Conker's Bad Fur Day

This is one of those "you had to be there" kind of games I think. I haven't played it since literally the year it came out. I rented the game and finished it during the period I had it. I'm withholding a rating because of this. I would be interested in playing this again some day, maybe, to see how it holds up.

Even at my age, at the time, I thought the movie "parodies" were pretty bad. They're not parodies so much as just on-the-nose references. Like, it's Saving Private Ryan but with cutesy animal characters! Ha ha? I do like the name of the "Tediz" though.

Not to say it isn't bereft of some good amusement if not outright laughter every now and then. The entire story of some king's milk spilling because of a three-legged chair and that their solution to fixing it is to capture and kill a squirrel to act as the fourth leg, I just love the absurdity of things like that more than most of the potty/shock humor, although the Great Mighty Poo is an encounter for the ages.

When I say "you had to be there," I mean, and having not played it in so long I can't verify for certain, but I'm pretty confident thinking this is the kind of game that was best appreciated the time it came out, and is more of a curio now more than anything. I remember the April edition of EGM, known for their well-hidden April Fool's pranks in the form of doctored game titles or cheat codes, had this announced and had to prefix it with "THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL'S GUYS!" because it seemed inconceivable.

For background, Conker was announced long before this game as another cute mascot platformer in Rare's line-up to go along with Banjo-Kazooie and the Kongs. They made some effort with a Game Boy Color title, Conker's Pocket Tales, and of course his appearance in Diddy Kong Racing. Then THIS came straight the fuck out of nowhere. And the fact that Nintendo themselves were bankrolling this was unheard of for the company at the time. They had made headway by allowing M-rated shooters and such on the N64 but being the active publisher of such a crass cartoon of a game was quite the leap for both Rare and Nintendo.

Another thing is what a technical marvel this was for the N64. That they were able to cram so much voice acting in the limited hardware of the N64 was an impressive feat, along with solid graphics and character animations without even requiring the RAM expansion pack used for Majora's Mask, DK64, Turok 2 and other games really showed the effort put into making this.

It also took a quite different approach to the bloated collect-a-thon that Rare was starting to build a reputation for, by making this a more compact experience. It was more about its varied, sometimes fairly challenging set pieces than anything with relative linearity compared to previous games of theirs. Some sections were better than others for certain - the racing stage in the lava level was pretty bad from what I recall, and the shooting sections had weird controls and aiming that could throw you off. It was definitely at its best during the platforming sections.

Finally there's the weirdly dark and serious tonal shift by the end of the game. Black humor is spotted all over the game but they went for outright tragedy at the final scenes. I remember feeling bewildered by this sudden turn in the game myself, with an ending meant to open itself up for a sequel that never came and never will.

In the vast ocean of games available, whether by major developers or no-name titles on gamejolt or itch.io having further pushed the boundaries of taste, whether said games are any good or not being irrelevant, makes this game seem perhaps unremarkable in this regard. When the game was remade for the Xbox it was met with little fanfare. A lot of its novelty had been lost even then. The overhauled graphics looked nicer, yes, but it was the Xbox, of course it could make it look better. All those combined factors perhaps was the double-tap to ensure that any notion of a sequel was dead (funny thing to note was that the Xbox remake was apparently MORE censored than the Nintendo version - in what ways I'm not sure, I think extra swear words were bleeped out that weren't originally?)

I'm sure today it is a game that retains some charm with fun moments but all the things that gave it such a strong presence and notoriety at the time of its release has been diluted heavily by time and the way games have evolved. The game sold poorly and so not many copies were made so getting an N64 cart of this will set you back some (if you have an Xbox One might as well just get Rare Replay which has this game and a butt-ton of other Rare titles on one disc, from Jetpac all the way up to their lesser received 360 games). Rare found this blue-moon opportunity to make a bizarre one-off title and they got their chance with this. I don't know if I'll ever play this game again or not, but I will say I'm glad I got to play the game in its entirety at the time that I did so.

