Played as part of Rare Replay.
In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead.
It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.
Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.
The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.
The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.
As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.
With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.
In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead.
It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.
Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.
The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.
The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.
As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.
With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.
this is what right wingers are talking about when they go "what happened to REAL comedy".
The N64’s swan song and a game that’s just aged like fine wine in general. Why this hasn’t made Nintendo realize that the fans who grew up with their games want more mature stuff, I will never know
Unironically one of the worst games I've ever played
Conker Piss
The flower provoked something in me.
Holy crazy Cogs and diarrhea cows! it's gonna be one of those days.
And what a day that was! It is Conker's Bad Fur Day!
A delightful journey of vulgarity, death, platforming, shotguns and of course, money.
Facing one hell of an overhaul from earlier development
Rare's team of renegade brits took it upon themselves to serve against the backlash and bickering of its audience of what was to become another cute collectaton platformer into what it is today. A drunk squirrel with guns and lust for money and big babes. It's amazing what they did,
and you know what they say, the grass is always green.
This marvelous journey of wonderful cutscenes and diverse gameplay segments is crafted with such heart and probably some specks of hatred, which in any case flavours the package into a self identity too strong to compare to your average joe.
This is also one of the finest looking games on the n64, with Conker himself fully animated both IN gameplay and cutscenes.
It is amazing to see all the idle animations and reactions Conker can achieve in individal specific areas with their context sensitive implementations and the way he emotes to enemies or other fun characters around as move about.
There is much care and attention to detail throughout this sweet, but short journey.
You always do something different. Sometimes it's easy and other times infuriating.
Regardless, unless you played Jet Force Gemini on N64,
The controls can be a bit of a pain, that is, whenever our friendly rodent dukes it out with guns.
Since playing my share out of the multiplayer and getting enough aquantaince with the controls to breeze through guns blazing, I'll still be gripe about it and say, it is an element that is entirely lost on the game unless you experiment with the controls which the game never really directly encourages you to do.
The optimal movement for aiming+movement is delegated to holding R to aim and moving with the C-buttons, while using the analog to control the aim.
As long as you don't hold R, you can move around with the analog, but you will lose the flexible aiming while moving. It works fine, but it can be hard to get into.
Without an N64 controller it'll likely be less intuitive without the shooting button located at the back of the controller instead of another potential bumper.
Outside of that Conker controls like your traditional rare mascot with a variety of moves suited for platforming.
Conker is flexible for jumping, but also intentionally designed to be clunky with one of the worst approximaties to fall damage and his short duration floating jump.
With a weapon I shall-not name- because you should see it for yourself you can only stagger enemies.
Conker also have several special moves delegated to the B-button in specific areas, which are too fun to spoil away.
All in all, one of Rare's finest brews, but also quite nutty and with a hint of sweet corn if you're into that.
And what a day that was! It is Conker's Bad Fur Day!
A delightful journey of vulgarity, death, platforming, shotguns and of course, money.
Facing one hell of an overhaul from earlier development
Rare's team of renegade brits took it upon themselves to serve against the backlash and bickering of its audience of what was to become another cute collectaton platformer into what it is today. A drunk squirrel with guns and lust for money and big babes. It's amazing what they did,
and you know what they say, the grass is always green.
This marvelous journey of wonderful cutscenes and diverse gameplay segments is crafted with such heart and probably some specks of hatred, which in any case flavours the package into a self identity too strong to compare to your average joe.
This is also one of the finest looking games on the n64, with Conker himself fully animated both IN gameplay and cutscenes.
It is amazing to see all the idle animations and reactions Conker can achieve in individal specific areas with their context sensitive implementations and the way he emotes to enemies or other fun characters around as move about.
There is much care and attention to detail throughout this sweet, but short journey.
You always do something different. Sometimes it's easy and other times infuriating.
Regardless, unless you played Jet Force Gemini on N64,
The controls can be a bit of a pain, that is, whenever our friendly rodent dukes it out with guns.
Since playing my share out of the multiplayer and getting enough aquantaince with the controls to breeze through guns blazing, I'll still be gripe about it and say, it is an element that is entirely lost on the game unless you experiment with the controls which the game never really directly encourages you to do.
