Conker's Bad Fur Day

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Conker's Bad Fur Day
Developer(s)	Rareware
Publisher(s)	Rareware THQ (Europe)
Engine	Modified Banjo-Kazooie engine
Platform(s)	Nintendo 64
Release date	NA March 4, 2001 EU April 6, 2001 AUS March 27, 2001
Mode(s)	Single player, Multiplayer
Rating(s)	ESRB: M ELSPA: 15+ OFLC: M
Media	512Mb (64MB) cartridge
Input methods	Nintendo 64 Controller

Conker's Bad Fur Day is a Nintendo 64 video game developed and published by Rare, and distributed by Nintendo. The game stars Conker the Squirrel, a Rare character who had previously appeared in other games marketed towards children, such as Diddy Kong Racing for the N64 and Conker's Pocket Tales for the Game Boy Color. Marketed as an "adult" platform game, Bad Fur Day features scatological humour, cartoon violence, sexual themes and a penchant for parodies. A remake of the game was made available on the Xbox in 2005 in the form of Conker: Live & Reloaded.

[edit] Gameplay

In the single-player mode, the player takes on the role of Conker and plays the game in a free-roaming environment. Conker can duck and jump a high distance vertically, as well as jump at least twice his height in any direction. Conker can also spin his tail around quickly like a helicopter for a few seconds. Rather than give it an official-sounding name, as is the unofficial 'tradition' in the video game business, Conker just calls it the helicopter tail. This allows him to jump a little higher, navigate in the air to accurately land, and slow his descent if he's far from the ground. After a few seconds, the tail slows down, and he drops and isn't able to do it again until he's landed and jumped again. Besides this, he has few other physical powers. He can swim underwater for a while until he runs out of breath, jog indefinitely and not get tired, and is strong enough to push heavy round objects, which in one of the later levels are a "big bourgeoisie boiler's brass bollocks".

Conker can eat pieces of "Anti-Gravity Chocolate" to regain lost health. In a parody of similar platformers with unexplained floating pickups throughout levels, they were originally created by the Professor, but he threw them out the castle window when he started a new project.^[1] Afterward, Conker can eat up to six of them. There are two types of chocolate; regenerative chocolate and one-time chocolate. One-time chocolate disappears after eaten, and doesn't re-appear until Conker exits then re-enters the world. Regenerative chocolate re-appears 10 seconds after being eaten, apparently out of thin air. Antigravity chocolate does not provide protection against certain things, such as falls from especially high heights, being severed in two by spinning blades, or being dismembered in a grinder. However, it does protect against being hit with a heavy object from above, such as a large dollop of feces.

"Safe zones" allow Conker to do things he couldn't normally do outside safe Zones; he usually pulls a far-too-big thing out of his far-too-small pocket, although sometimes he turns into an anvil and slams into the ground. B-button pads under barrels of beer can give him "drunken" abilities as well (he is able to stagger around and urinate). Although most safe Zones only work once, some can be used more than once, or even indefinitely. However, most of the context zones lose their purpose after being utilized, even if they are continuously usable. These safe Zones usually take the form of "B-button pads", and sometimes activate while Conker is in mid-air. However, they are always activated by a press of the B button.

Much of the gameplay in Conker's Bad Fur Day features parodies of various movies, including The Terminator, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, The Wizard of Oz, The Untouchables, The Exorcist, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Blue Velvet, Alien, Aliens, Full Metal Jacket, The Matrix, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scarface, Jaws, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, The Godfather, and Saving Private Ryan as well as games like Resident Evil, Wolfenstein 3D, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Super Mario 64.

The game has a lot of strong language in it, but only censors the word "fuck" and "cock" with a beep, with the subtitles of the speech containing the word being flashing symbols in red, like skulls, spirals and lightning.

[edit] Multiplayer

Conker's Bad fur day is host to a multiplayer option as well, Featuring seven diferent minigames; Beach, Raptor, Heist, Deathmatch, War, Tank, and Race. It also has eight different levels, one for each mode. Health is measured in chocolates just as in the single player mode.

[edit] Plot

The story revolves around Conker’s attempts to get home to his girlfriend, Berri, after wandering into an unfamiliar place in a drunken stupor. While he is trying to get home, he also must avoid the minions of the Panther King, who wishes to use Conker as a side table leg. ^[1]

Near the end of the game, Berri and Conker are enlisted by Don Weaso, head of the Mafia, to rob a bank. When they get into the vault, they find the Panther King, who shoots Berri and prepares to turn Conker into a side table leg. About this time, Professor von Kripplespak , a scientist working for the Panther King, activates a xenomorph hiding in the Panther King’s chest; the xenomorph bursts out of the king, killing him. The vault then turns into a space ship and launches into space, where the xenomorph attacks Conker. Conker opens an air lock, pulling von Kripplespak into space and making it easier to fight the xenomorph.

As Conker is about to be killed by the xenomorph, everything freezes, and Conker is allowed to ask the Programmers for whatever he wants. He gets a sword and a shotgun, and is transported to the Panther King’s throne room. He then decapitates the xenomorph, and is crowned king. Conker is unhappy with this result, however, as he does not want to be king, and he forgot to ask the Programmers to bring Berri back.

[edit] Development

Conker's Bad Fur Day was originally going to be titled Conker's Quest and was later titled Twelve Tales: Conker 64. Early screenshots suggested the game would feature cute characters and colorful settings. Rare had a long history of making games of this sort, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing, and at first Conker did not appear to be any different. However, Rare started to fear that the game would simply get lost in the platforming crowd, and critical mockery of "yet another cute platformer" caused the original game to be drastically overhauled. When the announcement was made that Conker would be re-tooled into a "controversial" game with lots of scatological humor many did not initially believe it, and assumed the press release was an April Fools' Day joke. However, as the months went on, the change quickly was understood to be very real and permanent. Inspired by South Park, the game's producer, Chris Seavor, lobbied to revamp the graphics and attitude, and it transformed into Bad Fur Day. Seavor himself voiced Conker in this new version, along with all the male characters in the game except the Great Mighty Poo and the Fairy Panther King, who were both voiced by Chris Marlow. Louise Ridgeway voiced all the female characters in the game. The game was also different from the Banjo series and Donkey Kong 64 in relying far less on collecting a variety of items. When items were required they were usually to solve a puzzle in the immediate area, resulting in a cash reward, aiding access to other areas. Moves were also simplified by having "context sensitive" buttons. Aside from this, their previous 3D platformers had not been completely dis-similar (apart from also being platformers). For instance, the cocky attitude of Conker and other characters is arguably reflected, albeit to a much less frequent extent and without swearing, in a few aspects of Donkey Kong 64 eg. the no-nonsense Cranky Kong and the DK Rap. Whereas the Banjo series has a fairytale nature eg. with an evil witch, the beginning of Conker's Bad Fur Day, is like the 20th century fairytale The Wizard of Oz with a scarecrow (however foul-mouthed) and a yellow brick road.

[edit] Differences

The promotional videos and pictures from Electronic Entertainment Expo (at the time when the game was still called Twelve Tales) revealed objects and characters which have influenced the released game. Objects such as the flower and mushroom sprites were seen in the promotional video and a character closely resembling Buga the Nut was seen chasing Conker (who was wearing a knight's helmet) in a promotional picture. Conker's Bad Fur Day is considerably a far different game from the original plans despite the small influences it had on the release game.

The game's original ending was going to involve Conker walking up to a mirror in the pub, bursting into tears, pulling out a gun and aiming it at his head. The screen would fade out, and a gunshot would be heard. This ending was dumped because "It didn't spot much for a sequel." When Chris Seavor was asked about a new Conker game, he said it would focus entirely on the SHC/Tediz war, and Conker would be killed in the first scene.

[edit] Reception

When Conker's Bad Fur Day was released, many publications and websites considered the graphics to be the best to date on the N64 (even better than Perfect Dark's).^[2][3] The game featured dynamic shadowing (shadows stretch and skew depending on nearby light sources), colored lighting, and more. Though these graphics techniques were not completely unheard of at the time, they were still fairly new to video games. The game also featured large areas with a large draw distance and no distance fog, a rarity among Nintendo 64 games. Conker's Bad Fur Day also featured detailed facial animations including lip synching. Again, this wasn't the first game to do so, but at the time, the vast majority of 3D games had characters with completely static or minimally animated faces. Also some characters had individually rendered fingers rather than the standard "brick." In short, Conker's Bad Fur Day featured a number of technical effects that gamers were not yet used to seeing. Though for all of these graphical effects, the game did suffer from some frame rate drops.

Developer Rare had a close relationship with Nintendo and they are known for squeezing out as much performance as possible from a console. Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of the last games published for the Nintendo 64; Rare had all of their previous developing experience from ten published Nintendo 64 games going into the project.

Also notable was the game's large and diverse vocal track, which easily rivaled that of other N64 titles which were well-known in this regard, such as Star Fox 64. It should be noted that no other N64 title has come close to the amount of recorded dialog that Conker's Bad Fur Day has, which is considered to be a technological miracle (similar to the Resident Evil 2 N64 port with its FMV scenes almost fully intact) due to the N64 cartridge constraints. The game's soundtrack is also notable for having two or three different remixes of specific songs that interchange depending on what is going on within the game, such as a different mission or change in scenery (e.g.: the background music for Barn Boys is the same as the area preceding it, but is performed by banjos instead of a string ensemble) won the 2001 BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award for sound.

Even though the game fared well with critics in both the UK and US, it sold worse than expected, in part because of its prohibitively high cost and early 2001 release; a year later, the Nintendo 64 was discontinued after the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, yielding to the new GameCube system.

Nintendo of America refused to even acknowledge the game in its Nintendo Power publication (except for the playback in volume #230), and all advertising in the U.S. was limited to late-night cable television and ads in Playboy (in other regions, however, the advertising was far less limited). Despite (or perhaps because of) everything working against it, the game has enjoyed a cult following, actually growing in popularity despite it being for an older console. Although the game didn't sell as well as most Nintendo releases on the system, it went on to become moderately successful.

[edit] Legacy

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In 2005, Conker's Bad Fur Day was re-released on the Xbox as Conker: Live & Reloaded. This game features improved graphics, a new multiplayer designed for an Xbox Live-enabled campaign, and other Live support. Despite selling well the first week of its release, it fared worse than its predecessor. Critics voiced their disappointment that it had been a port rather than a entirely new Conker game. There is a "port" line delivered in the game by Conker concerning his belief that Live and Reloaded was just a straight port and not simply a "hack", referring to the dupe pulled on him by the game's developer during the training level. The single player game was also censored beyond the bleeps that had already covered "fuck" in the Nintendo 64 version. Live and Reloaded bleeps over additional words such as "shit", "twat" and "fellatio". The title of the game was subsequently changed from the earlier Conker: Live and Uncut in light of the censorship.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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