Conker: Live & Reloaded

Bad Fur Day

I first played "Conker's Bad Fur Day" in middle school. Or was it sixth grade? It was 2001 and I graduated elementary and left for middle school that year. I can't believe it's been damned near a quarter century. We played through the story just once and had a blast laughing at all the crude jokes. It's just the stuff a young boy would love. Hell, I don't think I properly matured. I still laugh at fart jokes. And you know what? I can still stare at polygon boobs all day. Anyways, the main quest is awesome, but we had even more fun playing the multiplayer. I can't even explain why it was so awesome. The controls didn't exactly lend themselves to fluid kills. The maps wheren't anything to write home about. Maybe there was just something humiliating about getting killed by a teddy bear or cute squirrel that made us keep coming back. Oh, the trash talking was epic because of that.

Immature Lonely Boy

Unfortunately, I have no friends. I also don't have Xbox Live and I am not going out of my way to connect my original Xbox to the internet. So, I can't speak to the "Conker: Live & Reloaded" multiplayer experience. I can say that the story mode is still about as fun as I remember. All the gross and offensive humor is still intact. So are the pop culture references, which are stellar. However, they censored all the swear words. I didn't appreciate that. My immature self wants to hear swear words. I can't remember how well it played in the N64, that was damned near a quarter century ago. I suspect having dual analog sticks is much better than one stick and those awkward C-arrow keys. Besides, the N64 controller is hideous.

Inconvenience

I played the game just fine and enjoyed the whacky, disjointed, yet so utterly charming story. I only had a few issues. Whenever Conker gets hit, he goes through this stun animation where he flies a few feet back, rolls his eyes like a slot machine, and slides for a few feet more. There where many situations where I would get hit close to a ledge, get knocked back, and fall off a ledge and die. It was annoying. There also seems to be a tiny period of vulnerability when Conker comes to and enemies and knock you right back down again. It could be my aging reflex, but I felt it happened often enought to inconvenience me. Besides those mechanics, the game was fun and the highly varied levels actually enhance the whacky story about random events in Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Getting Old

Conker's Bad Fur Day is definitely a product of it's time. It was released during the Y2K era, the late 90s and early 2000s, where everything was edgy, offensive, cool, xtreme, and had lots of attitude. I'm talking about a time where Stone Cold Steve Austin, NWO, The Matrix, Eminem, Nu-Metal, Pop-Punk, Allen Iverson, Skateboarding, Jackass, parody comedies like Scary Movie, teen comedies that pushed the envelope like American Pie, Fight Club, Adam Sandler, reality trash TV like Jerry Springer, and South Park ruled the popular culture in the USA. It was edgy games like Conker's Bad Fur Day that fit squarely among this cultural zeitgest. It is exactly the time I grew up in. It was definitely an exciting time to be a youngling. Maybe I'm getting old. I'm probably biased, too. Or maybe I'm just simply out of touch. But popular culture feels nowhere near as awesome as everything I mentioned. I'm turning into an old man yelling at clouds. Well, I guess this is growing up.

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