The optimal movement for aiming+movement is delegated to holding R to aim and moving with the C-buttons, while using the analog to control the aim.
As long as you don't hold R, you can move around with the analog, but you will lose the flexible aiming while moving. It works fine, but it can be hard to get into.
Without an N64 controller it'll likely be less intuitive without the shooting button located at the back of the controller instead of another potential bumper.
Outside of that Conker controls like your traditional rare mascot with a variety of moves suited for platforming.
Conker is flexible for jumping, but also intentionally designed to be clunky with one of the worst approximaties to fall damage and his short duration floating jump.
With a weapon I shall-not name- because you should see it for yourself you can only stagger enemies.
Conker also have several special moves delegated to the B-button in specific areas, which are too fun to spoil away.
All in all, one of Rare's finest brews, but also quite nutty and with a hint of sweet corn if you're into that.
oh, this game "isn't good" and "hasn't aged well"? sure yeah ok pal name another game where i can fly around as a gay little bat shitting on guys in dracula's castle and shoot nazis
I demand an apology from everyone who has given this a rating of 2/5 or higher.
conker's bad
This is definitely one of those games where I don't think I have anything too insightful to say that hasn't already been commented on a million times before, nor do I feel too strongly about it in general. I think it's interesting from the perspective of being a game almost entirely built around giving the guys at Rare a platformer to express their very unique sense of humor without a filter. Some of the parody set pieces that emerge out of this are a lot of fun, if incredibly dated, and the very last thing you could ever say about Conker's Bad Fur Day is that it takes itself seriously.
I think it's a lot less interesting mechanically, however. The platforming in the early game feels solid enough, but a lot of the more gimmicky segments (which feel more plentiful in Conker's back half) really drag and feel a bit shoddy. It's Rare, so of course experimentation results in as many failures as successes. Big shock, there's a few gimmicks that control like total dogshit in a Rare game. Nothing new there!
I'm sure there's people out there with very insightful things to say about this one, about how much nostalgia for the media it lampoons plays a factor in being able to enjoy it today, or what it meant to have a game like this release on a Nintendo console (especially in 2001) from a company that was so closely tied to their image at the time. There's a lot to be said about how the media we consume as children influences our perception of media as adults, but that won't be me because I'm tired of talking about Rare and I want to go to bed.
I think it's a lot less interesting mechanically, however. The platforming in the early game feels solid enough, but a lot of the more gimmicky segments (which feel more plentiful in Conker's back half) really drag and feel a bit shoddy. It's Rare, so of course experimentation results in as many failures as successes. Big shock, there's a few gimmicks that control like total dogshit in a Rare game. Nothing new there!
I'm sure there's people out there with very insightful things to say about this one, about how much nostalgia for the media it lampoons plays a factor in being able to enjoy it today, or what it meant to have a game like this release on a Nintendo console (especially in 2001) from a company that was so closely tied to their image at the time. There's a lot to be said about how the media we consume as children influences our perception of media as adults, but that won't be me because I'm tired of talking about Rare and I want to go to bed.
De longe o jogo mais polêmico da Rare e nunca vou saber o que deu na Nintendo pra deixar esse título entrar no catálogo do N64. Uma quebra total de paradigma.
Conker's Bad Fur Day é um adventure misturado com inúmeros subgêneros como plataforma, nave, tps, puzzle, tank, e corrida.
Seu destaque é com certeza o humor ácido, sexual, e escatológico presente nas situações em que o protagonista claramente psicopata se encontra. Me rendeu boas risadas mas é um humor que pra muitos será bem datado. Outra coisa que chama bastante atenção são as referências e paródias de filmes famosos em quase toda cutscene.
Os controles horríveis do N64 dificultam bastante grande parte do jogo, que apresenta câmeras totalmente desfavoráveis e hitboxes injustos. Na segunda metade, o jogo vira de repente um third person shooter, o que o torna um pouco frustrante visto que o foco da mecânica nunca foi pra este tipo de gameplay.
Há um multiplayer com muitos modos e é divertidíssimo! Muito bem trabalhado e não dá aquela impressão que foi adicionado apenas pra encher linguiça. Não experimentei todos mas gostei bastante das versões de corrida, capture the flag, e deathmatch.
