Conker’s Bad Fur Day, will there ever be a new Conker?

The king has turned 20 years old on March 5th, 2001 Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released on the Nintendo 64. Being one of the last big releases on the console, as a result, the game wasn’t a huge commercial success selling only 55 000 copies in its first month and IGN calling it a certifiable flop but that didn’t stop Conker from becoming a cult icon including a full-on remake eventually being just a few years later.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day

What is it about this adorable innocent squirrel that people love so much maybe it’s the fact that he’s none of those things except the squirrel thing at first he did start off as an adorable innocent squirrel in diddy kong racing then the developers at rare decided to give him his own game, which started out as a family-friendly title called 12 tales conquer 64? Originally planned for release in 1998 though back then there wasn’t much to separate Conker’s bad fur day from the dozens and dozens of other 3d platformers at the time.

So, the team of this game decided that the good way to separate it from the oversaturated market was to gear it towards adults. They didn’t do this by adding in a few swear words though they went all the way with it conker’s bad fur day is the epitome of messed up to call it a mature game would be the understatement of the century.

This game has it all bloodthirsty nazi teddy bears titillating sunflowers and great big mighty poos this game definitely has shock value going for it with fans and critics agreeing that it is also a great game. Even garnering must-play status on Metacritic but does it hold up exactly 20 years later well we’re about to find out as I only recently completed this game for the first time.

So what you’re going to hear in this retro review is the opinion of someone with no nostalgia or bias for conker’s bad fur day that said I am a huge fan of the developer rare as most of their games have aged like fine wine. Most notably banjo-Kazooie which I can still play today and enjoy every bit of, however, conker is not a collection platformer in the same vein as Banjo-Kazooie as it’s almost completely linear with you.

Conker’s bad fur day game story

Partaking in a variety of increasingly outrageous scenarios rather than looking for objects. Although you do collect dollar bills that shout obscenities at you hey I’m here hurry up pick me up in a sense conker’s bad fur day is like a mature version of Mr toad’s wild ride taking you through a series of loosely connected scenarios that may or may not scar you for life one minute.

You’re swimming in shark-infested waters the next minute you’re a vampire bat and the minute after that you’re on the beaches of Normandy it gets wild. Even the story itself is just ridiculous it begins with our furry protagonist having an awesome night out with the best lads and getting plastered in the process.

The following morning he wakes up with a bad hangover and just wants to go home to see his girlfriend barry and then go to sleep before taking a wrong turn and accidentally beginning his adventure and that’s it conker only wants to get home but a series of increasingly bizarre obstacles stand in his way from a gargoyle to zombies and even nazi teddy bears. The main villain if you can call him that is an evil panther king who wants nothing but to drink his milk but he can’t do that without a new leg for his table and his german scientist minion suggests using a squirrel as a makeshift table egg.

I’m not making this up this is a real plot point and it’s amazing no doubt the story is what everyone remembers from Conker’s bad fur day game not just because of the events that occur but also the overall tone it comes off as an adult parody of a children’s platformer made by rare.

The best part is that it was actually made by rare to see them parodying themselves is glorious, especially when inanimate objects with eyeballs are involved as they cuss up an absolute storm you better get this fat ass off from my back. Pronto objects that are most iconic are the sunflowers who have a gigantic pair of breasts that you jump on because of course who in their mind would come up with stuff like this.

Conker’s bad fur day characters

Probably the game’s director and lead designer Chris Seaver who voices the iconic character and the rest of the male characters with the exception of the great mighty poo but we’ll get to him later the part that’ll stick with me forever was when you had to get three cows to poop down a valve by feeding them prune juice and when you’re done with them you viciously blow them to smithereens with a bull that’s just oh I can’t even say that’s dark.

It’s just strange while this is indeed a very effed-up parody of children’s 3d platformers. Conger’s bad fur day also parodies movies more so in the second interesting part of this game these range from brief nods to blatant spoofs with entire levels dedicated to specific films I looked up a full list of the film parodies in the game and I was surprised to find that I missed a lot of them. Some of which were from before my time but also because the more subtle ones are easy to miss one thing is for sure though Chris Seaver is a big Kubrick fan, while I expected some of the bigger spoofs to feel date given.

