieved a dollar amount, they could guess a consonant to receive that dollar amount for each time that consonant appeared in the puzzle. If an incorrect guess was made or the wheel was spun into one of the penalty spaces, control passed to the next contestant. At any time during a player's turn, he or she may choose to spin the wheel; ask to 'buy a vowel' of his or her choice, in which case $250 is deducted from his or her score; or solve the puzzle. The player with the most winnings at the end of the program is proclaimed champion and gets to play a bonus puzzle, which he had 15 seconds to solve after guessing five consonants and a vowel to discover.
Softie, which later became GameTek, obtained an exclusive license to produce the computer version of this popular game show after securing the license from Jeopardy! The game milked the license relentlessly, releasing approximately one WOF PC game each year between 1987 and 1994. New features were added as technologies advanced, from CGA to VGA and digitized voices of Vanna White in the 1991 deluxe edition. Each new version includes more questions than the last, although, disappointingly, they border on the easy side and tend to be in a few categories (e. g. , names of people, common nouns).
Still, fans of the TV series will undoubtedly enjoy these computer versions, which are fairly faithful to the originals.
