Conker’s Bad Fur Day Review

Ah yes, Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Every pre-pubescent boy’s childhood memory from the early 2000’s.

I played this game in its entirety and adored it. A replay has been on my backlog since 2011 and now I’ve finally tackled it. Oh boy, the nostalgia googles be very rose-tinted.

Disclaimer

I’m going to review this as someone who grew up in the 90’s and 2000’s. So I have an appreciation for the era this game came out during and will take that into consideration as I make comments.

However, this doesn’t absolve certain design decisions. The important question to ask when reviewing older material is to answer the question:

“If I could go back in time and redo this, what would I do differently?”

This takes into consideration the technological limitations at the time, as well as the societal perceptions or norms. But it leaves the artist the creative freedom to acknowledge mistakes or areas of improvement that are independent of the era.

Game Pitch

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a platformer for the Nintendo 64, released in 2001. The rough synopsis is that the titular character is trying to get home, after drinking and blacking out the night prior. However, there are many obstacles to overcome in this seemingly mundane task.

Obstacles such as:

• helping a “king” bee “pollinate” a well-endowed sunflower]2
• flushing down a giant sentient pile of poop, with a penchant for opera, living inside a giant dung beetle hive
• recovering cash from a vault for some cat-and-also-fish ladies, involving a fight with a mech, in the form of a boiler, with brass testicles
• sacrificing a baby dinosaur and becoming the leader of a tribe of cavemen
• freeing Conker’s girlfriend who is a gogo dancer in a dance club for rock people
• surfing a course of lava, on a hoverboard, in order to catch a band of of delinquent cavemen hoodlums who mugged you
• getting turned into a vampire bat by a discount dracula and fighting off legions of the undead trespassing on his estate
• surviving non-consensual enlistment to a war against an army of Nazi teddy bears
• reluctantly being pulled into a scheme with the mafia to remove the cavemen who are contending with the mafia turf. Then pulling a bank heist
• recreating the alien vs. ripley-in-an-exo-skeleton-suit fight scene
• incidentally usurping the throne from a tyrant whose downfall was inexplicably [hiring a mad scientist] instead of a carpenter

Somehow these events all interconnect. If this is not enough to compel you, then this very clearly not going to be up your alley.

Review

Story and Creatives

The story and design aesthetics are unparalleled. It’s truly unique and memorable. This is why it has a cult following. If it came out within the last decade, you would bet there would be a ton of internet memes from it.

Graphics

It’s quite beautiful, for the N64. With an emulator, you can upscale to a reasonable resolution and remove the anti-aliasing. This is enough to make it aesthetically appealing to replay. Add some shaders if you want to tweak with the design style but it has aged reasonably well. Being a cartoony, less realistic look.

There are so many cutscenes. For this era, it was unheard of for a cartridge-based console.

There are so many one-off animations as well. Conker has several idle animations. But what’s even cooler is that some are context-sensitive. Such as interacting with the butterflies in the background.

Audio

The amount of voice acting is incredible. It’s all really well done. Again, it’s uncommon for a cartridge-based console games to have this much voice acting. It contributes greatly to my memorable experience, as the voices are critical to the appeal of many characters:

• Berri’s valley girl accent
• Great Mighty Poo’s opera singing
• Mrs. Catfish’s old lady stereotype
• Hay Bot’s T-800 voice

As for music, it’s very well-suited. Very uplifting, easy-going. The one that stood out to me was the music in Rock Solid club. But that’s because it’s a rave with a bunch of rock people!

Controls

Oh boy, this is where we’ll lose some points.

There are some atrocious controls. Like purposefully bad. At the very least, they didn’t bother tweaking it.

I never developed confidence with Conker’s jumping and flying abilities. I never knew if he could jump high enough, if he could fly far enough, or if he was positioned to land correctly. This is not considered tight controls.

Controlling the dinosaur felt like a driving a tank. Not sure if it was purposeful but it felt like input delay. Gun control felt very twitchy. This is because the default joystick is 3rd-person movement and not strafing. So you can quickly 180, which is very fast for FPS. It’s simultaneously twitchy and sluggish.

The inverted y-axis control kept throwing me off. This is definitely a sign of its age, as it was very common for games to use inverted. There was no de facto setting yet. But many games let you customize this configuration. And the sensitivity needs to be customizable as well.

I’m not sure how this game continually gets praise for the refined, tight controls. Maybe all the N64 games has bad input? I don’t remember but I’ll keep an eye out for this.

Gameplay

There are lots of unique, experimental game play elements:

• zombie headshots
• laser mines
• surfing lava

This was Rare at their finest. Pushing the industry forward, being bold.

But there are so many bad things.

Shitty Camera

Many games in this generation suffered from poor camera. Everyone was trying to figure out this 3D gaming thing. But this game has some truly bad ones. There are some places you can’t move the camera. There are times when you can move it but it puts an obstruction directly in front of you.

And it’s so sluggish to use. And not sensitive. This is because it’s controlled with C-buttons, so there’s only binary input.

Swimming Levels

Swimming levels in many older games are bad. 3 dimensions in a game area that looks the same-ish and has crappy camera is a recipe for disaster. I continually lost my sense of direction in the shallowest of ponds.

I get it, swimming levels are hard to do. Humans have an additional sensory input to detect gravity. That needs to be replaced in-game, somehow.

Game balance

This game is incredibly unbalanced. The Spooy chapter literally has 3 pieces of chocolate. For 1-2 hours of gameplay. Why?

The surfing level is unforgiving and unnecessarily challenging.

Somehow I actually managed to overcome all these in my younger days. But for this recent run, I liberally used savestates and rewind. I don’t have time nor patience to tolerate this. I’m trying to maximize my experience and these challenges are simply in the way. They don’t give me further sense of accomplishment, they’re not “hard but fair”.

Summary

Overall, I would give Conker’s Bad Fur Day a 65%, from a modern-day perspective.

If you can tolerate and mitigate all the badness, the pop culture references and story has an undeniable charm to them. If you not in the mood for the challenge, I think this game would be a great candidate for Let’s Plays. You get to experience all the charm while someone else puts up with the infuriating game play.

This is a highly flawed game. A “recent” reddit post shares the same opinions I’ve made. The game is full of bad gameplay decisions and controls. But the charm of the story and aesthetic are not worth missing. This is why you’ll probably find polarizing reviews of this game. you might need to find out for yourself which side of the coin you are on.