CLASSIC

Before guns at my school were glamorized by countless run and shoot videogames and Drill songs (incidentally or not, inspired by the 16bit era of videogames), there was a fabled 16-bit and later 32-bit kingdom of furry magical antropomorphic animals crowding these adventures in faraway worlds.
Well, childhood passed for everyone, and games matured, yet their maturation went toward more violence (Grand Theft Auto), more bloods (Resident Evil), more weapons (Grand Theft Auto), more sex (Custer's Revenge), more drugs (yes, Grand Theft Auto), more rap (Grand Theft Auto), and ultimately more prophanity (... once again... Grand Theft F***ING Auto!). Surprisingly, things took a turn for the bitter once these filthydom was passed down by using and abusing precisely the furrydom platforming imagery.

Ahead of all of this filth, Rare, which has made half Sony Games and software houses billionaires by pioneering the dirt and slirt Banjo-Kazooie which would go on to be emulated by Playstation2's juvenile cash cows (Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank), decided to do a U-Turn against the foreseeable and poke fun at the very same virus it had created: create an intentionally sleazed gross-up British potty filth humor game to send yer mum to ragequitting while smashing her wallet for this game's purchase not even she was the Angry German Mum.
The innocuous (yet intriguing) Conker's Twelve Tales was thus kidnapped (despite being essentially completed), straightjacked, brainwashed, corrupted with rock & roll filth, a bit of Old Irish whiskey, and transformed into the ultimate parody of childhood's mascotte business, Conker's Bad Fur Day.

The game exploited the N64's structure to its full potential: colored lights, MP3 playback (considered impossible on cartridge), double-size ROM, full dialogs, interactive cutscenes, all the things that would have made a now-old console look like Unreal (and Counter-Strike) by parodying the videogame memeplex by poking fun at its own game (and clichès).
This was the last provocation against Nintendo of America's self-defeating parental policy, so no wonder that this game was loathed (and still is, apparently) but, despite its filth and s*** (literal, as the Great Mighty Poo singing proved us), this game is rooted into the healthiest of anglophone comedy and irony that is a hundred million times better than cynical gun-related violence promotion as business, as virtually ALL the videogame cash-cows in the 2000s did.

The game itself is super fun: it features unlockables mini-games that can be played by 4 players simultaneously, it features a very catchy and highly variegated soundtrack (gosh, even Acid House on "Rock Solid") that ranges from British folk to swing (played in real time by the in-game jazz combo at the main screen bar, with synced movement almost a la Plok), not to mention the hilarious chapters that mock each one of the in-vogue videogame genres (from horror to first person shooters to war games). And yes, it also poked fun at how stupid and overrated movies like the Matrix (and Alien2) were. It also contains a metas-videogame irony (the "lockup" sequence) that other games did not dare even to mention.
Curse words usage, self-censorship, fourth wall, space dimensional sound effects like reverb, catchy visuals, good voice acting, these were things that were un-imaginable in the previous century -- and that eventually poaved the way for games like Jak & Daxter (its illicit son of sorts).
It is quite sexual, but never deliberately offensive and unrespectful per sè as other games were (see: Grand Theft Auto), and that is why the uber-femenine character in the end had to die so pathetically. In doing this, it also pokes fun of the lonesome quality of oneliness players were soon to self-enclose in, something that is quite remarkable at that point.

