Unlike anything else you'll ever see on a Nintendo console...

User Rating: 9.4 | Conker's Bad Fur Day N64
Squeaky clean.

In the early days of Nintendo games, I would be hard-pressed to call them anything but. Even more "violent" games like Mega Man and Contra seemed to bubble over with fun-looking sprites and contained very little vulgar imagery.

Fast-forward to 2001, when Nintendo's dying N64 was struggling to compete against Sony's Playstation powerhouses. By this time, Rare had developed two of the most sophisticated games ever made in Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark, and took a completely new approach for their next project; a Banjo-Kazooie-type of platformer starring a furry red squirrel named Conker. While it was originally intended to be a cute adventure game (much like Banjo), the project was scrapped in favor of a wacky-plotted and potty-mouthed platform game.

As you're introduced to Conker in the opening story scene, the squirrel is in the midst of just about the worst of the worst morning-after hangovers. In serious need of Aspirin, Conker wakes up in the middle of a field next to a talking scarecrow named Birdy. After being asked by Birdy to step onto a randomly inscribed letter "B" in the ground, the gamer is given the basic idea about the Bad Fur Day control scheme.

"It's context sensitve! Which means it's.... sensitive.... to context."

Plop plop, fizz fizz.

With a clearer conscience, Conker takes off on a journey back home that will see him man a bee hive gun turret, help a washed up bee score with a well-endowed sunflower, roll balls of poo, recreate a few of your favorite movie scenes, and go pretty much everywhere in between in terms of gameplay. Whether it's a frying pan, throwing knives or a slingshot, you'll be given pretty much everything you need at that specific moment in time to help advance. Of course, the level of difficulty is such that you'll have to work for your money - literally. There's no other way to put it; no matter what you're doing, it's fun.

As the game progresses, the cuddly hero will be faced with more and more daunting challenges - an opera-singing poo monster, for one - while pushing the very boundaries of the M rating the game was given. Banjo-Kazooie it is not, but Conker's Bad Fur Day manages to surpass any other platformer released on the Nintendo 64 - all poop jokes aside.