Rare's Mark Betteridge

The team's solution to both of those challenges lies in the game's newfound focus on vehicles. By allowing players to build their own vehicles and use them to complete the bulk of the challenges in the game, the new Banjo Kazooie should hopefully give people a limitless number of ways to enjoy the game - while the advanced physics required to make all those vehicles work properly is definitely something that couldn't have been done in the last generation of hardware. But won't it change the game so fundamentally that it isn't really a Banjo-Kazooie game any more, we ask?

Mark's response is adamant. "It's still a Banjo game - you've still got the Banjo character, with Kazooie, still very much the same humour. What we've done though is that if you think about it in simple terms, Kazooie's moves in the previous games used to allow you access to different areas. Here, you collect parts in a platforming way, in the hub world, and then assemble those parts into functioning vehicles."

He pauses for a second. "It's a bit like electronic LEGO," he says. "That's not really a phrase that we use a lot, but you can think of it in those terms."

The structure of the game, and how you progress, will remain familiar to anyone who has played a Banjo-Kazooie game (or indeed any decent platform game since Mario 64). As before, you move between various worlds taking on a variety of challenges in order to earn money (called Jiggys in the game) and new abilities, in this case thanks to discovering new vehicle parts.

"You'll speak to a character and he'll give you a challenge - you do X, Y, Z, and you'll get a Jiggy for doing that," Mark confirms. "That could be scoring a certain number of goals in something like a football game. There's a challenge where you manoeuvre through hoops in a certain amount of time. Some of them are collecting or transporting objects, or typical platform-type challenges. Because you're able to construct a vehicle, it's really down to the player how they approach that challenge."

That's how Rare hopes to keep players hooked. There'll always be the possibility that a slightly tweaked vehicle design - or even a radically different approach - could give you a vastly better time in a challenge you've done previously. Hitting the top of the Xbox Live leaderboards won't just be about superb skills, it'll also be about really clever design - and the occasional stroke of genius. The Rare team reckons that while conventional vehicles will get you decent scores in the challenges, people who really think outside the box who will discover ways to shave massive chunks off the top times.

"Some players will spend many hours fine-tuning their vehicles - or making things that you wouldn't even consider vehicles," Mark predicts. "When we gave the game to testing, they really opened it up! A significant part of the game is the community aspect, the ability to trade blueprints and see what else other people have built. Within a few hours, our testers had built things as diverse as a space shuttle that actually took off vertically, someone else made an aircraft carrier... Someone else made a Godzilla, complete with breathing fire and laser eyes! They all actually worked, as vehicles."

"When you think of vehicles, there's a tendency for people to think of a plane, a boat, a car or something of that type," he says. "There are many, many different aspects to this, though, and once we've had this game on the market for a while, I think we'll be all stunned by the variety in what the community comes up with."