Conker's Bad Fur Day Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 1/22/2023)

[Image from igdb.com]

Conker's Bad Fur Day

Developer: Rare

Publisher: Rare

Genre(s): 3D Platformer

Platforms: N64

Release Date: March 5, 2001

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was the perfect swansong for the N64. What better game to send off the console other than with a crass, anarchic romp that wiped its ass with the family-friendly foundation that Nintendo facilitated and by the third-party developer that arguably made the greatest contribution in cementing its accessibility? Unsuspecting consumers assumed that Conker’s Bad Fur Day was yet another innocuous 3D platformer due to its Rareware pedigree and the fact that the game featured a furry, anthropomorphic protagonist. However, they were all flabbergasted at the game’s true colors underneath its intentionally squeaky-clean surface, even though the game box art featured an M-rating along with a disclaimer explicitly stating that this was not a game for children. All the while, Conker is holding a frothy mug of beer with his disturbingly voluptuous girlfriend, Berry. Even if someone is experiencing Conker’s Bad Fur Day knowing full well that the game is intended for mature audiences, the content is still pretty shocking. Rare created a game that shifted the light-hearted tone of their smash hits Banjo Kazooie and Tooie on its head without altering the cherubic visuals, inflicting obscenities on its storybook fantasy world and the cuddly characters that reside in it. Conker’s Bad Fur Day snuck in viscera and vulgarity into the pristine 3D platformer genre like a trojan horse, and uneducated parents were mortified when they inadvertently exposed their children to it. Grand Theft Auto III, another game released in 2001 that also garnered levels of contempt from the PTA boards around the world, at least made it obvious that children shouldn’t play it. On the other hand, Conker’s Bad Fur Day villainously duped parents with a level of deception that shattered their trust in the gaming industry, even though Nintendo did its best to warn them. All controversies aside, the provocative premise of Conker’s Bad Fur Day made it a breath of fresh air. The N64 was overflowing with many bright, cutesy 3D platformers thanks to Super Mario 64. The adult content of Conker’s Bad Fur Day acted as a self-effacing parody to signify that the genre had stagnated and needed to be buried alongside the console that harbored them. If Conker eviscerating the N64 logo with a chainsaw in the game’s introduction isn’t emblematic of its ethos, I don’t know how they could’ve conveyed it more overtly (okay, maybe Banjo’s severed head hung up on a plaque over the bar in the main menu). No one will argue against Conker’s legacy as a subversive title, but whether or not the game is up to snuff with its fellow 3D platformers mechanically is a point of contention.

Rare didn’t just whip Conker out of their ass when they sat down to devise the components of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Squirrels are certainly an appropriately adorable animal, but it’s questionable where they fit on the hierarchy of cuteness next to cats, dogs, or even other woodland critters. Conker was once a budding IP Rare introduced by making Conker a playable character in the 1997 N64 title Diddy Kong Racing. The Conker IP debuted on the Gameboy Color with Conker’s Pocket Tales, a simplistic action-adventure game marketed towards a very young demographic, as one would expect from a game featuring a cartoon squirrel. Rare was initially developing a fully-fledged console follow-up on the N64 titled Twelve Tails: Conker 64, but the early reception was less-than-enthusiastic. Developers were worried that kiddy Conker would wilt under the overcasting shadow of Banjo-Kazooie, for the game mirrored the inoffensive, mirthful atmosphere of the Banjo games to the point where it seemed derivative. In order to give Conker an identity of his own, Rare pulled what Hannah-Barbera did with obscure 1960s cartoon superhero Space Ghost and reinvigorated him into the realm of maturity, albeit with crude humor as opposed to dry, off-kilter absurdism. Immediately, Conker’s Bad Fur Day illustrates the squirrel’s transformation in the opening cutscene when he leaves his girlfriend Berri a message from a bar payphone to tell her he’s coming home late so he can buy another round with the boys. He gets sloppy drunk, ralphs on the ground, and loses himself in a drunken stupor. Whether it's a matter of lying to his girlfriend or binge drinking, Conker is clearly an adult putting himself in adult situations.