Love it or hate it, this is one of the first, if not the very first, of comedic masterpieces of videogaming, and it brought to life your favorite shooting platformers, in spirit if not in coding.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was the perfect swansong for the N64. What better game to send off the console other than with a crass, anarchic romp that wiped its ass with the family-friendly foundation that Nintendo facilitated, and by the third-party developer that arguably made the greatest contribution in cementing its accessibility? Unsuspecting consumers assumed that Conker’s Bad Fur Day was yet another innocuous 3D platformer due to its Rareware pedigree and the fact that the game featured a furry, anthropomorphic protagonist. However, they were all flabbergasted at the game’s true colors underneath its intentionally squeaky-clean surface, even though the game box art featured an M-rating along with a disclaimer explicitly stating that this was not a game for children. All the while, Conker is holding a frothy mug of beer with his disturbingly voluptuous girlfriend Berry. Even if someone is experiencing Conker’s Bad Fur Day knowing full well that the game is intended for mature audiences, the content is still pretty shocking. Rare created a game that shifted the light-hearted tone of their smash hits Banjo Kazooie and Tooie on its head without altering the cherubic visuals, inflicting obscenities on its storybook fantasy world and the cuddly characters that reside in it. Conker’s Bad Fur Day snuck in viscera and vulgarity into the pristine 3D platformer genre like a trojan horse, and uneducated parents were mortified when they inadvertently exposed their children to it. Grand Theft Auto III, another game released in 2001 that also garnered levels of contempt from the PTA boards around the world, at least made it obvious that children shouldn’t play it. Conker’s Bad Fur Day, on the other hand, villainously duped parents with a level of deception that shattered their trust in the gaming industry, even though Nintendo did their best to warn them. All controversies aside, the provocative premise of Conker’s Bad Fur Day made it a breath of fresh air. The N64 was overflowing with so many bright, cutesy 3D platformers thanks to Super Mario 64, and the adult content of Conker’s Bad Fur Day acted as a self-effacing parody to signify that the genre had stagnated and needed to be buried alongside the console that harbored them. If Conker eviscerating the N64 logo with a chainsaw in the game’s introduction isn’t emblematic of its ethos, I don’t know how they could’ve conveyed it more overtly (okay, maybe Banjo’s severed head hung up on a plaque over the bar in the main menu). No one is going to argue against Conker’s legacy as a subversive title, but whether or not the game is up to snuff with its fellow 3D platformers mechanically is a point of contention.

Rare didn’t just whip Conker out of their ass when they sat down to devise the components of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Squirrels are certainly an appropriately adorable animal, but it’s questionable where they fit on the hierarchy of cuteness next to cats, dogs, or even other woodland critters. Conker was once a budding IP Rare introduced via making Conker a playable character in the 1997 N64 title Diddy Kong Racing. The Conker IP debuted on the Gameboy Color with Conker’s Pocket Tales, a simplistic action-adventure game marketed towards a very young demographic, as one would expect from a game featuring a cartoon squirrel. Rare were initially developing a fully-fledged console follow up on the N64 titled Twelve Tails: Conker 64, but the early reception was less-than enthusiastic. Developers were worried that kiddy Conker would wilt under the overcasting shadow of Banjo-Kazooie, for the game mirrored the inoffensive, mirthful atmosphere of the Banjo games to the point where it seemed derivative. In order to give Conker an identity of his own, Rare pulled what Hannah-Barbera did with obscure 1960’s cartoon superhero Space Ghost and reinvigorated him into the realm of maturity, albeit with crude humor as opposed to dry, off-kiltered absurdism. Immediately, Conker’s Bad Fur Day illustrates the squirrel’s transformation in the opening cutscene when he leaves his girlfriend Berri a message from a bar payphone to tell her he’s coming home late so he can buy another round with the boys. He gets sloppy drunk, ralphs on the ground, and loses himself in a drunken stupor. Whether it's a matter of lying to his girlfriend or binge drinking, Conker is clearly an adult putting himself in adult situations.

