Conker's Bad Fur Day

"If Nothing Else, This Is The Funniest Game Ever Made!"

Holy balls of flaming poo! I would've thought that after making constant games featuring big cuddly bears, Mickey Mice, and clumsy gorillas named ''Donkey,'' that the the collective minds at Rare would have turned completely to mush by now. But oh no, no, no, that is far, far from the truth boys and girls. No, the minds of the good people at Rare have definitely not turned to mush, but far to the opposite, they should now officially be committed.
Well I might as well tell you about the basic premise of the game, which quite frankly, there isn't much. Not to it's disadvantage though, the simplicity of it is really nice for a change, you'll find none of the countless trips back and forth between levels just to pick up stupid little items (which in my opinion, is a Godsend). Anyway, the world Conker lives in is very nicely done. You start at a fork in the road, to the left leads up a hill to some very angry bees (aptly named ''mother buzzers'') and their hive, as well as the entrance to the War level. To the right you will find a path that takes you over a bridge to another fork in the road where you can choose to go up a spiraling hill to the left leading to a light house, or to the right, find your way up a hill guarded by giant bugs which leads even further into Conker's world. From here you can go right which will lead you to an impassable bridge (you don't get to go to the other side until close to the end of the game so I wont tell you what's over there, other than that it's very very cool) or to the left which leads you to poo mountain. You herd right, poo mountain. From poo mountain, you can get to the top of a large waterfall (which leads to another level) or go through a cavern to get to yet another level. You'll also eventually be able to go inside of poo mountain to face the Great Mighty Poo (this has to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen! Get your VCR ready for this!).

Well now that you know a little about where Conker does his business, without further adieu, I present the review of this marvel of a game. Caution! This game is meant for mature audiences only (that means none of you kiddies, hehe)!

Graphics: The graphics in Conker have to be among the best ever for the Nintendo 64. Although they're not that big of an improvement over Banjo-Tooie (which I'll be drawing many comparisons between) for the most part, what they did improve really make the game look great. For example, in Banjo-Tooie there was really a big amount of slow down, where as Conker has a really great frame rate regardless of the nice graphics, and the frame rate also never goes below it's 40-45fps level. For a good idea of what to expect, think back to how Mario 64 played and you'll have a good picture. For another example, Banjo-Tooie was also the host of quite a bit of clipping and draw in, while Conker's characters and landscapes look solid as a rock, making the cartoon like image all the more believable. Finally, even though Banjo-Tooie had quite good shading and lighting effects, Conker just improves upon it completely. All together Conker really makes Banjo-Tooie look first generation (despite BT being one of the best examples of the N64's capabilities).

Another thing to mention is that although they really didn't STEAL it, they did borrow many effects from Ubi Soft's Rayman 2 such as the streaming water which makes the water look to flow seamlessly in whichever direction it takes by linking many flowing animations together (they also used this technique for a lot of the poo animations hehe). There are also plenty of small details such as entire animations for flowers and how the poo or water drips off of you after you swim in it. Overall, very very nice. 10/10

Gameplay: I wont go into too much detail here because if you've played any Rare or Nintendo platformer then you've basically played them all (game play wise), but I will give a small over view. Basically it's like this: The control stick is how you move Conker, A to jump, B to use your frying pan (Conker's weapon for most of the game), Z to duck (press A while ducking to do a high-jump), R to go into first person mode, and the C-buttons for the camera (while holding R press the C-buttons to strafe). To tell you the truth, that's actually quite a bit simpler than most other Rare platformers (which is good, not bad) since the other ones usually use the C-buttons for actions.

Now that I've covered that I'll tell you a little about the game's flow; it's also similar to Rare's other games, just not as tedious since there isn't much back tracking. You just have one large area (the area I described in the intro) to rome around and you enter each level through this area, and after you win you don't have to look back (Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo-Tooie had you running back and forth between levels collecting stuff all of the time). Although this does make the game quite a bit shorter (I beat it in thirteen hours), I'd much rather have an amazing thirteen hours then 50 tedious and annoying hours. Like the graphics; overall, very very nice. 9/10

Sound: Have you ever played Rayman 2? Well this game has a lot in common with it in the sound department. Anyway, if you haven't played Rayman 2 I'll try to describe what I'm talking about. In Rayman 2 the sound was very nice, a LOT like a Disney movie, great samples, great voices (well, little bleeps and blips in Rayman 2's case), great everything. Conker is much like it in the way it sounds just like you're watching a Disney movie (albeit a very naughty Disney movie ^_^).

The sound effects are great as well. You get the basic ''cha-ching!'' sound when you grab some money (which sure likes to curse at you as well! Any game that has cursing money is great in my book!), you get a quaint gurgling sound when running through poo, nice splashing when jumping through water, hell, even the constant farting noise that comes out when you enter poo mountain sounds good (for what it is!). Finally, I must tell you about the voice overs. The voices in this game are really great (most N64 games don't even have voices!), especially considering how wide the variety of characters are (and very surprisingly, there are only two voice actors divided among all of the characters!) from the laid back tone of Conker, to the classic vampire speach of your great grand father the Count, to powerful Panther King's voice, to of course, the greatest spectacle in the voice department, the Great Mighty Poo's beautifully funny opera singer voice! Put simply; this is the best sound you can find on Nintendo 64. 10/10

Replay: Well if it were just the normal game this score would be about a 5 or 6, but not only do you get the amazing one-player game in this package, you also get an amazing multi-player mode to boot! There is a really wide range of the multi-player games you can as well, I'll try to give a quick description of a few of them right here:
-First of all, there is the straight death match. The name says it all, grab a weapon, kill some people, get some points, win a round. Simple, yet fun.
-Secondly we have the ''War'' mode. This mode is much like the actual assault phase in the ''War'' level of the one-player game. Basically, one team is the Frenchies (the good guys) and one team are the Tediz (the bad guys). The Tediz start in pill boxes with huge machine gun type things and try to mow down as many Frenchies as they can as the Frenchies try to run up the hill.
- Next, the race mode. This is just a simple hover board race. 2 tracks, simple yet pretty fun.
- The Heist: This is my favorite one. It's basically a cool version of capture the flag. It starts off where you pick a color robber (a take of from the Reservoir Dogs movie)then you and the 3 other robbers all start out on opposite sides of the map. From there everyone has to rush to the middle to try to take a bag of money and return it to their safe to get a point. The first to 3 money bags wins. But the fun part is that you start out with a baseball bat, and boy is it fun to smack people over the head repeatedly with a nice baseball bat!
Anyway, that's only about half of the great multi-player games included here, so as you can tell, you'll probably have yourself quite a bit of fun in multi-player as well as single-player (provided you have some friends ^_^). 9/10

Overall Conker is definitely worth your money as it provides an amazing one-player game and an amazing multi-player game, complimented by it's great graphics and great sound. BUY THE DAMN THING! NOW!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/13/01, Updated 03/13/01