Vale a pena pra quem tem um humor mais peculiar e pra quem gosta de coisas inesperadas. Gosto muito do protagonista e torço pra que ele surja novamente no futuro, já que ultimamente aparenta ter sido descartado pelo estúdio.
Conker's Bad Fur Day é um adventure misturado com inúmeros subgêneros como plataforma, nave, tps, puzzle, tank, e corrida.
Seu destaque é com certeza o humor ácido, sexual, e escatológico presente nas situações em que o protagonista claramente psicopata se encontra. Me rendeu boas risadas mas é um humor que pra muitos será bem datado. Outra coisa que chama bastante atenção são as referências e paródias de filmes famosos em quase toda cutscene.
Os controles horríveis do N64 dificultam bastante grande parte do jogo, que apresenta câmeras totalmente desfavoráveis e hitboxes injustos. Na segunda metade, o jogo vira de repente um third person shooter, o que o torna um pouco frustrante visto que o foco da mecânica nunca foi pra este tipo de gameplay.
Há um multiplayer com muitos modos e é divertidíssimo! Muito bem trabalhado e não dá aquela impressão que foi adicionado apenas pra encher linguiça. Não experimentei todos mas gostei bastante das versões de corrida, capture the flag, e deathmatch.
Vale a pena pra quem tem um humor mais peculiar e pra quem gosta de coisas inesperadas. Gosto muito do protagonista e torço pra que ele surja novamente no futuro, já que ultimamente aparenta ter sido descartado pelo estúdio.
love when the squirrel says shit
This is a hard game for me to review... For the first few hours of the game I genuinely hated it because it was full of long sections of dialogue and cutscenes chock full of the type of humor I find to be painfully unfunny. The gameplay itself I found decently enjoyable but I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to push through.
Then, starting with a famous boss fight, I felt like the game got a little more creative in locations, gameplay variety, and situational humor where I was actually starting to enjoy myself more and more as it went. This back 2/3rds of the game was filled with moments I found fun and I kept being surprised by it leading to a just insane ending I really enjoyed.
The game does show it's age a lot but I tried not to hold it against it, the camera and controls can be pretty problematic at times and sometimes the game has you doing repetitive actions for too long but again, this is an N64 game so I can let it slide a bit. Ultimately the game turned around for me and I was enjoying myself despite the issues.
Then, starting with a famous boss fight, I felt like the game got a little more creative in locations, gameplay variety, and situational humor where I was actually starting to enjoy myself more and more as it went. This back 2/3rds of the game was filled with moments I found fun and I kept being surprised by it leading to a just insane ending I really enjoyed.
The game does show it's age a lot but I tried not to hold it against it, the camera and controls can be pretty problematic at times and sometimes the game has you doing repetitive actions for too long but again, this is an N64 game so I can let it slide a bit. Ultimately the game turned around for me and I was enjoying myself despite the issues.
My favorite game that has multiple near-unplayable segments in it
If you like Epic Movie, Scary Movie or Channel Awesome movies, this game is for you
One of my favorite platformers alongside Banjo-Kazooie & the Mario Galaxy games. However, I don't think it's as good as the aforementioned games. While the game still has its funny moments, some of the game's humor has not aged well and there are parts where the controls flat-out suck. That being said, it still is a solid platformer loaded with references to famous movies and a surprisingly good message at the end. Finding an original copy of this game can be hard to come by so if you're interested in playing it then I would either pick up the Rare Replay collection or emulate it.
Me: But since we're all gonna die, there's one more secret I feel I have to share with you. I did not care for Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Deadpan: What?
Me: Did not care for Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Isaac: How can you even say that, STRM?
Me: Didn't like it.
Deadpan: STRM, it's so good! It's like the perfect comedy platformer!
Me: This is what everyone always said. Whenever they say...
Isaac: Voice Acting, clever writing, I mean, RAREWAR GOLDEN YEARSll!
Me: Fine. Fine. Fine stuff, did not like the game.
Gringo: Why not?
Me: Did not...couldn't get into it.
Deadpan: Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
Me: It insists upon itself, Deadpan.