The game’s 20 years old they surprisingly did not because the films referenced are absolute classics like saving private Ryan and the matrix heck some of these movies are still receiving new entries like the terminator, aliens, and again the matrix, and even though these spoofs are extremely in your face. The game still adds its own flair to them do you remember in saving private Ryan, when they fought a demented pack of teddy bears who conducted experiments on soldiers.

Conker’s bad fur day gameplay

Did we watch the same movie? the best parts of conker’s bad fur day. By far though are the bosses they’re not too advanced from a gameplay perspective but they’re perhaps the most humorous parts of the game. The first boss of the game appears to be a big giant bale of hay until it reveals itself to be a giant terminator. You have to trick it into electrocuting itself so you can press the giant button on its back again not a complex fight but did anyone expect a bale of hay to be a robot.

Another one of my favorites is the big guy a bourgeois big-bollocked boiler he has a deep manly voice right until you hit him in his gonads. You’ll then do this again with another boss Booga the nut where you gotta use your raptor friend to bite him right in his bugs and then take three big chunks out of his but you can’t come back from that. Of course, we can’t talk about this game without bringing up the great mighty pooh I am the great mighty pooh and I’m going to throw mine at your picture.

This you go through an entire level that is covered in poop you walk on it you swim through it you roll piles of it. So how do you think this? segment is going to end naturally by fighting a giant pile of poo that happens to be an opera singer it’s already wild enough to create a boss that’s a literal pile of feces but a pile of feces that can sing the boss itself, is simply having you throw toilet paper into his mouth but what makes him stand out. Isn’t just the fact that he’s a giant pile of poop but the lyrics he sings are wonderfully crass.

Conker’s bad fur day Xbox

Now I’m really getting rather battle like a niggly tickly shitty little tag nut when I’ve knocked you out with all my map I’m going to take your head and ram. I should point out though that if you play this on an Xbox series x or s you may find a glitch where he just stands there after a few attacks this was brought to rare’s attention in January. So, hopefully, they can fix this issue soon.

The humor in conker’s bad fur day is beyond crude and some of the jokes don’t age well as a result especially the ones that poke fun at sexual abuse namely the part where you’re forcing female cogs right below a male cog, who’s enjoying it way too much at least the part with the king b and the sunflower had some hint of consent but there was something way too dark going on with these cogs. Fortunately, they got revenge before they set off to the Caribbean.

I get that the humor is intended to be offensive but in this day and age. There are some lines you should not cross, the pitchfork attempts to commit suicide was funnier in 2001 not so much in 2021. Personally, I don’t enjoy the offensive parts of the game as much as I do the absurdly violent ones like when the bulldog shark gets loose and starts viciously eating the catfish. In the river that’s what they get for cheating me out of my ten dollars. There’s always something about cute cartoon animals getting vigorously slaughtered that I find amusing I should probably see someone about that.

Conker’s bad fur day Nintendo 64

Conker’s bad for a day is also a technical marvel for the Nintendo 64 taking full advantage of the hardware including an astonishing amount of high quality at the time voice work the level of detail within the worlds and on the characters are great too. Especially on conker who is incredibly expressive, it was not common to see expressive characters like this on the Nintendo 64. So, in that regard conger was sort of ahead of its time granted. I am playing the rare replay version which while using the exact same assets does run at a higher resolution and more stable frame rate.

But it’s still impressive to see the amount of work put into this game’s visual and audio presentation anyway I’ve talked a lot about the offensively absurd nature of conker’s bad fur day but because it’s a video game. We have to also judge it by the gameplay merits as well and if this game didn’t have the crude humor and bizarre story it just wouldn’t be a masterpiece by far.

Conker’s bad fur day controls

The most dated aspect of the game is the gameplay itself from the controls to the level design I first noticed that the camera controls were inverted and there’s no way to change that even if you could it’s still a sloppy camera and I spent a lot of time trying to fight it. So, I could see where I was going it’s especially worse when gunplay is introduced in the latter half of the game.

Nintendo 64 vs Xbox

These controls probably made more sense on a Nintendo 64 controller 20 years ago but with a modern Xbox controller everything is backward you hold the right trigger to aim down. The sights use the left stick to adjust your aim the right stick to move and the left trigger to shoot. These are the literal opposite controls you’d expect for a shooter game and I never got used to them the most frustrated I got with them was during the zombie graveyard section.

