Conkers Bad Fur Day Preview

We always suspected it. We saw the strange, sarcastic humour in games like Donkey Kong Country. We saw violence poured in Killer Instinct, and the wanton destruction of Blast Corps. We experienced the joy of killing scientists and executing Tribals in Goldeneye and Jet Force Gemini. Hell, we even saw KI’s Orchid get her kit off. And this, the latest incarnation of one of the earliest announced Rare games, has confirmed it: Rare are wholesale, 100%, bona-fide stark raving bonkers. And we love ‘em for it.<br><br>The new title of this games, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, was first announced early this year. We had been promised all last year that the game was still being worked on, when it seemed it was all but cancelled. And then this crops up: the most screwed up, bizarre, and most promisingly original game of this year. Oh, and if you’ve got sensitive ears…er, eyes…avert them now…<br><br>…because the world of Conker, helium-voiced squirrel bit-player of DKR, is fucked up.<br><br><br>At the same time Banjo-Kazooie was being announced, at the 1997 E3 show in Atlanta, Rare also announced another 3D platformer: Conker 64. Starring an unbelievably cute squirrel, with a voice that made us suspect he was either a Bee Gee or had been recently kicked in the nuts, it looked too similar to BK to be a serious contender to Mario’s throne. And so, while BK astounded all in ’98, Conker slipped quietly from the release schedules, and disappeared into the background, save for a cameo appearance in DKR.<br><br>In 1999, Conker resurfaced, this time as Twelve Tales: Conker 64, featuring both a two-player co-op mode and a four player deathmatch. Just as quickly as it had appeared, however, it vanished again. All sorts of rumours surfaced: it had been cancelled, it had been changed into Jet Force Gemini, it was finished and awaiting a gap in the release schedules.<br><br>We were expecting THIS about as much as we were expecting Anna Kournikova to turn up at our door and seduce us; to whit, we weren’t. AT ALL. Though, just like the above scenario, it’s an extremely pleasant surprise. <br><br>The fact that Conker’s Bad Fur Day is coming from the Killer Instinct team only makes us wonder what the hell they’ve been playing at up until now, because this game is a foul-mouthed, movie-spoofing, gore-splattered game, fused with a group of surreal characters that Disney would dismiss for being too cute. And it’s going to be great.<br><br>Having only recently been unveiled to games journalists, CBFD has yet to be seen in playable form. It’s still, essentially, a 3D platformer. It still stars Conker, the girly-voiced squirrel. The real changes have been made to the world he lives in: it’s foul-mouthed, stacked with sexual innuendo, filled with gore, and riotously funny.<br><br>The two-minute movie shown to games journos at a Perfect Dark show in Seattle contained a gore-filled parody of Saving Private Ryan, featuring the squirrel himself scrambling to stay alive as other furry creatures bite the dust in violent ways. A boss scene seems to involve Conker hitting a giant metal furnace square in his metallic nuts. Locked doors casually tell him to "Fuck Off!", just bleeped enough to satisfy Nintendo.<br><br>And no, this isn’t a joke.<br><br>Conker himself seems to be accidentally mixed up in this swearalicious universe, and it seems he WON’T be cracking out the South Park Vocabulary Book anytime soon. Thus, Rare have neatly side-stepped both the problem of him having been a regular angel of a squirrel in both Conker’s Pocket Tales and DKR, and avoiding pissing off Nintendo with a Duke-Nukem-beating, swear-crazy squirrel as a hero.<br><br>The game engine itself is looking tops, if somewhat inevitably taking a back seat to all the foul-mouthery. Twelve Tales had a great engine all along, and CBFD seems to carry that further. Long paraded as a Conker mainstay, and now even more appropriate, is Conker’s emotional response. Depending on his mood, his facial expressions will change, from fear, excitement, anger, happiness, and, er, arousal. The games will also come loaded down with speech (read: swearing) and cut-scenes, in apparently larger numbers than Perfect Dark.<br><br>Conker’s Bad Fur Day is going to be a brilliant game. It takes a company like Rare to break the mould so ingrained into developers minds as the 3D platformer. It also shows how much Rare are branching away from Nintendo – needless to say, the Big N shan’t be publishing this game themselves – and becoming an independent company of their own.<br><br>Comedy, gore, sexual innuendo and swearing is a very difficult mix to get right, but we reckon Conker has it down to a ‘T’. Expect imitations: this will be the South Park of the gaming world. Assuming the American moral guardians don’t throw a fit and ban it altogether.<br><br>But where is Conker’s girlfriend, Berri? Uhh…we shudder to think.<br></P>