#oneaday Day 514: Up to the Atic

For the last few days, I have not been playing any of the new games I have. I have, instead, been mildly hyperfixating on Atic Atac for Spectrum, which is part of the upcoming Rare Collection 1 cartridge that we're releasing for Evercade. I have ostensibly been doing this so I can better inform the Evercade community about how to get the best out of this game, but honestly I've just been having a lovely time, too.

Atic Atac is a game I have fond memories of, though not because I had it as a child — none of Rare predecessor Ultimate Play the Game's titles were on Atari computers. I don't actually remember where I played it for the first time, and it was only once I ever played it. I believe it was the BBC Micro version I played rather than the Spectrum version, which means I probably played it at my friend Matthew's house, but the details are hazy and unimportant.

What I do remember about Atic Atac is that I thought it was a really cool game for a few reasons: firstly, its top-down perspective, presented with bold, colourful, almost vector-esque lines; and secondly, its unusual health display, which was presented as a roast chicken gradually being stripped down to the bone. When all the "meat" was gone, you lost a life.

For years, I never actually knew what the point of Atic Atac was, though. When I played it as a child, neither I nor whoever it was who was proudly showing it off to me knew what you were supposed to do, so we just had a lovely time wandering back and forth through rooms, throwing axes at monsters. And, indeed, it is possible to enjoy Atic Atac like that if you so desire; there's even a score function based entirely on the enemies you defeat, so you can challenge yourself to get as high a score as possible before succumbing to inevitable death.

Spending some proper, protracted time with it now, though, I'm finding it very much my sort of game, in that it's something of a blend between the Atari 2600 classics Haunted House and Adventure, with a dash of early-format text adventures in there. Not in terms of how you interact with it — Atic Atac is out-and-out an action game — but rather in terms of its core structure of wandering a map, searching for specific "treasures" and your end goal being to return all of said treasures (three pieces of a key, in this case) to a specific location: the starting room.

What I often find with home computer games from this period — particularly those that originated on the Spectrum, for some reason — is that it's easy to assume they're a lot more complicated and confusing than they actually are. And such was the case with Atic Atac; at its core, it's a game about getting to know a map, unlocking doors and hunting for treasure, nothing more. Sure, there's a couple of additional wrinkles — most notably, a few special items counteracting a few "special" monsters that appear at various points — but the basics are simply explore maze, unlock doors, get treasure, escape.

One thing I have really enjoyed doing with Atic Atac is manually making a map, adventure game style. This is mostly fairly straightforward to do, though there are a couple of instances in the game where it defies its own laws of physics to squeeze rooms in where there "shouldn't" be any, which makes mapping those particular portions a little challenging, but for the most part it's easy enough to map. The tricky thing, then, is systematically searching all those rooms to find the keys and treasures that you need!

I haven't quite managed to beat the game just yet, but I've been really enjoying the attempts. And I think I know it well enough to be able to offer some solid advice to newcomers now, too — so watch out for that around the time of Rare Collection 1's release!

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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:

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 60: Perfection

Downloaded Perfect Dark on XBLA today. I've been waiting for this for a while, seeing as how I had some very fond memories of late-night multiplayer sessions on the original. Funny thing was, once it actually came out, I found myself hesitating a bit, wondering if it was still good.

I didn't need to worry. It is still good. Really good. Once you get over the N64-era level design, physics, character models and textures you'll realise there's still an incredibly solid game there, only uprezzed to HD and running at a frame rate the N64 could only dream of. I played a bit of the first level single player earlier and then went over to a buddy's house to play some multiplayer. The single player is good, and it's nice to play a Rare FPS again. They always were a pretty unique experience, with much more in the way of stealth elements and creative objectives than many other titles. But that's not what I remember Perfect Dark most fondly for. It's the multiplayer that I have the best memories of.

My God. How good is local multiplayer? It's easy to forget in this online age that one time, the only way to play games multiplayer was to bundle around the house of whoever had the biggest TV, take your N64 controllers and try and shotgun the top-left corner of the screen. I always prefer local multiplayer, as there's something about being in the same room with your opponents – who, by the very nature of the fact you're playing locally with them, are people you know well – that takes it from a fun but ironically solitary experience to a proper social event.

I ranted about the "social gaming" phenomenon yesterday in terms of how it really wasn't "social" at all, but this experience is true social gaming. Playing Perfect Dark on the Facility… sorry, Felicity level with remote explosives, rocket launchers and four FistSims on their hardest difficulty, and being surprised when the hand-to-hand only bots end up winning as a result of our collective ineptitude with anything vaguely explosive – priceless. Still fun, nearly ten years after we first did it.

So if you're umming and ahhing about getting Perfect Dark and you're the right age to appreciate it – i.e. you played and enjoyed it first time around – then stop hesitating and just get it. If you've been raised on Call of Duty you might be a bit shocked at the primitive graphics and seemingly simplistic gameplay, but give it a shot. You might just be surprised.