Ironically, Conker’s Bad Fur Day excels the most in the least edgy aspect found in the game, and that’s its surface-level presentation. The most fortunate thing about being the last hurrah in a console’s lifespan is having the advantage of hindsight paved by the shortcomings of your predecessors who were busy finding their way through uncharted territory. In the annals of gaming history, there hasn’t been a more arduous terrain to trek through than buffing out the cracks of 3D graphics in the N64 generation. Conker’s Bad Fur Day couldn’t transcend the rudimentary snags that beset the N64, or at least to the point where the player could clearly discern every strand of fur on Conker’s body. After five years of developing early 3D games on a console that looked like blocks of airbrushed chunks of cheese, Rare flaunted their experience in developing for the N64 and made a game that proved to be the pinnacle of the system’s capabilities. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is, bar none, the most gorgeous N64 game from a graphical standpoint, something unexpected from a title that brandishes such vulgar content. The graphics here don’t look too unfamiliar to the typical N64 aesthetic, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day pushes itself beyond its contemporaries through an elevated scope. I’ve always claimed that early 3D games that adopted a more fantastical, cartoonish style looked the most appealing. The developers could render something fittingly unrealistic under the confines of early 3D instead of attempting to emulate actual humans and real-world environments to expectedly lackluster results with such games as Goldeneye. Conker’s Bad Fur Day could essentially function as an interactive cartoon like all of its fellow 3D platformers, but the secret ingredient lies in taking the wide scope of some of Banjo’s levels and using that design consistently. The area of Conker’s Bad Fur Day that acts as the nucleus of the game’s world is a hub whose grassy valleys and hilly peaks create a diverse range of elevation, making Conker look small and insignificant. Interior areas such as the gothic castle and the prehistoric chamber are magnificently spacious, and the inner sanctum of the dung beetle’s operation is like a poopy Paradise Lost. Even the cliffside waterfall in the tutorial section looks splendorous. The best levels from the Banjo games were those with a wide proportional setting and expansive parameters. Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes something relatively cohesive with the same design philosophy. With a few refinements to the shape and tints of character models and settings, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes it apparent how far the N64 has come since Mario was hopping on a series of colored blocks in the N64’s infancy.

Another contributing factor to Conker’s stellar presentation is its cinematic flair. The game doesn’t present itself as if Hideo Kojima is at the helm, but like with its graphics, Conker’s Bad Fur Day makes due with what the N64 obliges and delivers spectacularly. A substantial portion of Conker’s Bad Fur Day’s humor is delivered through dialogue during cutscenes interspersed between gameplay moments. On the screen, dialogue is presented through speech bubbles, a fittingly comic touch that accentuates the game’s cartoon visuals. Bubbles with text that pop up on the screen never overflow and become jarring because the text refreshes with every spoken line, and conversing characters are never shown on the screen simultaneously. As you can probably guess, a strong facet of the game’s vulgarities is the foul language that spews from the mouths of the characters. Funny enough, Conker’s dialogue is saintly compared to every single NPC character's colorful stream of verbal sewage. Maybe this was done to make Conker seem more like a stranger in a strange land, a hostile environment marked by inhospitable rudeness. Either way, the language in Conker’s Bad Fur Day is caustic enough to make an aging schoolmarm say seven hail marys. Another surprising choice from the developers regarding the dialogue was to censor the word “fuck.” Don’t worry: the mother of all swear words is used frequently by the characters in a myriad of varieties, but any utterance of the word is bleeped like it’s on TV with a series of violent characters obscuring the word in the speech bubble. Somehow, keeping the overall language PG-13 by censoring “fuck” makes the game sound more explicit, with the grating sound of the bleep ringing louder in the player's ears than if they kept the dialogue as is. I’m surprised none of the NPCs ever told Conker to see you next Tuesday if you catch my vernacular. Rare is a British company, after all. Speaking of which, a mere three voice actors deliver the profane lines, and they all struggle to mask their British accents. Some voices, like Conker, occasionally seep in a British inflection on what seems like an accident, while others, like the dung beetles, sound like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis. Whether or not the voice actors are making an attempt to veil their accent, the cadence of the line deliveries consistently sounds like the voice is an improvised impression that is slowly deflating. Do not expect vocal performances with range or emotion; I’ll give the developers the benefit of the doubt that perhaps it’s another mark of the game’s wacky eccentricities rather than bad direction.

