Tag: Platform game

2244: Pouring One Out for Conker

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Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64 — if not my very favourite. It’s certainly my very favourite of all Rare’s mascot platformers — the Banjo series may have, objectively speaking, been better designed and more interesting, but Conker was just more likeable for the fact it didn’t give a shit what anyone thought and was, without shame, wildly offensive and absolutely hilarious.

The Xbox remake Conker: Live and Reloaded was one of the first ever “remasters” of a video game, and to date it remains one of the most impressive efforts, taking the original game and giving it more than just a hi-res upscale — it’s a game that still looks surprisingly impressive today, despite running in 4:3 aspect ratio and 640×480 resolution.

I’ve been looking to re-acquire a copy of Conker: Live and Reloaded for some time, since I traded my original copy in donkey’s years back and haven’t been able to find a replacement in recent years. By a stroke of good fortune, dropping into our friendly neighbourhood junk shop — which has a substantial retro gaming section — threw up a copy in good condition, so I dropped £12 on it and brought it home to revisit, partly in celebration of finding it, and partly to remember Conker’s glory days after Microsoft revealed this monstrosity the other day:

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That, if you’re not familiar with Conker, is supposed to be a young incarnation of Conker and is just wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels. This is what Conker is supposed to look like:

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That second picture is from the original Xbox, by the way — you know, the contemporary of the PlayStation 2 — while the first picture is from the Xbox One, two hardware generations later. How is it that they’ve managed to make him look so much worse?

Anyway, that aside, I’ve been keen to revisit Conker’s Bad Fur Day — which makes up half of the package of Conker: Live and Reloaded, the other being a surprisingly fleshed out multiplayer affair that sadly, with the death of OG Xbox Live, can no longer be played online — just for my own personal gratification. And, aside from a few frustrating sections — one of which I gave up on this evening just before writing this — it’s still an absolutely great game, and a reminder of a different time.

If you are, for some reason, unfamiliar with Conker’s original adventures, here’s the deal. Rare were a partner of Nintendo in the N64 era, and brought us such games as Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 as well as GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. Conker’s Bad Fur Day initially looked to be a similar take on the Banjo Kazooie formula — family-friendly platforming fun featuring a strong mascot character of the small and furry variety.

At some point during development, Rare decided that enough was enough, and that the Nintendo 64 probably had enough family-friendly mascot platformers — no-one was going to outdo Super Mario 64 after all, and the only people who had come close were themselves with the excellent Banjo Kazooie games. So they decided to make a radical change in direction with Conker’s Bad Fur Day. While maintaining the cartoonish, anthropomorphised animal aesthetic, they ditched the “family friendly” part and instead made Conker’s Bad Fur Day into a platform game for adults.

The setup is Conker waking up with the mother of all hangovers and trying to find his way home to go to bed. Along the way he gets considerably sidetracked by the sort of bizarre tasks you always find yourself doing in mascot platformers, many of which, in this case, provide convenient excuses for parodies of movies such as Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix, which were both around at a similar time to the N64 original.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day eschews Rare’s normal collectathon formula in favour of being a more straightforward action adventure of sorts. Giving the appearance of being open-world and non-linear (but actually being pretty linear), the game is split into several distinct zones, each of which have a number of tasks to complete, with the reward being cash for Conker to stuff his pockets with. The cash is subsequently used as a means of gating certain areas in the game, though not, by any means, to the same degree as something like Super Mario 64’s star doors and the like.

What’s nice about Conker’s Bad Fur Day is that as well as featuring some distinctly adult (albeit immature) humour, it also treats the player like an adult. There are no on-screen objective markers, no checklists, no guide prompts — you have to explore the area yourself, listen to what the characters say and figure out what you’re supposed to do and how to do it. It isn’t always obvious, and that’s an entirely deliberate design choice: part of the challenge of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is assessing each situation and determining what the relevance, if anything, of everything in the area might be.

What’s impressive about this is that it’s pretty rare you’ll find yourself feeling stumped as to what to do next. Cutscenes might linger a little longer on something in the environment that you might need to investigate, or characters might point something out, but it never feels like the game is dictating what you should do: progression is very much led by the player, and it’s all the more satisfying for that.

And progression is rewarded with some highly entertaining setpieces, lampooning everything from the lobby shootout in The Matrix to Ripley fighting one of the titular Aliens. The game keeps things fresh and interesting by providing context-sensitive areas that provide you with the items you need in a particular location, so you’re never stuck carrying around an inventory of useless crap, trying everything on everything in the hope that you might find something that works. There are also several places in the game where getting drunk and pissing on something is the solution to all your problems; try putting that capability in an inventory screen.

I’m pleased at how well Conker’s Bad Fur Day holds up, and that it’s not just rose-tinted spectacles that cause me to look back on it so fondly. While there are a few annoyances by modern gaming standards — long load times, particularly when you get a “Game Over” (remember them?) are probably the most frustrating, though sluggish camera controls are a close second — the good far outweighs the bad, and the game as a whole acts as a potent reminder of a type of game we simply don’t seem to get any more, either from a characterisation and aesthetic perspective, or even from a mechanical perspective, with its combination of exploration, action, platforming and puzzling.

Long live King Conker. I fear we shall never see your likes again.

#oneaday Day 838: Still No Wind Here

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As promised, here are a few further thoughts on A Valley Without Wind, given that I’ve inadvertently spent most of today playing it.

