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7) Conker’s Bad Fur Day
Platform: Nintendo 64 (2001)
Vulgarity and Nintendo seldom go hand-in-hand, so it’s quite surprising that the all-inclusive company let Rare make a game like Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Conker started out as a family-friendly action-platformer in the same vein as Banjo-Kazooie, but during the course of development, Rare took the game in a completely different direction. Though the genre remained the same, Conker‘s world became littered with extreme violence, sexual themes, and outlandish potty humor. Seriously, at one point in the game the player has to battle living feces! All this obscenity would be meaningless if the game wasn’t any fun, but luckily Rare provided Conker with solid controls and employed a unique system of context sensitive buttons that granted the squirrel a range of different attacks and abilities. Rare’s decision to skew towards an older audience with Conker resulted in one of its most creative efforts on N64. Rather than churn out another cookie cutter animal mascot, Rare’s efforts with Conker asserted the squirrel’s worth through some of the most crude and memorable antics in any video game, ever.
I honestly didn’t enjoy Banjo-Tooie all that much. Banjo-Kazooie was epic and is one of my favorite games ever, but Banjo-Tooie just felt too big to me. It took too long to get around levels, too long to get from one objective to the next, and too long to get between worlds in the overworld.
Then there’s the whole Stop n Swop thing, but regardless. BK, brilliant. BT, ehhh.
Maybe it’s because I have played it more, but I couldn’t get enough of Banjo-Tooie! It felt like everything a sequel should be: bigger, better and with just the right amount of new things to do.
And the less said about Banjo & Kazooie’s adventures post-Nintendo the better :)