Rare's George Kelion's confirmed that "fresh" Banjo stuff will be shown behind closed doors at Games Convention.
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Speaking to VideoGamer.com at the Develop conference in Brighton last week, Nick Burton, a senior software engineer at Rare, has assured Xbox 360 gamers that there's plenty more to come from the console.

"You never can push them as far as they can go. The reality of the peak performance of the console is yes, you could look to a generation beyond where we are now and think, yeah, I could use that power. But the reality is in 360 and the PS3 and the latest generation PC graphics, the amount of power in the GPUs is such that you're more bound by your creativity and the aesthetic you're going for than you're really bound by polygon pushing power," said Burton. "You're probably actually more bound maybe by art authoring and the amount of data throughput that, just the amount of memory you'd need, but I don't think 360 has reached its limit."
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Speaking to VideoGamer.com at the Develop conference in Brighton last week, Nick Burton, a senior software engineer at Rare, revealed that currently announced Rare titles only account for half the development studio.

Asked directly if Rare would be making a second Kameo title Burton replied: "This is where I have to be enigmatically vague. Never say never. I'll say that I'm not working on one at the moment. I'm not working on one at the moment. Doesn't mean nobody else is, but that doesn't mean they are either. Sorry. For the obvious PR reasons we can't talk about what we're doing now."

He went on to suggest that there's plenty going on behind closed doors at Rare that should have gamers getting very excited.

"All I can say is, you know about VP2 (Viva Piñata Trouble in Paradise), Viva Piñata on DS, Banjo obviously. There's a couple of things on the roster that are going to be pretty cool as well. Obviously you do the math. Look at the size and how big the Banjo team currently needs to be, how big our shared technology group and asset group are. Look at the number of games and how they're staggered and how many teams we have. There's about half the studio missing from the release schedule at the moment (laughs)," said Burton.
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Very sad news from Redmond, Wash. Melissa Batten, 36, a software development engineer in Microsoft's Xbox division, was murdered by her estranged husband, who then shot himself to death, earlier this week.
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Videogamer writes: "But only if Rare deems it a 'definite worthwhile improvement'.

There is a "possibility" that players will be able to share complete vehicles in upcoming Xbox 360 exclusive platformer Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, developer Rare has revealed.

As the title suggests, Nuts & Bolts, Rare's follow up to the N64's Banjo-Tooie, features vehicle creation using parts discovered by players during exploration of the game world.

Currently players will only be able to share vehicle blueprints with players, both friends and strangers. These blueprints tell players what parts are needed to construct a particular vehicle. They do not provide them."
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The future of user-gen includes some noteworthy players, not the least of which is developer Media Molecule and LittleBigPlanet, which has become a hype machine for the PS3. But this piece of work looks like it just might live up to the hype. Already people have witnessed the flexibility of the level-creation system (At E3, Sony used LittleBigPlanet to great effect to present what would've been a boring slog through sales figures), and the community aspects attached to this title are just as promising.

But there is another user-gen game, one that people didn't know was user-gen-centric until a few months ago: the Rare-developed Xbox 360 title, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, a game whose hook is allowing users to create and share vehicles to traverse virtual landscapes. Is this Microsoft's mass market, user-gen answer to LittleBigPlanet?
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"The highly anticipated return of Banjo to the Xbox 360 is drawing ever closer and the boys (and girls) over at Rare have decided to let us in on some juicy development information regarding Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. In the first of many dev diaries, Rare explains that the Banjo team is squarely focused on the single player campaign, with multiplayer nearly complete."
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Rare just told VG247 that rumour of Banjo motion control is completely incorrect.
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Microsoft has sent along a brief statement allegedly clarifying what Microsoft Game Studios creative director Ken Lobb meant when he said, "you twist the controller around and it'll move different things in [Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts]." The explanation goes a lil' something like this:

"There is no truth to this speculation. Ken's comment is in reference to rotating the left analog stick while hitting the X-button to move different things in the game."

While the statement seems to confirm that Banjo-Kazooie will stick to conventional controls, it by no means denies that Microsoft is preparing a magic show for E3. Will the wand be waved? Stay tuned.
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Kombo writes: Gamerscore Blog's Chris Paladino who, along with having the coolest last name ever, is a trustworthy source.

"All of the motion controller hopes and complaints regarding the Banjo video on IGN are false," he said. So long, rumor.
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