3D Platformer Gone Wild
The premise behind the game is very simple. A red squirrel spends a night at his local pub getting drunk with some soldiers, and thus misses a date with his girlfriend, a dance-crazy valley-girl squirrel named Berri. His challenge is simply to return home to Berri, apologize for missing his date, and move on with his life, but after awakening from his drunken stooper, he gets sidetracked and becomes involved in solving a series of problems presented to him by various village-folk around, ranging from species to species, everything from bumble bees, to rats, to dung beetles, to farming equipment. Additionally, the "King of the Land", his mad scientist, and henchmen are looking for just such a red squirrel to replace the leg in the royal table, giving Conker an enemy to escape. These problems themselves are encountered in a multitude of environments as well, from a farmhouse barn, to a cow pasture with an angry bull, to a mountain made of poo, complete with cave, to the castle of Count Dracula himself.
These varied situations make for some incredible humor, unlike any I've encountered in a video game. Tons of re-enacted scenes from various movies which have reached the status of icon await the gamer. These include full blown scenes from "The Matrix", "The Terminator", "Bram Stoker's Dracula", "Saving Private Ryan", "The Untouchables", and and "Aliens", to more subtle references from "Jaws", "Deliverance", "The Exorcist", "The Godfather", and "The Wizard of Oz". Thematic humor isn't all there is to this game, though. If you think that potty humor had reached its zenith in the likes of Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, you are in for a pleasant surprise, with the opera-singing "Great Mighty Poo". There is also a good deal of humor involving sexual references, including size of various body parts, and the use of particular orifices. In other words, this game is definitely NOT for kids, but adults wil see the humor and laugh it off. In fact, there has probably never been a game so adult released on a platform before or since, Nintendo or otherwise.
Graphically, the game was more than I bargained for on the N64. The visualizations were so powerfully done that I was left marvelling at the skill of the artists and developers at Rare, and I hadn't felt that way about an N64 game since Nintendo's home-grown "Legend of Zelda" games. Sound also is no slouch. In fact, this game is possibly the most advanced on the N64 where original music, voice-work, and sound-effects are concerned. Once again, only the two Zelda games come close.
Gameplay is rich and varied. The context-sensitive buttons being so tied to the game, as a surreal parody of other platforming games, was a clever move, and adds significant fun to the gameplay, and a good amount of humor comes from their use. And because this game acts as a parody of platforming "cute little furry" games such as StarFox and Banjo-Tooie, it has a lot of various types of platforming content from such games, and even more from other games that don't technically fit into the genre. You will experience everything from traditional platforming running and jumping challenges, to simple platforming puzzles and brain teasers, to speed racing, to first-person shooting. Yet even with all this varied and well designed content, the primary criticisms I have to make about the game are with the gameplay. Particularly, the incredibly annoying difficulty in manipulating the camera angles when necessary, and accurately controlling the player character Conker using the N64 controller was challenging as well. These two together constitute a significant problem, particularly in situations where one hit can mean certain death, such as in trying to make Conker swim around spinning underwater fans which slice him up on contact, or when Conker is walking tight-rope thin planks to get from one side of a ceiling to another, falling to certain death at the slightest of unintended deviations.
Besides the single-player story-line based game, there are also a myriad of multiplayer choices consisting of several environments and characters from the single-player game, all high-variety and extremely well-done. Though they are not as engaging as the single-player game, this is mostly due to the absence of storyline. Given that, they are some of the most fun multiplayer options when playing with a friend outside of the online world.
All in all, this is one of my favorite games on the N64, and in fact, one of my favorite games in all my years of playing console games. There was nothing like it at the time, and even after all these years, it stands up on its own as one of the most original gaming experiences available. Do yourself a favor by buying and playing this masterpiece.