"HA, HA, HAAAA. Finally I am free!" The words of Bottles' evil spirit when we hacked Bottles Revenge mode earlier today in Banjo Tooie. I wasn't planning on touching Banjo today because I had to write some code for another website but I decided to take a break and crank it up for half an hour and hack out a cutscene modifier. After a few fruitless attempts I started toying around with trying to find Bottle Revenge, which I had often done in the past when another code I was looking for failed. Fiddling a few values here and there I went into Spiral Mountain and a cutscene awaited me. The camera focused on Angel Bottles.

Angel Bottles: "Ha, ha, haaaa. Finally I am free."
Banjo: "Gulp!"
Kazooie: "Free from where?"
Angel Bottes: "From dead boy down there. I am Bottles' evil spirit."
Banjo: "You don't look very evil."
Kazooie: "You look like a nice ghost."



Angel Bottles then disappears and Devil Bottles appears in his place. He then goes on to explain the Bottles Revenge game just as our Rare Witch Video showed, telling us that player 2 can hinder player 1's game by pressing R when a baddy that Bottles can possess is in range.

After the cutscene Bottles just hovers near near you wherever you go. The first thing I spotted was the radar at the bottom right of the screen. This shows you the position of the controllable baddies although it's not something that you really need. When you are in close proximity to a baddy that he can control he floats off and rests above that baddy. Now although Bottles told player 2 to look out for sparklies so he can press R and take control of the baddy, we found that the baddy is immediately under the control of player 2. You can use the attacks that the baddy has such as ground smashes for the little green uggers on Spiral Mountain, you can evil control the statues that spit darts in Mayahem Temple. You use the analogue stick to spin it and B to fire a dart. I had a wander around the levels seeing what you could and couldn't control and it seems you can pretty much control any baddy. A good one was the slot machines in Witch World.



Controlled by player 2, the baddies have a much wider roaming space so that player 2 can fully take advantage. I honestly didn't think you would be able to control the pterodactyls and didn't hold much hope but Bottles wandered off and took his position above the flying baddy. You do not get much control of him, just circling around and then B to perform a dive attack. The sledge-hammer weilding baddies in Witchyworld were also fun to control, pressing B to slam the hell out of Banjo. The hicks in Glitter Gulch Mine were a bit different, you could use B to do your attack or press A to make him go back underground so only his hat is visible. Pointless really, because there is no stealth as Bottles still floats above the baddy. You can even take the baddies into the water and still be in full control, although if you stray too far away from the action the baddy vanishes and Bottles returns to you looking for the next baddy to possess. One thing that suprised me was the fact that you can actually control the opponents in the dodgem mini games and no doubt countless others.



A big disappointment was not being able to control boss characters. Bottles tells you he is not needed here and then disappears. Perhaps Rare didn't get the chance to implement the bosses or maybe it would've been too much of a job to let the player control the complex boss actions. Either way, this feature is fully functional and it's a mystery why Rare didn't include it in the final build. Who knows, perhaps they did and there is still a way to unlock it. I tried saving with the mode enabled and then see if it was available in that save slot when you select it, but alas it doesn't save. That said, I did try saving with an empty slot, perhaps it needs everything unlocked to save. Further investigation should prove or disprove that.

So there you have it, another question answered by us. Bottles Revenge is physically still in the game. We hinted at this previously when the BK base egg was removed in the PAL version during a clean up but the Devil Bottles model still remained. Now the question is can it be unlocked without the aid of hacking devices. Only time will tell.



It's finally time for everyone to dust off their Nintendo 64, call their friend over and fire up Banjo Tooie. Today we are releasing the Action Replay/Gameshark codes for our recent, most exciting discovery, Bottles' Revenge. We've made sure nobody is left out in this historic event as our codes are available for four regions.



Action Replay/Gameshark Codes
All codes by Ice Mario and SubDrag.

PAL UK
80130402 0001
8008B4D1 0002

PAL AUS
80130172 0001
8008B4D1 0002

NTSC JAP
801255C2 0001
80080881 0002

NTSC US
8012B3F2 0001
800810C1 0002