Ironically, Conker’s Bad Fur Day excels the most in the least edgy aspect found in the game, and that’s its surface level presentation. The most fortunate thing about being the last hurrah in a console’s lifespan is having the advantage of hindsight paved by the shortcomings of your predecessors who were busy finding their way through uncharted territory. In the annals of gaming history, there hasn’t been a more arduous terrain to trek through than buffing out the cracks of 3D graphics in the N64 generation. Conker’s Bad Fur Day couldn’t transcend the rudimentary snags that beset the N64, or at least to the point where the player could clearly discern every strand of fur on Conker’s body. After five years of developing early 3D games on a console that looked like blocks of airbrushed chunks of cheese, Rare flaunted their experience in developing for the N64 and made a game that proved to be the pinnacle of the system’s capabilities. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is bar none the most gorgeous N64 game from a graphical standpoint, something unexpected from a title that brandishes such vulgar content. The graphics here don’t look too unfamiliar to the typical N64 aesthetic, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day pushes itself beyond its contemporaries through an elevated scope. I’ve always claimed that early 3D games that adopted a more fantastical, cartoonish style looked the most appealing. The developers could render something fittingly unrealistic under the confines of early 3D as opposed to attempting to emulate actual humans and real world environments to expectedly lackluster results with such games as Goldeneye. Conker’s Bad Fur Day could essentially function as an interactive cartoon like all of its fellow 3D platformers, but the secret ingredient lies in taking the wide scope of some of Banjo’s levels and using that design consistently. The area of Conker’s Bad Fur Day that acts as the nucleus to the game’s world is a hub whose grassy valleys and hilly peaks create a diverse range of elevation, making Conker look small and insignificant. Interior areas such as the gothic castle and the prehistoric chamber are magnificently spacious, and the inner sanctum of the dung beetle’s operation is like a poopy Paradise Lost. Even the cliffside waterfall in the tutorial section looks splendorous. The best levels from the Banjo games were ones with a wide proportional setting with expansive parameters, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes something relatively cohesive with the same design philosophy. With a few refinements to the shape and tints of character models and settings, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes it apparent how far the N64 has come since Mario was hopping on a series of colored blocks in the N64’s infancy.

Another contributing factor to Conker’s stellar presentation is its cinematic flair. The game doesn’t present itself as if Hideo Kojima is at the helm but like with its graphics, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes due with what the N64 obliges and delivers spectacularly. A substantial portion of Conker’s Bad Fur Day’s humor is delivered through dialogue that takes place during cutscenes that are interspersed between gameplay moments. On screen, dialogue is presented through speech bubbles, a fittingly comic touch that accentuates the game’s cartoon visuals. Bubbles with text that pop up on screen never overflow and become jarring because the text refreshes with every spoken line and conversing characters are never shown on the screen at the same time. As you can probably guess, a strong facet of the game’s vulgarities is the foul language that spews from the mouths of the characters. Funny enough, Conker’s dialogue is saintly compared to the colorful stream of verbal sewage spoken by every single NPC character. Maybe this was done to make Conker seem more like a stranger in a strange land, a hostile environment marked by inhospitable rudeness. Either way, the language in Conker’s Bad Fur Day is caustic enough to make an aging schoolmarm say seven hail marys. Another surprising choice from the developers regarding the dialogue was to censor the word “fuck.” Don’t worry: the mother of all swear words is used frequently by the characters in a myriad of varieties, but any utterance of the word is bleeped like it’s on TV with a series of violent characters obscuring the word in the speech bubble. Somehow, keeping the overall language PG-13 by censoring “fuck” makes the game sound more explicit, with the grating sound of the bleep ringing louder in the players ears than if they kept the dialogue as is. I’m surprised none of the NPCs ever told Conker to see you next Tuesday, if you catch my vernacular. Rare is a British company, afterall. Speaking of which, a mere three voice actors deliver the profane lines, and they all struggle to mask their British accents. Some voices like Conker occasionally seep in a British inflection on what seems like an accident while others like the dung beetles sound like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Whether or not the voice actors are making an attempt to veil their accent, the cadence of the line deliveries consistently sounds like the voice is an improvised impression that is slowly deflating. Do not expect vocal performances with range or emotion, and I’ll give the developers the benefit of the doubt that perhaps it’s another mark of the game’s wacky eccentricities rather than bad direction.

