Yooka Laylee Adds an N64 Filter

I wrote about Yooka-Laylee over three years ago when the Kickstarter first came out, and have since played it a little bit since it has been released. I haven’t talked about it much because there’s not really much to say about how it realtes to the N64 besides the fact that it’s made in the same style of gameplay as Banjo and other 3D platformers. Well, now it has a N64 filter.

Also back in the day, there was a game called FreezeMe that had (or if I remember correctly they retracted it later in development) a Nintendo 64 style graphics filter. This N64 filter made the game more low res and added scanlines to give it a bit more of a 90’s feel. Well, it turns out that Yooka Laylee is now catching up as part of the kickstarter rewards for the game.

The filter adds a few tings to the rendering engine (From what I can tell at least), all of these are of course toggleable from the tonic menu so it can be removed if needed:

• Lower output frame resolution
• Reduced frame rate
• Lower colour depth
• Scanlines
• Rounded ‘TV’ corners

There has been a bit of a backlash regarding this graphical N64 filter. The Youtube video is sitting at around 50% up/downthumbbed and most of the comments are saying that its a cheap substitute for a low-poly mode, which is what people were expecting. The kickstarter goals do make it clear that it’s just a shader mode and not a full reconstruction of all of the game’s models.

Though technically correct, it would have been nice to see some models be replaced with low-poly counterparts, kinda like they did with Mr Pants in Jet Force Gemini: