Wednesday Whimsy

By: Caelrona

 

Hiya all! Caelrona here, and I’ve got another Wednesday full of whimsy for you all. I’ve written a bit about video games before, but nothing too big. I did a post about one of my biggest guilty gaming pleasures; Harvest Moon, and I’ve also written a bit about my pretty serious addiction to Minecraft. So today I thought I’d write about my second biggest guilty gaming pleasure; Conker’s Bad Fur Day. This video game is so incredibly vulgar and disgusting, and I love it so much. The first time I played it, I was borrowing it from a friend’s brother who, for some reason unknown, had decided I should play it. I gotta say, I’m pretty dang grateful for that disturbing insight on his part, because I absolutely love this game. Something about a vulgar red squirrel, paired with the horribly designed N64 controller just gets me. While I no longer have the N64 cartridge (because it was borrowed, and they now cost upwards of $60 USD) I still play Conker on emulator on my computer, and I still enjoy it.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is an action platform game developed by Rare for the N64. It is Rare’s last game for that console, and one of the few N64 games requiring a 64MB cartridge. It is also one of the very few Nintendo games to carry an ESRB rating of ‘M’ for Mature. Conker’s development started like a lot of other Rare titles, however due to critical mockery for making yet another ‘Cutesy platformer’; Conker was retooled into a controversial game with pretty vulgar humor. It features a lot of technical effects that were uncommon at the time, especially for an N64 game, such as dynamic shadowing, lip syncing, colored lighting, no distance fog, large areas with a long draw distance, detailed facial animations, and individually rendered fingers on some characters. Unlike other N64 games, Conker relies heavily on cut scenes, and features a rich soundtrack. Rare also went in a new direction by getting rid of item collecting, which was a prominent feature in other Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64; instead utilizing context sensitive buttons to simplify things.

The story follows Conker, an alcoholic red squirrel, who is attempting to return home to his girlfriend Berri after a night of binge drinking at the local tavern with his friends. Meanwhile, the Panther King finds that his throne’s side table is missing a leg and keeps spilling his milk. Unfortunately for Conker, the solution offered by the slightly unstable Professor Von Kriplespac is the use of a red squirrel as the fourth leg. Thus as Conker searches for his way home he finds himself embroiled in a series of increasingly absurd, gross and often dangerous situations, including (but not limited to) fighting a giant opera-singing pile of poo, knocking some big brass balls off a boiler, and helping a King Bee ‘pollinate’ a female sunflower large ‘stamens’; all while avoiding the King’s henchmen. Your life bar consists of 6 squares of anti-gravity chocolate, which can be found all over the world; and if you happen to die then don’t despair. Gregg, the Grim Reaper, will explain how squirrels, like cats, are one of those ‘special cases’ and Conker will get another chance.

After the release of Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Rare began development on another Conker game, referred to as Conker’s Other Bad Day. Sadly, this game was ultimately cancelled; although designer Chris Seavor said that it was to be a direct sequel, dealing with “Conker’s somewhat unsuccessful tenure as King. He spends all the treasury money on beer, parties and hookers. Thrown into prison, Conker is faced with the prospect of execution and the game starts with his escape, ball and chain attached, from the Castle’s highest tower.” When Rare was purchased by Microsoft in 2002, Rare instead developed Conker: Live & Reloaded, a pathetic excuse of a remake of Bad Fur Day, which was released on the Xbox console in 2005. Including updated graphics, updated camera control, an auto-targeting system and a brand new multiplayer mode, Conker:L&R also cut a lot of the fun from the game by replacing almost all of the obscene language with bleeps, changing several scenes and small bits of gameplay (such as the Key scene near the beginning) and in some cases replacing whole voice scripts that sound just terrible. I also read somewhere that a few chapters were cut out of the game, but I can’t find where I read that, or any evidence to back that up. All in all, considering that the game went from family friendly Nintendo to the killing field of Xbox, I was shocked at the censorship applied to Conker, especially since initial reports stated that they were going to be decreasing the censorship and adding content.

So, that brings us to the conclusion of my second biggest guilty gaming pleasure; Conker’s Bad Fur Day. It is vulgar? Hell yes! It is disgusting? Even Conker vomits on occasion, so yeah. Is it fun? Most definitely. If Conker sounds like something you think you would enjoy, then I seriously recommend giving it a try. It is a lot of fun to play, and it will definitely take care of any cravings for nostalgic platformer action. Anyway, I’ve left Conker paused, and I would hate to keep my foul-mouthed squirrely friend waiting any longer!

Until next time,

Caelrona – signing off! ❤

My Guilty Gaming Pleasure

By Caelrona

Hiya All! Caelrona here, and this time I’m here to have a chat about one of my biggest Guilty Gaming Pleasures… Harvest Moon. Now I know that Harvest Moon gets a lot of flak from a lot of people, mainly because they don’t see the appeal of raising crops and animals in a video game. To be honest, when I first picked it up that pretty much summed up my reaction as well; “Farm in a video game? I’m too lazy to go weed the garden in real life, but they have a video game for farming.. Ehh.” But eventually one super boring summer spent at my sister’s house, I finally rented Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life from the local movie rental place and gave it a go on my GameCube. Let me tell you, Holy Batman! did I get addicted to that game. I spent hours growing crops, raising animals and making friends with the townsfolk. I ended up married to Cecilia, and was in the process of encouraging my adorable little baby to love animals and crops when I had to return it to the store. I immediately bought my own copy, and when they released a girl version (Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life) I immediately went out and bought it. I eventually got around to downloading the ROMS so I could play the earlier versions on Emulator. My addiction, and guilty gaming pleasure, had begun.

The Harvest Moon series of games runs the gamut of Nintendo consoles, starting at the super amazing Super Nintendo, or SNES, and running all the way up to the current Wii. Natsume also released a few special editions on various Playstation consoles (Ps1, Ps2 and PSP.) No doubt Nintendo and Natsume will continue to cash in on what has become a huge series with whatever future consoles they come out with. Not to mention the spin-offs that came from Harvest Moon’s success. I am talking about Rune Factory and Innocent Life. Rune Factory has successfully (so far) spun off into its own series with various titles available on the Wii and DS consoles as well as one port to the PS3. Innocent Life, however, has been limited to one (not very well received) game released on the PSP and later ported to the PS2.

All of the Harvest Moon games have the central theme of working a farm. The game usually starts with your character inheriting a farm from a relative or old friend and being introduced to the farm life and various aspects of said lifestyle such as growing crops, and raising livestock and animals. Also you are expected to find a spouse and get married (and in some games raise your child.) Each game provides goals to complete or objects to gather. Some titles have a mystical or magical aspect to the storyline where you help magical little spirits known as Harvest Sprites and occasionally the Harvest Goddess.

In recent years Harvest Moon has been the inspiration for several social networking games, most available on Facebook. I’m sure most of you have heard of Farmville, but there are many others such as Country Story, Farm Town, Happy Harvest and even Adult Swim’s very own Hemp Tycoon. If you have played any or all of these then you are aware of how freakishly addictive they are, and if you haven’t… well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Well, there you have it! My Guilty Gaming Pleasure. In all honesty, I adore these games. It might seem odd to see my copies of Harvest Moon sitting all snuggly on my shelf next to games like Dead Island, Legend of Zelda, or Skyrim but I guess we all have that one little Guilty Gaming Pleasure. Besides, there’s more to me than slaying dragons, kicking zombies in the face or playing my Ocarina. Maybe I’ll see you around the farm next time I play Harvest Moon!

Until next time;

Caelrona, signing off! ❤