Also, do not expect Conker’s Bad Fur Day to amaze the player with an extravagant plot. Conker’s mission throughout the game is just to find his way home, like a scatalogical Homer’s Odyssey. Conker’s journey is a roundabout trek through a no-man’s land where each step onward won’t lead him closer to his goal, but provide another distraction with its own secondary arc. Any characters Conker comes across have a perfunctory presence whose transient impact on the story leaves no lasting impression. Sections of the game’s story are listed in chapters, divided by notable scenes like how the aforementioned Greek epic is structured. Similar to how everyone remembers individual parts of The Odyssey such as the bout with the Cyclops or avoiding the Sirens, the player will recognize the events of Conker’s Bad Fur Day in the same way. The pinnacle moment of each chapter is obtaining dollars: hopping, cigar-smoking stacks of money that serves as the game’s one collectible. Adult Conker is a man’s man who is motivated by money, alcohol, and poontang, so of course all three of these things are featured in his mature breakout title in some capacity. The cutscene that triggers when the player collects these wads of cash shows Conker’s pupils shifting into dollar signs as they scroll up in his head like slot machines, with Conker expressing an ecstatically wide, toothy grin. If you’ve played any other 3D platformer game, you’ll know this is a nod to the brief, victorious celebration that a character performs when they earn another one of the main collectibles (Super Mario 64, Banjo, Jak and Daxter), and Conker’s expression never fails to amuse me. I’ve heard that collecting the money is what unlocks new areas and progresses the game, but I found this to be inconsistent. Judging from the placement of these chapters in the main menu, I completed the section with the barn way before the game intended and the game did not direct somewhere else on the map.

I’d claim that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a deconstruction of the archetypal hero’s journey like the cash collectable is for gaming tropes, but I feel I’d be giving the game too much credit considering the half-assed conflict scenario they conjured up. Meanwhile, the Panther King, the mighty monarch of this land, notices a problem while sitting on his imposing throne. The table in which his glass of milk resides is missing a leg and cannot hold his glass due to its irregularity. His scientist advisor deduces that placing a red squirrel as an alternative for the missing leg is the only logical solution, for a red squirrel is the optimal size and color. The Panther King’s weasel army sets out to capture Conker so their snarling highness can drink his milk in peace. Is this really the best source of conflict you could come up with, Rare?

Perhaps I can’t be too critical of the game’s arching plot because it seems evident that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a series of events that serve as a collective. Because the nature of this kind of story is episodic, a good ol’ highlight reel is needed to detail Conker’s finest moments. Calling Conker’s Bad Fur Day crude is a statement that even Captain Obvious wouldn’t bother to utter. Each chapter in the game involves a fresh slew of characters and scenarios, so the game has plenty of opportunities to be uniquely offensive. For those of you who are particularly squeamish, chapters like “Windy” and “Barn Boys” feature the visceral combustion of precious farm animals. Conker feeds an irritating rat so much cheese that the gas built up by lactose causes him to inflate and explode like a watermelon, while the cows are disposed of by the ramming of an irate bull after they defecate enough for the dung beetle’s liking. Several local villagers are abducted by Bat Conker in “Spooky” and are liquidated by a spiky, medieval contraption in a room of the Count’s mansion as a means for the ancient vampire to feast on their gushy remains. Conker’s sacrifices an infant dinosaur he hatches to gain further access in the “Uga Buga” level where a giant stone slab crushes the adorable beast into bloody mincemeat. To be fair, the creature had blood on his hands as he devoured every caveman in sight until he was pulverized. If blood and guts don’t turn your stomach, Conker’s Bad Fur Day also offers up a slew of raunchy moments involving intimate bodily fluids and lewd, sexual, content. One of Conker’s adult vices that I briefly touched upon was alcohol, and the stupid bastard didn’t learn his lesson from the night before. In two sections, guzzling booze from a keg will get Conker sloppy drunk, and the objective is to unzip his pants and douse enemies with his piss. Do I need to comment on the content involving fecal matter any further? Actually, the shit in Conker’s Bad Fur Day stacks up so high that it hits the fan with The Great Mighty Poo, a magnificent mass of sentient poo so grand that it developed a singing voice to match its immense size. This boss fight that also factors as a musical number is one of the greatest boss fights in gaming history, and I will not dispute this claim with anyone. There is no explicit nudity in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but the game still teeters with the western world’s most touchy of taboos. The Boiler Room boss inside the vault brandishes a pair of iron testicles that Conker must wallop with a set of bricks. The fight against Buga the Knut, the king of the cavemen, involves making his pants fall down like King Hippo, only this neanderthal isn’t wearing underwear and Conker must make the miniature T-Rex he hypnotized chomp off chunks of flesh from his big, naked ass. After that, Conker takes a crack at his tall, buxom cavewoman, for the well-endowed sunflower he encountered earlier weirded him out (as it did for the rest of us). Look at Berri and tell me with a straight face that she’s a dynamic character and not an trope of sexual objectification (you can’t). People nowadays might take offense at a Beavis and Butthead duo of a paint can and brush bullying a pitchfork into hanging himself, which he fails because he doesn’t have a neck.

