CONKER'S BAD FUR DAY

Ah what good memories you bring me Conker!!! Definately my favorite Nintendo game and one that changed my life. 9th grade, Athens, going home on a friday after school with 6 guys to shoot squirrels and ripped teddy bears that would curse their lives out! Moayed screaming for his life, my mother pregnant asking the guys to quiet down, Peter throwing ice cream at me to get the controller... ordering 4 humongous 4x4 pizzas (72 slices of pizzas) that if you were lucky enough and Arthur didn't bully you and ate YOUR slice, you'd get a 2nd slice... The good old days when no alcohol was needed to have fun!

The crazy thing about this game is that not many people know it. Developed and published by Rare, it was released in March 5 2001 for Nintendo 64 and considered to have the best graphics at that time.

Even though the game fared well with critics in both the UK and US, it sold worse than expected, partly due to its prohibitively high cost and release in early 2001. A year later, the Nintendo 64 was discontinued after the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, yielding to the new GameCube system. The game was still a moderate success, selling about 700.000 copies^[12].

Nintendo of America refused to even acknowledge the game in its Nintendo Power publication except for the playback in volume #230, and all advertising in the U.S. was limited to late-nightcable television and ads in Playboy. In other regions, the advertising was far less limited. Despite all of these factors, the game has enjoyed a cult following, actually growing in popularity despite its age.

After the release of Conker's Bad Fur Day, Rare began production on a new Conker game initially named, 'Conker's Other Bad Day', but may have been changed to incorporate a subtitle, 'Getting Medieval'.^[14] But in 2002 Microsoft bought Rare from Nintendo, so instead of finishing and releasing the game, Rare remade Conker's Bad Fur Day for the Xbox, naming it, Conker: Live and Reloaded. On September 16, 2008 it was announced that Microsoft cancelled the game Rare was working on, and in a later interview, some of Rare's staff members hinted at what might have been.^[15] A petition has been started for Microsoft to jumpstart the project and let Rare complete the game.^[16]

A remake of Conker's Bad Fur Day titled Conker: Live & Reloaded was released in 2005 for the Xbox console. It includes improvements to graphics and sound with a slight addition to story at the training level. The game retains the single player mode of the original but dumped the original multiplayer modes in favor of a revamped Xbox Live multiplayer featuring an entirely new weapons set and gameplay mechanics. UnlikeBad Fur Day, it was also released in Japan.

The story opens with a prologue, spoofing the opening scene of A Clockwork Orange, where a miserable Conker tells the player that he is now "king of all the land", and begins to tell the story of the game.

The morning after a night of binge drinking with his friends, Conker awakes to find himself lost in an unfamiliar land with a terrible hangover. Having no other choice, he begins a long journey with the goal of returning home to his girlfriend, Berri. Meanwhile, the Panther King, ruler of the land that Conker is lost in, finds that his throne-side table is missing its fourth leg when he accidentally spills his milk because of it. Not knowing what to do about this problem, he has a meeting with Professor Von Kripplespak, a legless mad scientist weasel that the king keeps as a right-hand servant. Kripplespak suggests the use of a red squirrel as the fourth leg for his table, and heeding this advice, the Panther King orders his minions to search for one and capture it. In the meantime, Kripplespak plots to assassinate the king and escape.^[2]

As Conker searches for his way home, he finds himself embroiled in a series of increasingly absurd and oftentimes dangerous situations, including having to recover a bee hive from some enormous wasps, confronting a giant opera-singing pile of feces, being turned into a bat by a vampire, and even getting drafted into a war between grey squirrels and a nazi-like race of teddy bears simply known as the "Tediz". However, Conker keeps managing to find wads of cash scattered throughout the land, and in his desire to find them all, he is sidetracked from his ultimate goal of returning home.

While this is occurring, Don Weaso, head of the Weasel Mafia, sends one of his henchmen to abduct Berri from her home, with the intention of using her as an exotic dancer for his nightclub.

In the final chapter of the game, Berri and Conker are enlisted by Don Weaso to rob a bank. When they get into the vault, they find many wads of cash, enough to make them both millionaires. Conker is overwhelmed with excitement at this development; however, the Panther King then appears before them both, revealing that the entire bank scene was an elaborate trap set by him and Don Weaso in order to capture Conker.

Hearing this, Berri defiantly stands up to them in defense of Conker, but Don Weaso shortly opens fire on her with a machine gun, killing her. Just as all hope seems lost for Conker, a Xenomorph bursts out of the Panther King's chest, killing him instantly. In the ensuing confusion, Don Weaso sneaks off and escapes unseen. Kripplespak reveals that the alien is one of his creations, and that he had planned all along to use this opportunity to kill the king and escape, expressing hatred for the castle's lack of technology. On that note, he activates the vault's machinery, revealing it to be a spaceship that immediately launches into low orbit. Naming the alien "Heinrich", he instructs it to attack and kill Conker as revenge for destroying the Tediz, which were also his creations. However, Conker thinks fast and pulls a switch that opens an air lock, pulling Von Kripplespak into the vacuum of space. Berri's body is sucked into space as well.

Using an armored robotic suit found in the vault, Conker throws the xenomorph out of the airlock. However, it returns and lunges at him again, and as it does so, the entire game suddenlyfreezes. Exiting the suit, Conker expresses disbelief at the fact that Rare apparently did not beta test the game properly, and breaks the fourth wall to ask some software engineers to assist him. A programmer immediately responds to him, communicating to Conker with a command line. Entering the game's debug mode, Conker asks the programmer to spawn a selection of weapons, from which he draws a katana. He then asks the programmer to transport them to the Panther King's throne room and unfreeze the game. Conker then decapitates Heinrich, and is crowned the new king of the land by the characters who shortly rush into the room. However, Conker states that he doesn't really want to be king because he was supposed to go home, and then comes to the grim realization that Berri is still dead. He attempts to ask the programmers to bring her back to life, but realizes that they have already left.

Conker then speaks to the player in a closing monologue, in which he discusses what it means to appreciate what one already has instead of being overcome with desire and envy for superficially better circumstances, stating that "the grass is always greener, and you don't really know what it is you have until it's gone."

After the credits, Conker returns to the pub seen at the beginning of the game, alone and completely miserable. After drowning his sorrows in scotch whisky, Conker drunkenly stumbles off into the stormy night once again, this time walking in the direction opposite from the one he took previously. His fate, this time, remains unknown.

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