Deadpan: What?
Me: It insists upon itself.
Deadpan: What does that even mean?
Isaac: Because it was an adult only game made on N64 and the last games released on the system, IT HAD A VALID REASON TO DO SO, IT’S INSISTED!
Me: Its controls are really sloppy; a lot of the jokes are just poop jokes or characters swearing for the sake of it... You know, I can't get through, I've never even finished the game. I've never seen the ending.
Isaac: YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE ENDING?!
Helicon: How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even given it a chance?
Deadpan: I agree with Helicon. It's not even fair.
Me: I have tried on three separate occasions to get through it, and I get to the section where it’s WWII and you're fighting the Nazi teddy bears and.
Deadpan: Yeah, it's a great section. I love that section.
Me: It’s not, the shooting and aiming is dogshit. That part in the hallway is pure bullshit... You know, that's where I lose interest in it.
Deadpan: You know what, STRM.
Isaac: IT WAS ON N64!
Deadpan: you can’t expect every single video game in the 5th gen era to hold up to modern day standards; sometimes games made back them didn't have the technology or the time to have everything work the way the devs probably wanted them to work.
Me: I love Banjo-Kazooie. That is my answer to that statement.
Deadpan: Exactly.
Me: Well, there you go.
Deadpan: Whatever.
Isaac: I like that game too.
Deadpan: What?
Me: Did not care for Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Isaac: How can you even say that, STRM?
Me: Didn't like it.
Deadpan: STRM, it's so good! It's like the perfect comedy platformer!
Me: This is what everyone always said. Whenever they say...
Isaac: Voice Acting, clever writing, I mean, RAREWAR GOLDEN YEARSll!
Me: Fine. Fine. Fine stuff, did not like the game.
Gringo: Why not?
Me: Did not...couldn't get into it.
Deadpan: Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
Me: It insists upon itself, Deadpan.
Deadpan: What?
Me: It insists upon itself.
Deadpan: What does that even mean?
Isaac: Because it was an adult only game made on N64 and the last games released on the system, IT HAD A VALID REASON TO DO SO, IT’S INSISTED!
Me: Its controls are really sloppy; a lot of the jokes are just poop jokes or characters swearing for the sake of it... You know, I can't get through, I've never even finished the game. I've never seen the ending.
Isaac: YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THE ENDING?!
Helicon: How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even given it a chance?
Deadpan: I agree with Helicon. It's not even fair.
Me: I have tried on three separate occasions to get through it, and I get to the section where it’s WWII and you're fighting the Nazi teddy bears and.
Deadpan: Yeah, it's a great section. I love that section.
Me: It’s not, the shooting and aiming is dogshit. That part in the hallway is pure bullshit... You know, that's where I lose interest in it.
Deadpan: You know what, STRM.
Isaac: IT WAS ON N64!
Deadpan: you can’t expect every single video game in the 5th gen era to hold up to modern day standards; sometimes games made back them didn't have the technology or the time to have everything work the way the devs probably wanted them to work.
Me: I love Banjo-Kazooie. That is my answer to that statement.
Deadpan: Exactly.
Me: Well, there you go.
Deadpan: Whatever.
Isaac: I like that game too.
A shitpost disguised as a game and absolutely unhinged in more ways then one. The humor is great but the gameplay can be a mixed bag at times with some straight up annoying sections, I still had fun with it though and I would have been down to see how the sequel would have turned out if it never got canceled. Its not as good as something like Banjo Kazooie, the DKC trilogy, and Perfect Dark but I'd recommend playing it at least once.
I really wish I loved this game. It's consistently funny and the characters are endearing, but I never actually enjoyed the gameplay. I'll give this another shot at some point.
It was quite a surprise playing Conker's Bad Fur Day for the first time in 2021. In the two decades since the game's original release, many of the edgier aspects like swearing and violence have been normalized to the point of being the default in the medium. However, Conker is just so creative with using its mature themes that it still provides a unique experience. Even with something as typically one-note as poop humour, Conker fully commits to the idea and contains an entire location with floors and walls of feces, music composed of flatulence, and a sentient singing pile of the stuff. Pushing turd balls around and dropping them on enemies’ heads is another highlight that can’t be ignored. It's an experience that stands out on not just the Nintendo 64, but the medium of video games as a whole.