The million dollar question pertaining to the content of Conker is if it is still funny after all these years, or if it was funny to begin with. During the late 90’s and early 2000’s, comedy’s initiative in raising the bar was to include the most foul and deplorable things that media in the past wouldn’t dare to display. One could probably compare Conker’s Bad Fur Day to South Park, for they both broke ground in the vein of depravity for their respective mediums around the same time. However, Conker’s Bad Fur Day doesn’t mold its crude humor into a satirical substance like South Park tends to do. All we can do with Conker’s content is marvel that all these perversities managed to elude the censors for shock value. On top of the shlock, the meta humor, film references, and other humor tropes common at the time make me groan. The A Clockwork Orange Kubrick stare and the D-Day recreation from Saving Private Ryan are effective, but I’ve seen these parodied countless times. Am I simply not seeing the comedic genius because I am experiencing this game twenty years after it was released? The most amusing aspect of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is how much it borrows from Looney Tunes as its prime source of cartoon inspiration. Conker is essentially a more sociopathic Bugs Bunny, treating all the people around him with sarcastic glee and derision. Just substitute a beer for a carrot and the word “maroon” for “wanker” and the resemblance is uncanny.

I can forgive the dated humor in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but I cannot overlook the severe mechanical problems the game possesses. One would expect an adult-oriented 3D platformer to offer more of a challenge, but I feel as if Conker provides one unintentionally. Overall, the game is fairly lenient with difficulty in terms of approaching obstacles and with error. In another attempt to jab at video game tropes, actions in the game are reserved to “context sensitive pads” seen everywhere with the letter B. A lightbulb will appear over Conker’s head, and he’ll proceed to whip anything out of his ass to solve a problem. Usually, these instances are pretty straightforward. The video game trope of multiple lives is explained by a diminutive, churlish depiction of the Grim Reaper once the player dies for the first time. Apparently, a squirrel is an animal with multiple lives like those blasted cats he despises, and extra lives are tails hanging off of random places around the map. To stave off bothering Grim, tabs of chocolate are displayed as the game’s health item, totalling up to a maximum of six. Chocolate is everywhere, and thank the lord because Conker constantly depletes it due to falling. Even the most tepid of tumbles will hurt Conker, and it isn’t fair considering he’s a character with the power of flight at hand. The player can execute a high jump and glide for a short distance, and this will hurt Conker. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourselves. The chapter of “Bat’s Tower” was especially tense because of this. On top of this, aiming Conker’s flight trajectory is a finicky task due to Conker’s base control feeling like years of drinking has made him half paralyzed. Add a restricted, uncooperative camera in the mix and the game starts to remind me less of Banjo Kazooie and more of Super Mario 64. Ouch.

