Conker's Bad Fur Day
System: Nitnendo 64
Publisher: Rare & Nintendo
Developer: Rare
Released: March 5, 2001
Genre: Action/3-D Platformer
Capabilities: Up to 4 Players, Rubmle Pak Compatible

The Above images show how wacky this game can really be, and how Rare made a cutesy game into the most gruesome game ever
to appear on console. Picture Credit(IGN.com)

Note: If you’re offended by adult language, don’t read the sound category of the review where I give examples of the games mature dialogue.

The Original Game

A couple of years ago at various game trade shows like E3, Space World, and the quarterly CES’s Rare showed off work on a new 3rd person perspective game with a squirrel named Conker, in an 3-D platform game that had a cutesy resemblance to Banjo-Kazooie, and had other promised special modes 4 man multi player. The game was tentatively titled Conker: Twelve Tales. Meanwhile during development, the Conker character debuted, in all his cutesy disguise, in Diddy Kong Racing, the Rare approach at Mario Kart. Also a little later in 1999, Conker debuted his first stand alone title on Game Boy Color, Conker’s Pocket Tales, an action game with the cutesy Conker character.

The New Game

It was around this time that Rare decided to give Conker: 12 Tales for N64 a complete overhaul. Rare most likely thought it did enough cute/average 3-D platform games for the N64 with games like Banjo-Kazooie in 1998, Donkey Kong 64 in 1999, and Banjo-Tooie in 2000. So they decided to make the lovable Conker character into a smart-ass, loud mouth swearing, hung over pest! The game now has a more adult look to the game, and is something never approached before in this genre (Perfect Dark is a FPS, not a platform game), and even though Nintendo is helping Rare distribute the game, the head honcho at Nintendo must not want people to know they are doing this because they aren’t giving the game any coverage at all in there official mag, Nintendo Power. So will this new overhaul satisfy the fans; or end up as a poor attempt at adult humor? Let’s get onto the review and find out. Oh, yeah, one more thing, as far as those big disclaimers those other reviewers are putting out for the game, here’s mine:

For mature gamers only.

The Story

The games story is rather unique and generic in a weird combination. After lying to his girlfriend, Berri of his whereabouts, and getting plastered to death at the local pub, our main character of the game, Conker finds out that the evil Teddy Bears had started to conquer the land of the squirrels, and now he must stop the evil Panther King, a creature who betrayed the Kulas race of squirrels a long time ago (yes, Rare named something after my real life, last name, I have close contacts there and they promised they would name something after me in this game, too bad this is the best they could come up with, don’t believe me? Check in the manual) and went out to start his own evil dynasty. And now you, Conker, with the help of a drunk scarecrow by the name of Birdy, must now go out and rid the world of the evil Panther King and evil Teddy Bears.

Graphics

Oh, my gosh. These are graphics are just marvelous to start out with. Big, bright, shiny, polished visuals you’ll automatically see in the games cut-scenes and game play. The characters have an unbelievable amount of detail, like Conker, when he’s hung over in the beginning of the game, you sure as hell can tell by his slow movement, and animations of him trying to jump and punch. Also the game has animated mouths of the characters speaking, lip synching if you prefer, and it is quite accurate with the games actual dialogue. It makes you wonder why Rare didn’t do it for Perfect Dark. The games environments are also just wonderful. First impressions in single player are a magical type of happy land you explore in. I’m guessing Rare must’ve used the original Twelve Tales game levels and added enhancements to them like Barb Wire, and other adult related stuff like alcohol to make this game more aimed at mature people. The game has lots of splendid animation I might add. The game is rather extraordinary gory, because whenever you hack and slash at opponents, big drops of red come right out of them, and yes, I mean more blood then Mortal Kombat 1 through 4 combined! Replace the red blood with yellow lines when the squirrels and other characters decide to “urinate” in the bathrooms.

The surprising thing is that you think because of how well this game looks that this title would make maximum use of the expansion pak, right? Think again, no use of the expansion pak at all, I’m just outright surprised at how beautiful the single player is, and jaggy free without the added VRAM, in multi player however, things do look a bit less detailed, and not as polished with 3 or 4 people playing at once, and there are some noticeable jagged visuals, but nothing major, or distracting. And rarely during single player, the game seems to be a little off at times when maneuvering around your environments. Other than that, the graphics are one of the best parts of the game.