This review contains spoilers
O diálogo desse jogo é muito daora, gosto da variedade das fases e de gameplay, a trilha sonora poderia ser bem melhorzinha, mas ainda é boa, e ironicamente eu gostei muito das referências toscas que esse jogo faz, a melhor de todas foi a da cena final que faz referência a Laranja Mecânica, o final é muito bom, tem bastante coisa pra fazer e tem um bom modo multiplayer + o Conker é o modelo de personagem mais bonito e bem feito de todo o sistema do Nintendo 64. Esse cara é uma figura
I am the great mighty poo and I'm going to throw my shit at you
I wasn't old enough to go on a bender with my mates in the late 90's, but I feel like this game captures that experience.
It starts as dumb fun; communication is done mostly in movie references; bodily fluids get everywhere; and if you're the first to sober up you're in for a rough end to the night.
| An aside on self-sabotage |
I played this game on the Project N64 emulator, which was the second N64 emu on Windows that I've tried. Given the behavior of the simulation here, I'm now convinced all three of my attempts to play through Rare's N64 titles this year have been marred by subtle emulator problems.
From aiming, to climbing ropes, to the "pissing mechanic" everything was just a bit wrong for me—sometimes just crossing over into breaking the game logic entirely—even after applying hex-code config injections for "lag" and "FPS" fixes. So I'm going to withold most of my judgement on the game controls and mechanics.
If I play a game on a 2009 LCD with every picture processing feature on, then it's on me when a game feels "mushy." Maybe one day I'll try some of these games again on the Rare Replay or something and see what the actual game feel is like.
| I can still critique everything else |
And perhaps unsurprisingly there isn't much to say.
Conker is a 10 hour gauntlet of every joke the developers thought to cram into it. It's high on effort, surprisingly, but very uneven on quality. It's the kind of experience where one minute an entire boss fight is orchestrated to an opera song with some fairly impressive vocal range on the performance, and the next you're running into slow moving blades underwater because you can't judge distance with the flat rendering and tight FOV.
Sometimes you'll giggle to a cheeky Terminator reference in a boss fight. Sometimes they're just doing a drawn out remake of the bank lobby scene from the Matrix with no actual punchline. Sometimes its such dumb fun its charming. Sometimes you feel like you need to sit in confessional just for playing the game.
It's very... NewGrounds-esque. Whichever came first.
| You can never accuse it of a lack of variety |
For those who value novelty in experience above all else, this game can definitely deliver on that. It's 30 different tech demos jammed together, each made special for a joke and thrown away after the telling whether it landed or not. It's very uneven, but I actually enjoyed that part about it (when my emulator wasn't sabotaging me).
It has that sense of dream logic lunacy that made text and point-n-click adventures so charming.
I frankly don't think I'd recommend this game to anyone—as I don't want to be associated with it—but it was a fascinating little bit of gaming history to witness.
It starts as dumb fun; communication is done mostly in movie references; bodily fluids get everywhere; and if you're the first to sober up you're in for a rough end to the night.
| An aside on self-sabotage |
I played this game on the Project N64 emulator, which was the second N64 emu on Windows that I've tried. Given the behavior of the simulation here, I'm now convinced all three of my attempts to play through Rare's N64 titles this year have been marred by subtle emulator problems.
From aiming, to climbing ropes, to the "pissing mechanic" everything was just a bit wrong for me—sometimes just crossing over into breaking the game logic entirely—even after applying hex-code config injections for "lag" and "FPS" fixes. So I'm going to withold most of my judgement on the game controls and mechanics.
If I play a game on a 2009 LCD with every picture processing feature on, then it's on me when a game feels "mushy." Maybe one day I'll try some of these games again on the Rare Replay or something and see what the actual game feel is like.
| I can still critique everything else |
And perhaps unsurprisingly there isn't much to say.
Conker is a 10 hour gauntlet of every joke the developers thought to cram into it. It's high on effort, surprisingly, but very uneven on quality. It's the kind of experience where one minute an entire boss fight is orchestrated to an opera song with some fairly impressive vocal range on the performance, and the next you're running into slow moving blades underwater because you can't judge distance with the flat rendering and tight FOV.
