The Past and Times of Yore: Conkers Bad Fur Day

Release date: April 13th 2001
Genre: RPG/Platformer
Publisher: Rare
Developer: Rare
Platforms: Nintendo 64
Modes: Single-player

Well… how do I start? this game was quite something, I hadn’t really known much about Conker the Squirrel apart from my housemate Brok mentioning him, he made his first appearance in Diddy Kong Racing as a playable character with a limited storyline before Rare decided to grant him his own game. And so Conker’s Bad Fur Day (CFBD) was released in 2001 near the end of the Nintendo 64’s lifecycle and stretched the machine to its limits. When Brok used to talk about this N64 game with a usual cute character but dark adult themes and swearing I didn’t believe it at first, and then I saw some gameplay and was seriously like what the eff? This is actually a game, it really is like this, the swearing, the vulgarity and in something which looks from first glance like your usual cutesy platformer but then you look some more and oh wow it’s not at all. The very concept that a game like this could even exist on the Nintendo 64 was alien to me, even on the Playstation that would seem a bit odd. At first I didn’t really believe what I heard about it, but after seeing someone actually it I was like what the fackin hell? There’s a paintbrush and a bucket with eyeballs saying the F-word and at one point I swear I heard the C-word though some parts were still censored.

A particularly unpleasant dung beetle

Indeed the game was originally intended to be released as a family friendly platformer game similar to Rare’s other titles Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 however when the initial trailers were released there were calls that the game was just more of the same as they had done before so the game’s director Chris Seavor took the innovative decision to have lots of adult topics, graphic violence, sexual content, adult language, and dark humour. The change was a risky but a relative success however due to the content of the game it received little advertising as Nintendo Power Magazine and a number of toy companies who usually endorse Rare games refused to this time, understandably so. CFBD has since earned a cult following and no wonder, it stands as one of the oddities of the game world and a good one at that. I did intend to play the game via emulator to make full use of the massively better graphics but found that the rom had a few issues like right at the start it couldn’t render the drunken haze through Conker’s viewpoint and I wasn’t sure what else would go wrong so I decided to play on the Nintendo 64 cartridge.

Conker in the 'Hungover' section

The opening sequence is pretty awesome where an animated Nintendo logo walks in then gets sawn in half with a chainsaw by Conker who replaces it with the Rare Logo, now that’s an intro! The camera then swings into blackness then shows Conker entering a bar named the “Cock and Plucker” on a stormy night where he starts drinking with his military squirrel buddies and various other characters. The bar itself serves as the main menu of the game and you can access the save game slots as well as the multiplayer options. The game tells the tale of Conker the Squirrel and starts with him sitting on a throne in a medieval castle and through voiceover he explains the events preceding this moment as the camera pans out ClockWork Orange style, which I didn’t actually realise it was until I read about it. This is one of the many movie references in the game and I hope you like them cause there are tons more. It then cuts back to the bar where conker has had a little too much to drink and then calls his girlfriend Berri to say that he’s coming home before stumbling out. It then cuts to a scene in a castle where the Panther King is sitting on his Throne and accidentally spills his milk as one of the table legs is missing so in one of the most bizarre plotlines I’ve ever seen he employs his servant Professor von Kripplespac to help him fix it and for some reason Kripplespac concludes that a ‘red squirrel’ will make a great table leg so the Panther King attempts to track down and capture Conker.

The intro, man the first time watching this was weird as.

The next part of the game (aptly titled “Hungover”) is the tutorial where after walking out of the pub into the rainy darkness Conker finds himself in some kind of cavern and meets the scarecrow Birdy who tells you how you can use the B button on context-sensitive areas to do various things like shooting slingshots and crossbows and other weapons, however Conker can always use the B button to thwack things with a frypan. This tutorial introduced me to the somewhat challenging nature of parts of the game, as I was at a point where you need to smack a living key with eyes with your frying pan that was bouncing around trying to avoid you and seriously I just could not do it and almost gave up there. There were a few other times were I just gave up at that point too then tried again later, I can tell you now the game was not exactly what you’d call easy as was the theme back in those days. I remember when playing the NES most of the games were rock hard and didn’t have a save feature so all you could do was see how far you could get before game over.

"Birdy" explains the context-sensitive areas

But anyway I was determined to move forward so I persevered and after defeating a Gargoyle by one of the most cartoonish ways possible I was out into what you could call the main world hub titled ‘Windy’. From here you access all of the ‘chapters’ in the story (in a linear fashion), however playing the game I noticed there’s wasn’t really any clear path I just found myself walking around seeing what I could interact with. I did have to refer back to my housemate Brok an awful lot for tips and advice which was sometimes just simply where to go as he had previously completed the game. He was so helpful I didn’t even need to use a guide thought that would have helped as there was a lot of wandering around. The first task I did rescuing a hive for a Queen bee from some wasps and then it turning into an anti-air gun and shooting them down.

Running from the wasps in Windy

That wasn’t too weird but then I’m fighting a giant cyborg bale of hay, making a cows shoot diarrhoea then explode and then listening to a giant turd sing opera, you gotta see it to believe it. It’s sort of like you go from one crazy thing to the next mind you though it’s all a lot of fun (as long as you’re not easily offended) The game can roughly be divided into section as you go back to the ‘Windy’ hub world 3 times. One of my favourite sections was Spooky as most of it was truly frightening despite the cartoonish graphics, in fact all of it was frightening really. You never really know what’s going to happen next as the whole experience is so ridiculous anything and everything can happen though it plays out fine and the changes in theme/chapter happen gradually so it’s not like going falling into a giant toilet then landing in a prehistoric world, well almost. CBFD is jam packed with pop culture references from the Saving Private Ryan sequence in It’s War! to the Matrix Style Bank Robbery in the Heist chapter.


