Conker: Live and Reloaded

The original Conker’s Bad Fur Day on the Nintendo 64 was the console’s last hurrah, and rightfully so. The game basically panned and satirized the whole cartoony platformer genre while featuring a hilarious script filled with swearing and bawdy humor. The game was quite a departure for a Nintendo title, being a game laced with adult humor and situations on a console geared primarily towards younger audiences. The game didn’t sell terribly well, largely due to the hefty $70 price tag and the fact that the N64 was on its way out anyway. Luckily, for those of us who missed the boat when it came to Conker’s N64 opus, Microsoft and Rare are giving us another chance with Conker: Live and Reloaded. The game features great new multiplayer modes as well as a completely made over version of Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The game has a few twists and turns that weren’t in the original game, but ultimately has much of the same great script now brought up to technological speed for today’s consoles. Xbox gamers take note: Conker returns this summer.

The story in Live and Reloaded follows the young hero Conker as he wanders his way home after a drunken night of partying it up at his favorite bar. Trashed, Conker wakes up in a field and is forced to fight hordes of enemies as he gets back to his house. The story gains some momentum, as Conker must take on the Panther King, who is trying to capture the young squirrel for his missing table leg, of course…?

If you aren’t already aware, Conker is a terribly nasty game. While the presence of a cute, little squirrel may seem fairly innocuous at a glance, Conker is a dirty little animal. The game constantly drops the F-Bomb (although it is pretty much bleeped out through the script, as is the “S-Word”). There are tons of poop jokes and bathroom humor aplenty. That said, it’s real damn funny. The game has a great sense of self-awareness and parodies the genre to a T, making fun of the mechanics common to platformers, like coin collecting and so on.

However, the platform game genre isn’t the only thing that Conker pokes fun at. The game lampoons all kinds of films, ranging from Saving Private Ryan to sci-fi films like Starship Troopers with a hint of Lord of the Rings.

The Conker’s Bad Fur Day side of things features some subtle improvements over the original game. Now, you can choose from several new weapons that you previously couldn’t, like a baseball bat with nails hammered into it, as well as an improved camera that seldom gets caught up against walls and so forth.

The coolest new addition is the multiplayer, which has a Battlefield 1942 feel to it. The multiplayer satirizes the World War II shooter genre, allowing players to take on each other in famous locales like the beach at Normandy and other areas of interest. The controls for this mode are radically different from the single player mode, feeling more like an FPS than a platformer at this point. The camera follows behind the player, and you use the left thumbstick to move and strafe and the right to look around. The action is pretty hardcore, and you can use objects like stationary guns as well as vehicles in your battles. You can also add bots to your multiplayer matches to up the ante in terms of kills.

The graphics are quite phenomenal in Live and Reloaded, certainly among the best to ever hit the Xbox, or consoles in general for that matter. The game features some great “fur-mapping”, which means that the character models have an insane amount of detail and real-looking fur. The environments are also vibrant and colorful, a huge step beyond the N64 version, which looked pretty good for its time. The sound is also excellent, which great voice acting attached to a sharp script, nice music and crisp sound effects.

Live and Reloaded is shaping up to be more than just a port of an N64 game, it's becoming a rightful heir to the Conker series with a bevy of features that those who missed the game the first time around as well as those who enjoyed it will need to check out.