Sometimes you'll giggle to a cheeky Terminator reference in a boss fight. Sometimes they're just doing a drawn out remake of the bank lobby scene from the Matrix with no actual punchline. Sometimes its such dumb fun its charming. Sometimes you feel like you need to sit in confessional just for playing the game.
It's very... NewGrounds-esque. Whichever came first.
| You can never accuse it of a lack of variety |
For those who value novelty in experience above all else, this game can definitely deliver on that. It's 30 different tech demos jammed together, each made special for a joke and thrown away after the telling whether it landed or not. It's very uneven, but I actually enjoyed that part about it (when my emulator wasn't sabotaging me).
It has that sense of dream logic lunacy that made text and point-n-click adventures so charming.
I frankly don't think I'd recommend this game to anyone—as I don't want to be associated with it—but it was a fascinating little bit of gaming history to witness.
i love rare as much as the next 90s kid but man this game has not aged gracefully at all
conker's bad fur day is the drakengard of n64 platformers, but replace everything that made drakengard so intriguing with dated film parodies and humor on par with south park and newgrounds. also the literal shit monster that sings that's the only reason people ever remember this game.
multiplayer kicks ass though!
conker's bad fur day is the drakengard of n64 platformers, but replace everything that made drakengard so intriguing with dated film parodies and humor on par with south park and newgrounds. also the literal shit monster that sings that's the only reason people ever remember this game.
multiplayer kicks ass though!
Oh, Conker.
What have you done this time?
You want to enjoy a night out with the lads and have some brews before they're shipped off to war? Fly into the wind, Conker. Let life guide you aimlessly.
Conker could go home to his beautiful girlfriend, or, Conker could start doing funny little platformer quests because he simply can.
A red squirrel without agency nonetheless remains.
This game is both a parody and deconstruction of platformers. What if the protagonist collected wads of cash and quipped about paying his mortgage and buying a car? What if every character assisted by Conker was outwardly annoying and despised by Conker? What if we do little goofy platformer quests that result in the genocide of an entire race? A sacrifice to the Gods? Sure. What if the big-bad's motivation for doing anything was so shallow, it was literally needing to affix Conker to his table so that he could set his milk onto it? This is awesome.
The gameplay was not awesome. Every interesting idea is forced down my throat by being immediately copied and pasted 2-3 times. The last three chapters introduce a sin known as "aiming on the Nintendo 64", turning my tedium into rage. I spent the last 2-3 hours praying for the level to end and possibly bring me into a new area that was less difficult or annoying.
and then I beat the final boss.
Conker's journey came to an end. This ending was good. It doesn't fully redeem how annoyingly difficult things were prior, but it made me glad I beat it. I will never play this game again, but I appreciate it for what it is.
What have you done this time?
You want to enjoy a night out with the lads and have some brews before they're shipped off to war? Fly into the wind, Conker. Let life guide you aimlessly.
Conker could go home to his beautiful girlfriend, or, Conker could start doing funny little platformer quests because he simply can.
A red squirrel without agency nonetheless remains.
This game is both a parody and deconstruction of platformers. What if the protagonist collected wads of cash and quipped about paying his mortgage and buying a car? What if every character assisted by Conker was outwardly annoying and despised by Conker? What if we do little goofy platformer quests that result in the genocide of an entire race? A sacrifice to the Gods? Sure. What if the big-bad's motivation for doing anything was so shallow, it was literally needing to affix Conker to his table so that he could set his milk onto it? This is awesome.
The gameplay was not awesome. Every interesting idea is forced down my throat by being immediately copied and pasted 2-3 times. The last three chapters introduce a sin known as "aiming on the Nintendo 64", turning my tedium into rage. I spent the last 2-3 hours praying for the level to end and possibly bring me into a new area that was less difficult or annoying.
and then I beat the final boss.
Conker's journey came to an end. This ending was good. It doesn't fully redeem how annoyingly difficult things were prior, but it made me glad I beat it. I will never play this game again, but I appreciate it for what it is.
I was 12 years old and this game was too childish for me.