The 'Blood Hunt' scene from the spooky section

Controlling Conker isn’t too hard, the game is basically a platformer, you can do all the basics like running, jumping, swimming, crawling and balancing across tightropes, you can also do a tail hover thingy for aid in landing. Conker’s only permanent weapon is a comically huge frying pan which you can pull out and whack with the B button, all other abilities are context sensitive when you stand on an area which obviously has a big B printed underneath it so you know you can shoot your slingshot or crossbow or whatever. Conker also gets to use other weapons like the shotgun in the Spooky section and rides and drives everything from a raptor to a tank and gets turned into a bat at one point. Controlling Conker isn’t too hard but as I was playing the game on N64 with a TV that wasn’t made for it, I wasn’t always aware of where I was running or jumping i.e. what was a ledge or not.

At this point I am riding a living pitchfork

Being a game from the N64/PS1 era in the mid to late 90’s CBFD was remarkably difficult at times and more often than once I just gave up and left it to come back up to a week later to have another go or enlist help from my housemate Brok. One of the examples of this was fighting the Zombies in the Spooky Chapter and the ‘Mugged’ sequence in Uga Buga where you chase on hoverboards across lava, I swear that took me at least 20 goes to complete it. There is no difficulty setting so I couldn’t just put it on easy and coast through like I do so many other games today haha though I am proud to say I have completed the whole thing in its entirety. And this was no small effort, it was bloody hard and frustrating at times a much different from how I usually like to play games. But I beat it and that’s something as with these older games I usually just conk out towards the end where it starts getting tough and I think I’ve done enough.

This 'hoverboard' bit was very annoying indeed

As I mentioned before the game stretched the Nintendo 64 to its graphical limits and there was some notable slowdown in some places but overall it ran pretty well, the characters although crude and cartoony still had lots of detail and the animation was hilarious at times the way characters and objects hopped around, almost everything was a character really even the money you collected had eyes and talked. Speaking of the money that was the only thing you collected in CBFD in contrast to Banjo-Kazooie’s extensive item collecting. This time you had just one thing which talked to you, well I guess the Jinjo’s did too sort of. Conker plays an unlikely hero throughout the whole game, bumbling from one place to another and giving witty remarks no matter what situation he’s in comedic, dire or otherwise. There are so many movie, pop culture and historical references that you might only see the second time through. Rare shine again with their soundtrack offering a range of boppy tunes and orchestral music complete with hilarious sound effects. However the voice acting is what really shines for this game, it’s utterly amazing even with the limited quality sound that the N64 can provide. There’s no yabbering and twittering like in Banjo Kazooie, just straight up acting talent, especially in the ‘Sloprano’ section, I swear that was one of the best moments in my gaming history and I had already seen it before.

SPOILER ALERT, Possibly the greatest scene ever, if you're not going to play the game, then at least watch this.

I haven’t played much of the multiplayer modes but like the singleplayer mode they are fun, nasty and well made. You’ve got a wide variety of gamer modes to play which are themed from different parts of the game which is pretty cool in itself. For example you have Beach which is basically like the beach assault section of the game and a LOT like Unreal Tournament’s Overlord Assault map where one team has to storm a beach and get to safety while the other team hides in sniper towers and tries to stop them. There’s also a mode where you play as Uga-Bugas trying to steal raptor eggs or Raptors trying to eat Bugas, there’s your usual capture the flag mode between squirrels and Tediz and also a Heist mode where you play as weasels and try to bring a money bag back to your safe. Probably my favourite was the Total War mode which was sort of like a team deathmatch with a twist, you could capture a canister from the enemy base then bring it to a sewer and release poisonous gas killing everyone unless they are down in the sewer with you or have a gas mask. There is even a lava racing mode from that damn mugged section of Uga-Buga.


A bit of multiplayer in the Total War Mode

I can honestly say of all the games I have played this is one of the weirdest and most unbelievable, you would never have thought a game like this could exist, I mean yes there were controversial games like Carmageddon and Duke Nukem 3D but this I dunno, maybe I wasn’t paying attention but I never saw a huge media row over Conker which is surprising seeing what it was actually like, maybe it just wasn’t that popular and as I said before it was released at the end of the Nintendo 64’s Life Cycle. However it was successful enough to warrant a remake, Conker Live and Reloaded was released for the Xbox in 2005 and I’m looking forward to seeing what that the game looks like with some updated graphics to really display it’s craziness. Whether you think you’re into this type of game or you think you may be put off by the vulgarity you just have to have to play it trust me you have never seen anything like this before and with today’s PC nanny state you probably never will again.

JD

9/10

Things I liked:

There is seriously almost no game like this anywhere

Endless fun movie references and humour

Very creative platforming and minigame experience almost no section was the same.

Non structured level layout you had no idea where you would go next.

The Great and Mighty Poo

Many multiplayer modes with bot support.

Things I didn’t like:

Can be difficult at times.

Some slowdown and graphical issues due to limits of the N64

Sound quality a bit rough (again due to limits of N64 cartridges)

The original trailer

Going for number two will never be the same again