Conker’s Bad Fur Day Review

Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Rareware – Rareware – N64 – 2001

Reviewed in 2018

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is an 2001 action-platformer made by Rare for the Nintendo 64.  Rare was considered one of the best developers of the late nineties, going through a renaissance of huge hits including Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, and Diddy Kong Racing.  When Rare announced Conker’s Quest, everyone criticized Rare’s choice to make another cartoony rehash of Banjo-Kazooie.  As such, Rare overhauled the design and writing, giving the game a M-rated South Park-esque  tone and a new name, releasing to exceptional reviews.  Although a remake released in 2004 for the Xbox titled Conker: Live and Reloaded was received more mildly, Conker’s Bad Fur Day‘s humor , controls, and level design all age poorly to the point where the game is not fun anymore, and serves as the canary in the coal mine for Rare’s fall in the 2000s.

In Conker’s Bad Fur Day, you play as Conker, an anthropomorphic cartoon squirrel, Who after a long night of drinking is hung over and trying to find his way home to his girlfriend, Berri, while avoiding the evil panther king.  He does this by curing his hangover and helping out new “friends” along the way.

Conker is a product of its time.  Throughout the 90s, many corporation wanted to create an edgy cartoon mascot, whether it was Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, or Earthworm Jim.    Conker’s Bad Fur Day pushes the edginess such that the character is actually objectionable, not just “sassy”.  Conker gets himself into some precarious situations, whether it is peeing on partiers in a night club, recovering from a hangover,  accidentally killing his friends, or getting involved with the mob.  These scenarios are generally entertaining, but the writing is not nearly as funny as it thinks.  The humor is designed to be South Park-esque, relying on parody, sex, booze, and toilets.  While this may have had shock value at the time, now nothing here is shocking and just comes across as annoying or immature.  That’s not to say all the humor is bad – even some of the immature jokes land for great effect – but these are mostly funny for other reasons, great word play, absurdist situations, or the exceptional animations. When Conker gets drunk he smiles, hiccups as his eyes rolls, and his gait frequently changes between an off balance swaying walk to a quickstepping attempt to keep balance.  This exceptional animations service both the character development of Conker, and the humor of the game.   The parody aspects of Conker work fairly well, but references to the Matrix, Jaws,  Aliens, the Godfather, and Saving Private Ryan,  all date the game.  The only parody that really works is how the whole game is essentially a parody of Banjo-Kazooie and the whole collect-a-thon genre.  The thing bad about this unless the parody is really good, it just reminds you of better collect-a-thons (like Spyro the Dragon).

For gameplay, Conker’s Bad Fur Day cannot decide its audience.  Some sequences of the game are designed to be difficult, but with out the strong controls or thoughtful levels to make these sequences reasonable.  Conker is a slippery while running, and floaty while jumping.  This is only a problem because some levels are designed for pixel perfect precision, notably in The Great Might Poo boss fight (a fight against a pile of excrement that sings while throwing feces at you) or while escaping from the Tediz lair (a fictional group of National Socialist Teddy Bears).  While the base controls aren’t perfect, many sequences that have alternative control schemes,  which feel underdeveloped and don’t have forgiving level designs to compensate for them.  In a lava-boarding racing sequence, every crash instantly ends the race and the player must hold the control stick forward to continually accelerate, an uncomfortable positon to hold while still trying to steer.   This weakness in controls is systemic throughout the game, regardless whether you are controlling a T-rex, a tank, or pushing a giant stick of dynamite.   Many bosses require these alternative control schemes in order to beat them.  Some are brutally difficult because of the bad controls (final boss), but most are just super easy because you can exploit stupid enemy A.I.  Either way, they are only fun if the humor associated with the particular boss fight hits your fancy.

While the early levels are generally well designed and feature light platforming and basic puzzles, they almost all have a lack of direction.  At multiple points in the game, I was completely lost on where to go or what to do next.  Most of these things required me to either try something unintuitive or non-sequitorial – neither are fun. Examples would include back tracking for no reason and no indication, or enemies previously blocking paths disappearing without notice.  After a certain point the game switches from primarily platform action to shooter action, but the shooter levels are all lowlights.  The gunplay is an exceptionally weak showing, considering these are the creators of Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, and Jet Force Gemini.  The player cannot aim the gun while moving,  and stopping to aim leaves you vulnerable to attack.  In the levels designed for the gun play, the player can again exploit the poorly designed level by taking out enemies from safe vantages, or just to running pas them.  In the bad Tediz Lair escape sequence, the enemies always aim faster than you.  As such, you must run through the level praying you don’t get stun locked until death.  I barely lucked through this.

After playing through Conker’s Bad Fur Day I was exhausted and tired of the game.  The game had thrown me thrown a bunch of poorly made levels with brutal control schemes that I was ready for it to be over. The dated humor felt like it tried to be edgy and failed, and the gameplay was so underbaked I couldn’t tell the focus of the game.  While the concept was interesting, and I could always count on the animations for a good laugh, I was ready to move on to a different game and thoroughly surprised at the acclaim that the game had received so far.

 

Pros

• Amazing Animations
• Fun concept
• Decently designed early levels
• Effective as a parody of collect-a-thon genre

 

Cons

• Dated film References
• “Funny & edgy”
• bad camera
• cheesy bosses
• dated film references + humor
• not as funny as it wants to be
• constantly switching control scheme with different “wacky random” action sequences that always suck
• no direction in game -just try random things and hope they work

4.0 /10 –  bad

 

Played with Pat, and a little bit with Mati and Connor, another time with Ryan, a little with Aiden, and a final bit with Faith.  Approximately 17 hours until completion.