Add on mediocre controls for the time in a genre that has aged poorly overall and you have a game that has a very confusing cult fanbase.
Add on mediocre controls for the time in a genre that has aged poorly overall and you have a game that has a very confusing cult fanbase.
This review contains spoilers
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. On the other hand, Conker’s Bad Fur Day villainously duped parents with a level of deception that shattered their trust in the gaming industry, even though Nintendo did its 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 many bright, cutesy 3D platformers thanks to Super Mario 64. 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 will 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 by 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 was 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 1960s cartoon superhero Space Ghost and reinvigorated him into the realm of maturity, albeit with crude humor as opposed to dry, off-kilter 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 instead of 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 of 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 those with a wide proportional setting and expansive parameters. 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 during cutscenes interspersed between gameplay moments. On the 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 the screen never overflow and become jarring because the text refreshes with every spoken line, and conversing characters are never shown on the screen simultaneously. 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 every single NPC character's colorful stream of verbal sewage. 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 player's 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, after all. 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; 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 scatological 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 similarly recognize the events of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The pinnacle moment of each chapter is obtaining dollars: hopping, cigar-smoking stacks of money that serve 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 unlocks new areas and progresses the game, but I found this inconsistent. Judging from the placement of these chapters in the main menu, I completed the section with the barn way before the game was 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 collectible 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 on which his glass of milk resides is missing a leg, and he cannot hold it 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 sacrifices an infant dinosaur he hatches to gain further access to 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 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 a 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 on 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 90s and early 2000s, comedy’s initiative in raising the bar included the foulest and most 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 at how 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 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 game's severe mechanical problems. One would expect an adult-oriented 3D platformer to offer more of a challenge, but I feel 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 for “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, totaling 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, which isn’t fair, considering he’s a character with the power of flight. The player can execute a high jump and glide for a short distance, hurting 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 have made him half-paralyzed. Add a restricted, uncooperative camera in the mix, and the game reminds 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 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, 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. The 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 during 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 shell shock. Conker can't be a renaissance man if he already struggles with his main mechanic.
I’ve given up on making sense of Conker’s plot, but the ending of the game 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 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 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 or 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.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
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 by 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 was 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 1960s cartoon superhero Space Ghost and reinvigorated him into the realm of maturity, albeit with crude humor as opposed to dry, off-kilter 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 instead of 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 of 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 those with a wide proportional setting and expansive parameters. 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 during cutscenes interspersed between gameplay moments. On the 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 the screen never overflow and become jarring because the text refreshes with every spoken line, and conversing characters are never shown on the screen simultaneously. 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 every single NPC character's colorful stream of verbal sewage. 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 player's 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, after all. 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; 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 scatological 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 similarly recognize the events of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The pinnacle moment of each chapter is obtaining dollars: hopping, cigar-smoking stacks of money that serve 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 unlocks new areas and progresses the game, but I found this inconsistent. Judging from the placement of these chapters in the main menu, I completed the section with the barn way before the game was 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 collectible 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 on which his glass of milk resides is missing a leg, and he cannot hold it 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 sacrifices an infant dinosaur he hatches to gain further access to 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 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 a 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 on 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 90s and early 2000s, comedy’s initiative in raising the bar included the foulest and most 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 at how 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 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 game's severe mechanical problems. One would expect an adult-oriented 3D platformer to offer more of a challenge, but I feel 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 for “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, totaling 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, which isn’t fair, considering he’s a character with the power of flight. The player can execute a high jump and glide for a short distance, hurting 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 have made him half-paralyzed. Add a restricted, uncooperative camera in the mix, and the game reminds 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 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, 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. The 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 during 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 shell shock. Conker can't be a renaissance man if he already struggles with his main mechanic.
I’ve given up on making sense of Conker’s plot, but the ending of the game 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 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 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 or 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.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
Conker's does a good job at making all of the boss fights fairly enjoyable and the humor is still pretty on point. Some parts of the zombie + WW2 worlds are slogs to get through, but overall, I really enjoyed the variety of gameplay and spot on parodies presented throughout. I would be quite pleased if this got rereleased on PC with better controls.
It's an adult swim banjo game basically, and it's absolutely amazing