Also, do not expect Conker’s Bad Fur Day to amaze the player with an extravagant plot. Conker’s mission throughout the game is just to find his way home, like a scatological Homer’s Odyssey. Conker’s journey is a roundabout trek through a no man’s land where each step onward won’t lead him closer to his goal but provide another distraction with its own secondary arc. Any characters Conker comes across have a perfunctory presence whose transient impact on the story leaves no lasting impression. Sections of the game’s story are listed in chapters, divided by notable scenes like how the aforementioned Greek epic is structured. Similar to how everyone remembers individual parts of The Odyssey, such as the bout with the Cyclops or avoiding the Sirens, the player will similarly recognize the events of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The pinnacle moment of each chapter is obtaining dollars: hopping, cigar-smoking stacks of money that serve as the game’s one collectible. Adult Conker is a man’s man who is motivated by money, alcohol, and poontang, so of course, all three of these things are featured in his mature breakout title in some capacity. The cutscene that triggers when the player collects these wads of cash shows Conker’s pupils shifting into dollar signs as they scroll up in his head like slot machines, with Conker expressing an ecstatically wide, toothy grin. If you’ve played any other 3D platformer game, you’ll know this is a nod to the brief, victorious celebration that a character performs when they earn another one of the main collectibles (Super Mario 64, Banjo, Jak and Daxter) and Conker’s expression never fails to amuse me. I’ve heard that collecting the money unlocks new areas and progresses the game, but I found this inconsistent. Judging from the placement of these chapters in the main menu, I completed the section with the barn way before the game was intended, and the game did not direct somewhere else on the map.

I’d claim that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a deconstruction of the archetypal hero’s journey, like the cash collectible is for gaming tropes, but I feel I’d be giving the game too much credit considering the half-assed conflict scenario they conjured up. Meanwhile, the Panther King, the mighty monarch of this land, notices a problem while sitting on his imposing throne. The table on which his glass of milk resides is missing a leg, and he cannot hold it due to its irregularity. His scientist advisor deduces that placing a red squirrel as an alternative for the missing leg is the only logical solution, for a red squirrel is the optimal size and color. The Panther King’s weasel army sets out to capture Conker so their snarling highness can drink his milk in peace. Is this really the best source of conflict you could come up with, Rare?