At first, I didn’t know you could aim down the sights with the right trigger, so I had to keep running around avoiding the zombies before they bum-rushed me in this section with no health pickups and even with the aiming. It was still a difficult fight even more difficult than the hallways filled with teddies. Still, this part overstayed its welcome and I groaned every time I was thrown into another hallway filled with laser traps and teddies around every corner.

The one mechanic that baffled me the most was fall damage I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been injured by a fall that was just a few feet even worse some of the levels are designed as if you can’t take fall damage by including a lot of pits and tall buildings that are easy to fall off of this happens to me a lot in the windy chapter. There’s also a part in the prehistoric chapter, where you have to get flung to the top of a dinosaur statue and it’s really easy to fall off.

Conker’s bad fur day game

This thing while you’re trying to get to its nostrils as it is conker’s bad for a day isn’t the most refined game in 2021 but there are still elements that are enjoyable. The bull riding section though a bit repetitive was fun in its own screwed-up way thanks to how easy the bull was to maneuver. I also had a blast playing as a vampire bat picking up villagers and throwing them in the meat grinder. If I had to pick a favorite chapter it would be Ooga Booga not because you sacrifice a poor baby dinosaur but because you get to carry a bomb for the mafia to blow the place up, which leads to a back-to-future style.

Hoverboard race against a group of cavemen and it concludes with an arena battle against fungi the raptor. Conker’s bad fur day game goes to places you would not expect which is what made me want to keep playing in spite of the frustrating parts. Unfortunately, a lot of the frustration comes at the end with the saving private Ryan section and the final boss sandwiched between these parts. Though is the brief but satisfying matrix level where you use slow-mo tactics to shoot up some soldiers and just when you think it’s about to end with a boss fight against the panther king?

A new parody burst right out of his chest and like the end of the movie conker men or squirrels a machine to take the alien down this boss takes some practice to defeat having you learn its quick attack patterns in order to get the jump on it and throw it out into space Mario 64 style. In the end, conker just shatters the fourth wall completely and asks the programmer to give him a samurai sword and bring it back. Some dead characters but he forgot barry who somehow ended up on this adventure with him and got thrown into space in that sense.

Conker’s bad fur day ending

The end of this game is not necessarily a happy one it doesn’t end with any celebration or happy music just conquer acquiring his throne and begrudgingly enjoying a glass of milk before going back to the bar. He’s probably disappointed because he knows he’ll never get a sequel so what did? I think of my first time playing conker’s bad fur day well when those credits rolled I felt rather mixed while I enjoyed most of the jokes and parodies aside from the ones that were too dark by today’s standards.

I also liked the bosses and the fun sections I talked about earlier those being the Ooga Booga chapter and the matrix fight scene. However, the last half of the game is filled with a lot of frustrating moments that I owed to some sloppy shooting controls and a final boss that took way too long to figure out. But as I sat down to write this review and later talked about it with my fellow game-explained colleagues I discovered that I liked the good parts way more than I disliked the bad parts.

Conker’s bad fur day game took me on a bizarre ride through every chapter and at the end of each one I couldn’t wait to see where it would take me next what was holding it back though were those frustrating and poorly designed sections involving a gun.

Play this game should have never had any fall damage and the aiming controls should have been seriously revamped. So in the end I liked conker’s bad fur day. In spite of its flaws and I may even play it a second time. Now that I’m more used to the controls and know how to go about the objectives after 20 years I would say it’s worth revisiting or playing for the first time.

If you’re a newcomer like me chances are you will be turned off by the parts of the game that haven’t aged well, but you may also enjoy the sick dark humor and the chaotic story conker’s bad fur day is not a masterpiece in my eyes but it’s something too unique to ignore the question. Now is if we’ll ever see conker again in a sequel or something else well if these past few years have taught us anything it’s that Microsoft hasn’t forgotten about conquer putting him in the game of project spark and nope.

So, hopefully, we’ll see more of him in this decade. If they are going to make a sequel, however, there are going to be some jokes that won’t fly today but that doesn’t mean they won’t be able to make a game as shockingly bizarre as the first one. There will probably be a lot more blood and a lot more swearing maybe we’ll get a mad max parody you know you want it anyway what do you think of conker’s bad fur day 20 years later do you still love it do you think it’s overrated?

conker’s bad fur day game