Sound

You got a typical war theme music to most of this game, and during other parts you oddly have some youth oriented themes, which I guess must’ve been some stuff leftover from Twelve Tales. The music, for the most part, is not bad at all, and you really won’t even notice it that much during the heat of action. The sound effects are pretty standard, and everything sounds appropriate and they way it should like hops, punches, gunfire and so on. The thing that amazes me the most about the audio is the amount of digitized voice they add in the game. The game has loads of dialogue during the cut-scenes and at the beginning of multi player scenarios with characters explaining game modes. Plus the game has lots of in game player chatter that will bring you memories of the old FPS, South Park on the N64 with lots of bleeped out words, I was surprised at some speech that didn’t get bleeped out that you think would. Like the “S” word that gets heard a lot by characters throughout the single play game like “Let’s beat the S*** out of him!”, also more explicates like “Hell,” “Ass,” “Ass-Hole,” “Arse,” and even the quote of mad creatures yelling “You Son of a Bitch!” that can be heard as plain as day. Really gutsy efforts at Rare to manage to let Nintendo keep this stuff in the game and still slap the Nintendo seal of quality on the box (though its worth mentioning that the seal is on the back of the box in the upper left hand corner, where people usually don’t look, and it’s tinier then usual.) The only drawback for the sound, is that on some occasions, the voices can be quite slurred and hard to make out, but you got the comic-type boxes with captions for an incentive.

Game play

The controls are just like what you’d expect out of any 3rd Person perspective game, with free 3-D movement, via the control stick. Jumping with A, and pressing A again in mid air to do a flying helicopter Tail spin. The B button makes you jab, and holding Z makes you crawl. The C buttons rotate the camera, and the R shoulder button gives you a 1st Person view of the area you’re in. Controls aren’t customizable, but should be enjoyed by standard since this is the way most platform games are on the N64.

The games single player mode is a blast to play, and involves lots of game play elements other than blasting stuff away. You gotta solve puzzles and achieve certain goals, like returning a honey comb back to the queen bee by avoiding getting nailed by a group of wasps, and you get to do races on a jet board and raptors to advance to other areas in the game, not that common kind of stuff you would find in most platform games. Once you’re all tired out of the rather short time to beat the single player game, you got 7 different multi player modes to choose from! And it sure as heck delivers. Unlike most other games that have various multi player scenarios, these extra scenarios are actually a blast in the game. I really can’t pick out any flaws in the games main engine, not much slowdown whatsoever, or problems with game mechanics. The only thing that really bothers me is that your life bar is made out of a chocolate bar. I don’t know, that just doesn’t make sense in this type of game.

Replay Value

The single player is fun to play! The bad thing about it is that it takes about 15 hours to beat on your first time around. Heck, I’ve been getting other reports saying that this game takes about only 9 hours to beat also. So you think Rare would add lots of extras to keep you hooked? Well, they did. You can access any of the games parts and replay them over and over in the chapters mode. And the multi player’s seven modes will keep you occupied for a great deal of time. They modes like where you race on Jet Boards (the only 2 player multi mode, the rest or up to 4 players), you also got modes like War which is a lot like Capture the flag, and Heist, which is in a way, an odd form of Frag Tag, you also got some other unique multi player modes like Beach, where you got to get past lots of trenches and plains of gunfire and bombs to make it home safe, and Raptor where you can be either hungry dinosaurs munching on poor Uga’s, the other selectable race who try to steal their eggs for a meal. You also got a tank mode where you battle other tanks in a mini arena for all out war, and plus you got the standard death match mode, where you try to blast your opponents away in several arenas using various weapons and explosives.

In Brief

+: The single player is really fun to play, Lots of multi player modes to keep you hooked, Awesome graphics and Sound

-: Game only takes a little while to beat, Some camera problems pop up occasionally, why on earth do we have chocolate health bars!

The Final Ratings Rundown

Graphics: 9.8
Sound: 9.5
Game play: 8.7
Replay Value: 8.2

Overall: 9.0

Rounded to fit GameFAQs Score: 9

Comments

Kudos, again to Rare to keeping their track record flawless for N64 with their last game for the little system that could. This game will down with the rest of their N64 titles: Killer Instinct Gold, Blast Corps, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Donkey Kong 64, Goldeneye 007, and Perfect Dark, that established the N64 as the king of second party software!

As on the opinion on weather or not you should get the game, it varies, if you’re looking for a good single player game, this would be it, but it you’re getting it just for the single player, I suggest renting it once or twice because of the short time it takes to beat it, and even though you can play against the computer in multi player, it’s just not the same against real people. And if you’re more of a party goer, than this will go down as another great multi player hit for the N64 with countless other titles. Also your tastes in game content will be another key motive on weather or not you want to purchase this game if you couldn’t tell already.