Perhaps I can’t be too critical of the game’s arching plot because it seems evident that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a series of events that serve as a collective. Because the nature of this kind of story is episodic, a good ol’ highlight reel is needed to detail Conker’s finest moments. Calling Conker’s Bad Fur Day crude is a statement that even Captain Obvious wouldn’t bother to utter. Each chapter in the game involves a fresh slew of characters and scenarios, so the game has plenty of opportunities to be uniquely offensive. For those of you who are particularly squeamish, chapters like “Windy” and “Barn Boys” feature the visceral combustion of precious farm animals. Conker feeds an irritating rat so much cheese that the gas built up by lactose causes him to inflate and explode like a watermelon, while the cows are disposed of by the ramming of an irate bull after they defecate enough for the dung beetle’s liking. Several local villagers are abducted by Bat Conker in “Spooky” and are liquidated by a spiky, medieval contraption in a room of the Count’s mansion as a means for the ancient vampire to feast on their gushy remains. Conker sacrifices an infant dinosaur he hatches to gain further access to the “Uga Buga” level, where a giant stone slab crushes the adorable beast into bloody mincemeat. To be fair, the creature had blood on his hands as he devoured every caveman in sight until he was pulverized. If blood and guts don’t turn your stomach, Conker’s Bad Fur Day also offers up a slew of raunchy moments involving intimate bodily fluids and lewd, sexual content. One of Conker’s adult vices that I briefly touched upon was alcohol, and the stupid bastard didn’t learn his lesson from the night before. In two sections, guzzling booze from a keg will get Conker sloppy drunk, and the objective is to unzip his pants and douse enemies with his piss. Do I need to comment on the content involving fecal matter any further? Actually, the shit in Conker’s Bad Fur Day stacks up so high that it hits the fan with The Great Mighty Poo, a magnificent mass of sentient poo so grand that it developed a singing voice to match its immense size. This boss fight that also factors as a musical number is one of the greatest boss fights in gaming history, and I will not dispute this claim with anyone. There is no explicit nudity in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but the game still teeters with the western world’s most touchy taboos. The Boiler Room boss inside the vault brandishes a pair of iron testicles that Conker must wallop with a set of bricks. The fight against Buga the Knut, the king of the cavemen, involves making his pants fall down like King Hippo, only this neanderthal isn’t wearing underwear, and Conker must make the miniature T-Rex he hypnotized chomp off chunks of flesh from his big, naked ass. After that, Conker takes a crack at his tall, buxom cavewoman, for the well-endowed sunflower he encountered earlier weirded him out (as it did for the rest of us). Look at Berri and tell me with a straight face that she’s a dynamic character and not a trope of sexual objectification (you can’t). People nowadays might take offense at a Beavis, and Butthead duo of a paint can and brush bullying a pitchfork into hanging himself, which he fails because he doesn’t have a neck.

The million-dollar question on the content of Conker is if it is still funny after all these years or if it was funny, to begin with. During the late 90s and early 2000s, comedy’s initiative in raising the bar included the foulest and most deplorable things that media in the past wouldn’t dare to display. One could probably compare Conker’s Bad Fur Day to South Park, for they both broke ground in the vein of depravity for their respective mediums around the same time. However, Conker’s Bad Fur Day doesn’t mold its crude humor into a satirical substance like South Park tends to do. All we can do with Conker’s content is marvel at how these perversities managed to elude the censors for shock value. On top of the shlock, the meta humor, film references, and other humor tropes common at the time make me groan. The A Clockwork Orange Kubrick stare and the D-Day recreation from Saving Private Ryan are effective, but I’ve seen these parodied countless times. Am I not seeing the comedic genius because I am experiencing this game twenty years after it was released? The most amusing aspect of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is how much it borrows from Looney Tunes as its prime source of cartoon inspiration. Conker is essentially a more sociopathic Bugs Bunny, treating all the people around him with sarcastic glee and derision. Just substitute a beer for a carrot, and the word “maroon” for “wanker” and the resemblance is uncanny.

I can forgive the dated humor in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but I cannot overlook the game's severe mechanical problems. One would expect an adult-oriented 3D platformer to offer more of a challenge, but I feel Conker provides one unintentionally. Overall, the game is fairly lenient, with difficulty in terms of approaching obstacles and with error. In another attempt to jab at video game tropes, actions in the game are reserved for “context-sensitive pads” seen everywhere with the letter B. A lightbulb will appear over Conker’s head, and he’ll proceed to whip anything out of his ass to solve a problem. Usually, these instances are pretty straightforward. The video game trope of multiple lives is explained by a diminutive, churlish depiction of the Grim Reaper once the player dies for the first time. Apparently, a squirrel is an animal with multiple lives like those blasted cats he despises, and extra lives are tails hanging off of random places around the map. To stave off bothering Grim, tabs of chocolate are displayed as the game’s health item, totaling up to a maximum of six. Chocolate is everywhere, and thank the lord because Conker constantly depletes it due to falling. Even the most tepid of tumbles will hurt Conker, which isn’t fair, considering he’s a character with the power of flight. The player can execute a high jump and glide for a short distance, hurting Conker. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourselves. The chapter of “Bat’s Tower” was especially tense because of this. On top of this, aiming Conker’s flight trajectory is a finicky task due to Conker’s base control feeling like years of drinking have made him half-paralyzed. Add a restricted, uncooperative camera in the mix, and the game reminds me less of Banjo Kazooie and more of Super Mario 64. Ouch.

