i'm not oblivious to the irony of my feelings about this trash. when i was in my teens, magazines like egm and gamefan loved to report on joseph lieberman's campaign against violence in video games. he and his fellow senators didn't really get it, and even as kids we knew better. better than them, better for ourselves. mortal kombat was and always has been looney tunes, but these crusty old politicians took it seriously - at least enough to raise funds from clueless conservative parents. this whole era tilled the soil from which gamergate would sprout a couple of decades later. censorship was the enemy, no matter what considerations might motivate the direction of art or changes to it.

(a couple of side notes: howard lincoln, president of nintendo america in 1993, said that year that night trap would never appear on a nintendo system. well, he was wrong about that. also, it's pretty interesting to see these guys wring their hands about konami's justifier lightgun "teaching children that any problem can be solved with a gun" when we consider the world we live in - at least in the us - today. lightguns are pretty much a thing of the past, and i feel like it's a safe bet that kids who played lethal enforcers didn't all go on to become cops. but if they did, well, then i don't imagine lieberman has anything negative to say about them. i'm quite sure he's not thinking about what a tragedy it is that some old video games "justified" them becoming the violent foot soldiers of the white supremacist state. and how would we ever know if even a single cop in 2022 ever played lethal enforcers, anyway? what the fuck am i even talking about?)

here i am, well into my adulthood and reading articles about a fascist recruitment campaign which happened in roblox, thinking i'd like to make it my mission to get my nephews away from this junk. initially i frowned upon learning that the elder of my nephews was playing lots of this because, well, it's fucking devoid of any sort of aesthetic quality. funko pop shit. and, in fairness, my nephews are still young and easily distracted and who the fuck am i anyway, i'm literally talking in irc in between paragraphs here about cruelty squad and the worldview of its developer, who is supposedly anti-capitalist, though he also collaborated with the brigador devs not long after they were exposed as something awful forum posters into white nationalism and holocaust denial or whatever, and i find the whole situation frankly fucking bewildering and idk if i want to play this game (cruelty squad) which otherwise seems to be, incidentally, the exact inverse of a game like roblox... but is it really? jfc i really am an idiot. sometimes nothing makes sense. it's not like i'm afraid of some level of depravity... i mean, have you seen the movies and music i'm into? but i mean, despite my depression and the world i'm not a doomer or a nihilist. the red pill is a metaphor in the matrix, a movie that whips ass, not the hateful bullshit some 4chan nerds equate with being "based." all of this is so much weirder and more unsettling to me than mortal goddamn kombat ever even came close to being.

look, i mean... i don't want to approach my nephews as a lieberman, as some arbiter of content safe for consumption with a stick up their ass. still, one thing i do know: roblox is shit and the kids could do better. play a fucking dragon quest. discover culture, idk. maybe even go outside, learn how to be alone.

I’m going to list a few traits below and I’d like you to guess what game I’m referring to:

- Top-down Zelda-inspired combat with absurdly small hit detection
- Charge attack that sends a boomerang-like projectile forward
- Moveset consisting of jumps and a dash that utilizes momentum-based drifting
- Floating companion creature whose abilities change depending on equipment preferences
- Linear adventure areas connected via an overworld map
- Villages with talking animals
- Using apples to refill health
- Surprisingly convoluted story about the origin of life
- Complete disregard for any sense of mechanical or narrative pacing
- Can be easily completed in a few short play sessions
- Ends with a beautiful calligraphy “FIN”

It might seem like I’m describing Linkle Liver Story. That’s because I am! But I’m also describing Nextech’s previous game released only a short two years prior: Crusader of Centy. It’s almost comical how perfectly identical these two games are.

Since it’s impossible to divorce Linkle Liver Story from the shadow of Crusader of Centy, I also regret to report that Crusader of Centy nearly does everything better. Crusader of Centy’s narrative focus on prejudice and miscommunication feels a lot more inspired and poignant than Linkle Liver Story’s musings about the impermanence of naturalistic life. I’ll give Linkle Liver Story that its protagonist’s controls feel more polished and refined, though its enemies are significantly more annoying and its weapon-growing system does not offer nearly as many strategic or personalization opportunities as it seems to hope it does.

Of course, this is all neglecting one crucial detail: in Linkle Liver Story, you can Naruto run as a foxgirl. So maybe it’s better than Crusader of Centy after all

PLAY THIS GAME.
Theresia is my favorite game. It's an extremely deep and interesting story that could be compared to some of the horror greats, such as Silent Hill 2 and Rule of Rose. It's gameplay is point and click mixed with dungeon crawler- and unfortunately, the first chapter of Theresia is unfortunately the worst regarding the gameplay- it clocks in as long as Theresia's prequel.
I refuse to talk on the story- but it deals with some very mixed feelings and overall a balance of "beauty and ugliness" within scenarios. It's a very interesting game story wise. I probably shouldn't give it a 5 star review based off the sometimes bad gameplay, but when I got obsessed with it to the point I didn't stop thinking about it for 2 years straight- you know it's good. Theresia also has a second campaign called Dear Martel (unlocked after beating the game) which is my particular favorite of the two entries- and tells of the origin of the events of the first scenario. If you can be patient enough to put up with its sometimes clunky controls, it's a gem.
Beginner tip: If you're playing this on emulator, I greatly reccomend using super speed. This game's movement is unfortunately really slow and you'll be having a better time if you play with this.