Controlling Conker already sounds bad enough on a base level, but it’s made much worse anytime the game features anything outside the realm of platforming. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Notorious examples of these include swimming underwater in the vault and the blistering lava race, but these end quickly as opposed to the game’s shoddy shooting controls. Getting rid of the hostile dung beetles at the beginning with a slingshot is an early sampler of these, and it’s uneventful due to the sluggish speed of the bugs. The hive turret is sort of uncooperative, but the one-shot damage of the bullets does enough to compensate. The pinpoint accuracy needed to kill the zombies in “Spooky” is excruciating, but it’s only a small factor of the entire chapter. The lengthy period of the game that makes shooting a core mechanic is the WWII-inspired “It’s War.” War is hell enough as is, but having to mow down gangs upon gangs of evil Tediz as a one-man-army feels like we’ve plunged into the seventh circle. The shooting controls in Conker’s Bad Fur Day are some of the most slippery and unresponsive I’ve seen across any game I’ve played. Tediz do not have to adhere to piss-poor controls, so they’ll easily bushwack Conker while he’s lining his sights. This especially becomes a problem at the chapter’s escape sequence on the beach where the Tediz can obliterate Conker with one bazooka shell, whereas Conker has to stop and carefully aim. This chapter made me feel like I just underwent a campaign overseas and started feeling the stages of shellshock. Conker can't be a renaissance man if he already struggles with his his main mechanic.

I know I’ve given up on making sense of Conker’s plot, but the game’s ending still bothered me. Once Conker returns from war, the weasel mob boss wants him and Berri to complete a bank heist, and this operation is a full-on Matrix reference complete with all of the action sequences we’ve seen parodied to death. At the end of the vault is the Panther King who has become impatient waiting for Conker and decides to face Conker himself. Unexpectedly, his contemptuous scientific underling has slipped his boss a mickey in the form of yet another film reference: the xenomorph from Alien who bursts from his chest. Not an alien with a striking resemblance to H.R. Giger’s creation, but the alien itself. How did Rare not get sued? Conker even duels the alien as the game’s final boss in the yellow mech and says “get away from her, you bitch!” when it hovers over Berri’s lifeless body. The fight proves to be too formidable for Conker but before he is torn to shreds, the game freezes as Conker uses this opportunity to request more accommodating circumstances for this scenario. He decapitates the xenomorph with a katana and succeeds the Panther King as the land’s royal leader. A postmodern meta moment like this is not surprising, but placing it in the game’s climax feels rather contrived. Then again, the game’s plot was already contrived. One thing I do like about the ending is swinging the xenomorph by its tail in an homage to the Bowser fights in Super Mario 64. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most clever reference in the game.

It goes without saying, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day certainly stands out from the rest of its 3D platformer contemporaries. The game perches itself on the tower of backs made from its N64 brethren to poke and prod their foundations while excreting an unspeakable cocktail of piss and shit down their trail. Games like Super Mario 64 and Rare’s Banjo games walked so Conker’s Bad Fur Day could run, and the game has shown through its presentation that it can run pretty fast. Unfortunately, the game did not have the stamina of gaming competency to do the hundred-yard dash, making it a fellow contender instead of the undisputed king. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a case of style over substance and even then, the smutty style that launched it into the stratosphere is a bit too sophomoric and is ultimately a product of its time. Nevertheless, Conker’s Bad Fur Day is still a unique experience not for the faint of heart, and rest assured that there won’t be another game like it released in the future.

I was so excited when I got a cartridge of this game from my friend for Christmas...but that just proves that I had no idea what I was in store for.

This is the kind of game that makes you think "What the heck where they thinking?" in more ways than one.

On one hand, it's hard for me not to love the ambition that went into Conker's Bad Fur Day. How many game companies with a reputation like Rare would go out of their way to make a game that completely destroyed every expectation associated with it? In on that front on a Nintendo console far less.

Conker's Bad Fur Day is unforgiving offensive, extremely crude in it's humor, and has some moments that will uniquely make you feel uncomfortable. It's definitively a game with a sense of humor that's not for everyone. But something about the improv. nature of the script just made me fall in love with it.

Because it's the type of experience where you have no idea what the next section is going to hold.

One minute you're throwing toilet paper into a giant singing poo, the next you'll be peeing on giant rock monsters to finish a puzzle. It's the kind of game that you keep playing just because you want to see what happens next. I've never seen any game quite embrace that element of comedy in a video game and indeed, even today, there really is nothing quite like Conker's Bad Fur Day.

But unfortunately that's where my compliments for this game end.