First up, having read a few reviews around the Web which focused heavily on the visual side of things, I direct you to this post. Get over it. Not everyone has the budget to make something that looks like Final Fantasy XIII, and it’s not as if AVWW’s visuals are bad per se, they just look like something out of a PC game from the 1990s, shortly after we discovered Super VGA. If “8-bit” can be an acceptable aesthetic (and I shan’t get into a rant on the misuse of that term here) then why not “mid-90s PC game” if the graphics don’t actually hurt the experience?

Secondly, the music. You will, as the cliche goes, love it or hate it. Here’s a simple test. Do you like chiptunes and electronica? You will like the music. If you do not like chiptunes and electronica, you will probably want to switch it off and listen to something else. (I love chiptunes and electronica.)

Those two glaringly obvious points which most reviews seem to focus on aside, let’s discuss the gameplay a little more.

Following an initial tutorial which introduces key gameplay concepts to the player with various gravestones sarcastically describing how various predecessors could have avoided their fate, the player reaches a settlement. This is a sorry affair to begin with, with only a single, bedraggled-looking survivor staggering around it, but a selection of basic buildings already constructed and ready to go. Three of the giant crystalline “Ilari” life-forms are here, and later in the game they’ll provide a means to purchase items, build things and cast far-reaching spells. To begin with, their most important function is to restore your hit points.

Leave the settlement and you’ll be taken onto a grid-based randomly generated world map. Each tile has a particular terrain type which controls the type of enemies that will spawn there, the items you’ll discover and, if you’re lucky, the survivors you might come across. Each region comes from a specific time period — the game’s story centres around the concept of the world being “shattered” both geographically and temporally — and this comes into play with some of the missions later.

When exploring a region, you’ll come across buildings. You can enter every single one of them. Most of them are sprawling mini-Metroidvania adventures in their own right, but for the most part you’ll be seeking out the “stash” rooms that contain plenty of treasure. These are conveniently marked on the graph-like abstract dungeon map in the corner of the screen, which shows the connections between rooms but not their exact layout. A key part of gameplay is “scouting” buildings, which means delving in just far enough to reveal the rest of the map — rooms that are within two “connections” of the one you’re in appear without you having to go to them — and then weighing up whether it’s worth exploring further.

The buildings are rather abstractly designed (not to mention having TARDIS-like properties), and call to mind retro classics such as Jet Set Willy, where a “real world environment” was simply a room with obstacles in it and various graphics representing toilets and televisions scattered around the place. They’re far from “believable” environments, but it doesn’t matter — you’re playing a side-on platform game, so there’s a limit to how realistically these structures can be designed anyhow. I’d rather have something that is interesting to explore than something where every building is the same.

Missions play a key role in progression. You’ll come across missions either on the world map or tucked away inside buildings. These whisk the player off to a unique, special area and challenge them with a specific task. Sometimes you might be climbing a linear tower and bashing bosses on the way up. Another time you might be defending storage silos from incoming meteors like a Missile Command platformer. Another time you might be tasked with removing the “anachronisms” from an area, which involves figuring out which monsters don’t “belong” in the region you’re in and eliminating them. Destroying all the correct monsters concludes the mission. Destroying an incorrect monster spawns two more, either, both or neither of which may also be an anachronism. Yet another time you might be challenged with getting through a “one shot, one kill” dungeon where either you or the enemy grazing their knee results in instant death.

As you progress through the game, death becomes an increasingly frequent occurrence. When a character dies, they’re gone for good, leaving behind a tough-to-defeat vengeful ghost at the location where they shuffled off the mortal coil. Fortunately, you don’t lose all the stuff you’ve spent hours accumulating — you simply lose any upgrades you might have applied to that character’s health, attack power and mana pool and have to pick a new playable character. As you rescue survivors from different time periods, you gain access to a range of characters with varying abilities — those from an “ice age” era, for example, are resistant to the cold, while those who are not will require special equipment to explore cold environments effectively.

The eventual goal is to storm into the local Overlord’s lair and kick him squarely in the balls. Said Overlord has a bunch of lieutenants, too, who can either be knocked off individually before taking on the Overlord or battled at the same time as the big boss man. You can theoretically walk straight into the Overlord’s lair from the beginning of the game, but you’ll be ill-equipped to deal with the challenges therein. Instead, it’s advisable to complete a bunch of missions to raise the continent’s “civilisation level” (thus affecting both the strength of the enemies and the potential rewards on offer) while also collecting the raw materials required to buff up your character’s spells. And rescue survivors. And build buildings. And construct wind shelters to push back the wind storms that buffet the region, making exploration difficult. And track down “mystery rooms” to find clues describing exactly what the hell happened to the world to get it in this state. And… you get the idea. There is a shitload of things to do, and completing the first continent then invites you to do it all again in a more diverse array of environments.

The sheer amount of things that there are to do can make the game seem like a daunting prospect. The game often draws comparisons to other open-world freeform adventures such as Minecraft and Terraria and that feeling of being alone in a vast, terrifying world is very much present and correct here. Focus on completing a few simple tasks, though — the game is good enough to suggest some to you — and things will gradually start to fall into place.

A Valley Without Wind is an ambitious title that tries very hard and while it’s true there are elements of the experience that could do with a little refinement, it’s a very memorable, compelling and addictive game that produces some excellent emergent narrative. Best of all, though, is the fact that the developers are still working on it, meaning the game experience will grow, change and evolve as time goes on. If it’s this intriguing now, I can’t wait to see what the game looks like in a few months or years.