Controlling Conker already sounds bad enough on a base level, but it’s made much worse anytime the game features anything outside the realm of platforming. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Notorious examples include swimming underwater in the vault and the blistering lava race, but these end quickly as opposed to the game’s shoddy shooting controls. Getting rid of the hostile dung beetles at the beginning with a slingshot is an early sampler of these, and it’s uneventful due to the sluggish speed of the bugs. The hive turret is sort of uncooperative, but the one-shot damage of the bullets does enough to compensate. The pinpoint accuracy needed to kill the zombies in “Spooky” is excruciating, but it’s only a small factor of the entire chapter. The lengthy period of the game that makes shooting a core mechanic is the WWII-inspired “It’s War.” War is hell enough, but having to mow down gangs upon gangs of evil Tediz as a one-man army feels like we’ve plunged into the seventh circle. The shooting controls in Conker’s Bad Fur Day are some of the most slippery and unresponsive I’ve seen across any game I’ve played. The Tediz do not have to adhere to piss-poor controls, so they’ll easily bushwack Conker while he’s lining his sights. This especially becomes a problem during the chapter’s escape sequence on the beach, where the Tediz can obliterate Conker with one bazooka shell, whereas Conker has to stop and carefully aim. This chapter made me feel like I just underwent a campaign overseas and started feeling the stages of shell shock. Conker can't be a renaissance man if he already struggles with his main mechanic.

I’ve given up on making sense of Conker’s plot, but the ending of the game bothered me. Once Conker returns from war, the weasel mob boss wants him and Berri to complete a bank heist, and this operation is a full-on Matrix reference, complete with all of the action sequences we’ve seen parodied to death. At the end of the vault is the Panther King, who has become impatient waiting for Conker and decides to face Conker himself. Unexpectedly, his contemptuous scientific underling has slipped his boss a mickey in the form of yet another film reference: the xenomorph from Alien who bursts from his chest. Not an alien with a striking resemblance to H.R. Giger’s creation, but the alien itself. How did Rare not get sued? Conker even duels the alien as the game’s final boss in the yellow mech and says, “get away from her, you bitch!” when it hovers over Berri’s lifeless body. The fight proves too formidable for Conker, but before he is torn to shreds, the game freezes as Conker uses this opportunity to request more accommodating circumstances for this scenario. He decapitates the xenomorph with a katana and succeeds the Panther King as the land’s royal leader. A postmodern meta moment like this is not surprising, but placing it in the game’s climax feels rather contrived. Then again, the game’s plot was already contrived. One thing I like about the ending is swinging the xenomorph by its tail in an homage to the Bowser fights in Super Mario 64. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most clever reference in the game.

It goes without saying, but Conker’s Bad Fur Day certainly stands out from the rest of its 3D platformer contemporaries. The game perches itself on the tower of backs made from its N64 brethren to poke and prod their foundations while excreting an unspeakable cocktail of piss and shit down their trail. Games like Super Mario 64 and Rare’s Banjo games walked so Conker’s Bad Fur Day could run, and the game has shown through its presentation that it can run pretty fast. Unfortunately, the game did not have the stamina or gaming competency to do the hundred-yard dash, making it a fellow contender instead of the undisputed king. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a case of style over substance, and even then, the smutty style that launched it into the stratosphere is a bit too sophomoric and is ultimately a product of its time. Nevertheless, Conker’s Bad Fur Day is still a unique experience not for the faint of heart, and rest assured that there won’t be another game like it released in the future.