I wanted to love Conker for those elements alone but this game is plagued with dated controls, overly frustrating mini games, and a level of perfection that is genuinely quite mind blogging at times.

But if there's any section of this game that truly shows how unforgiving this game is... it's the dreaded lava boarding section.

Scenario: You have to stop 3 cavemen who stole your cash. You run laps around a track and have to hit them with your frypan to stop them. Simple right?

...then you realize touching the walls will deplete your health.Okay so you'll slow the board down no big deal. Only to realize, you have to be moving at maximum speed to catch any of them. Okay I guess it's time to practice...but only then you realize your mistake.

You fall to your knees and ask god for mercy because you discovered the dino rng.

As you start the course, you notice a Brontosaurus casually walking across the course. You comfortable pass it as you fly across the course. The second lap around you'll notice it's sitting it's fat butt in the middle of the path. But you skillfully pass through it's legs.

"man that was close!" you say.

Only to come around the third time and have to no way to pass it's legs and just die.

You start the course again, you get past the dino on the first lap with no issue, and then you come around again aaaaannnnd you're dead.

"That's weird could've sworn it wasn't this far up last time."

Then a chill goes down your spine....this dinosaur position is completely unpredictable.

It doesn't matter how good you are at that course, the dinosaur decides when you're done. Good luck.

At some point when you beat it, you'll realize this was only the half way point. Then you stop enjoying the game and just start dreading what kind of nightmare they'll throw at you next.

If you want to check out this game due to the cult following that has grown around it do yourself a favor and watch someone else play it....or treat some sucker into playing it for you.

Conker's Bad Fur Day has frustrating puzzles, unplayable minigames, jokes you wouldn't laugh at if you were twelve, and a very short length...

... and yet it's somehow a really good game.

Given the game's flaws, it is surprising Conker's Bad Fur Day is as good as it is. However, the game has some of the most incredible graphics and visual design of any game on the Nintendo 64. This is probably the most graphically advanced title on the system. The environments and character models look amazing. The game also has full voice acting and a variety of cut scenes to watch, and boasts some of the best sound design available on the console.

In addition, Conker's Bad Fur Day is very creative and features cool characters, ideas, and levels. The game is generally not repetitive and gives you plenty of interesting puzzles to solve and environments to explore. Overall, it's a very diverse and fun experience, with "Bat's Tower" standing out as a fun and memorable level.

The game is memorable for it's pop culture references, some of which are predictable and formulaic, while others are truly creative. I counted references to A Clockwork Orange, The Terminator, Jaws, The Godfather, Blue Velvet, Eyes Wide Shut, Saving Private Ryan, Dracula, Apocalypse Now, The Matrix, and Aliens. Although some of the jokes are sophomoric, many are hilarious.

That being said, the game has some serious flaws. My biggest complaint is some of the minigames you have to complete to progress. Several levels give you a gun and require you to shoot enemies. Doing so requires mastering some of the worst shooting controls I've ever experienced in a game. It's incredible how broken and stiff these controls feel. The aiming is awful, and the reload is incredibly slow, which does NOT work for close range combat against extremely fast enemies. This, along with other moments in Conker's Bad Fur Day, may make you want to give up on the game. Other sections and minigames include surfing, controling a bat, and riding a dinosaur. Conker's Bad Fur Day also has one of the worst final boss battles of any game I've ever played. It was one of the hardest bosses I've ever played in a Nintendo game, but for all the wrong reasons. With inconsistent hit detection and an incredibly frustrating boss design, the final boss almost ruined the whole experience for me.

Another problem is that often the puzzles aren't explained clearly. Early on in the game, you get tutorials that teach you how the controls and mechanics work. However, there are certain points where explanations are strongly needed but where the player is left in the dark. Some of the controls are not explained well to the player.

Conker's Bad Fur Day is also very short, and can be completed quickly. This wouldn't be such a problem if they had ironed out some of the game's flaws. However, this is definitely a great game, although it has some pretty significant problems.

EDIT: Looking back, I cannot call Conker's Bad Fur Day a great game. Large sections of the game are literally broken and unplayable.