Around the end of the game, when you enter the alternate dimension that the antagonists of the game came from, Cortex remarks that there were supposed to be two dimensions, "but we ran out of time". Due to everything I had been through with this game while playing it, hearing this felt like when your friend makes a self-deprecating joke that's just a little too revealing and makes everyone uncomfortable.

I'm kind of baffled by how many people have given this game a pass when it comes to all its bugs, glitches, and general sloppiness. Don't get me wrong, this is a solid idea for a new Crash game, turning it into a more linear Jak and Daxter has its appeal and makes sense for when it came out. There are little moments where this new format works; when the platforming takes advantage of the more open levels and the crate mechanics of previous Crash games. But these moments don't last long and are replaced with mid-at-best gimmick sections. These gimmick sections start off kind of interesting, but nearly all of them immediately fall into the pitfall of the game's broken nature. Rolling around as a ball is neat until you have to make a precise jump and all of a sudden you launch thirty feet into the air. Rolling Cortex around in a barrel seems promising until one nudge rolls him off the stage immediately. Sliding stages require you to use a jump that only works half of the time, and the Nina Cortex level involves extremely brainless wall-jumping mechanics. Some stuff like Crash having to drag Cortex through levels and playing as Cortex aren't too bad, but man games in this era sure loved just giving as many different types of gameplay as possible, and considering Twinsanity is constantly falling apart, it does not do this game any favors.

But let's focus on just playing as Crash, going through levels with the usual jumping and spinning and whatnot. As I said, it sometimes works, but it often feels like they forced Crash-style platforming challenges into a 3D space and it doesn't feel great. I had several moments of falling into pits due to not being able to judge the distance of a jump, or not being able to see the jump at all, which rarely happened in previous Crash games. The worst part is anything involving platforming on steel crates, on which you can't see your shadow. This makes platforming on such sections a complete hassle, and I often ignored the gems that involved them due to how hard it was to find out how to land properly on them. In general, many of the crate bouncing challenges that are reminiscent of previous games are pretty bad here, and the game is at its best when it just acts like crates don't exist outside of TNT and nitro crates.

I have some other gripes, like how Aku Aku is basically useless since it seems every obstacle is instant death, how dogshit checkpointing can be sometimes (it really is inspired by Jak and Daxter), and the unskippable cutscenes, but really the main reason I can't recommend this game is how broken it is. I had three straight-up crashes/soft locks while playing, one of which sent me way too far back, one moment where I couldn't progress past a combat section because knocking an enemy into a pit didn't count as killing them, and a couple of moments of losing all the music for some time, and several other glitches. So many things just killed me without explanation that I went through most of the game scared for my life that a random seam on the floor would take my last life and send me back to the last autosave. Anyone else jump on that one boss's dead body, thinking it was safe, only to have it kill you and make you do the whole boss again? I could also talk about how the story feels like only half of it was told, the cutscenes that desperately need actual sound effects, and countless sloppy little things.

Obviously, no one sets out to make a game like this on purpose, it was the result of crunch, disputes between different parts of development and with the publisher, and having to scrape together different, unfinished versions of this game that went through multiple changes way too rapidly. There's a version of this game that fully realizes what Traveler's Tales set out to do, and it's sad we'll probably never see it considering the Crash series has both come back and died before it could get to giving this the full-on remake it needs. Some people can enjoy it for what it is, I personally had a rough as hell time and would not recommend this to anyone, especially since emulating it still seems to be an involved process. The music stands out as the only fully realized and wholly enjoyable part of this game. I need to stop trusting the taste of 3D platformer fans though, have you seen the way they talk about this game, it's like they played a different game I swear.

After being pushed back twice and ultimately not shipping from Amazon dot com, I caved and picked up Pocky & Rocky: Reshrined from Gamestop. Like an absolute lunatic, I also purchased two gigantic boxes of batteries because my addled brain would rather slap an extra 25 dollars on an order and get something rather than cough up six bucks for shipping. The real question is, was all this trouble worth it?

I think so. Like Tengo Project's other releases, Reshrined does such a great job at replicating every element that made the original games work while innovating on them in a way that feels like a natural progression, you'd almost think it was released a generation apart from the originals rather than 20+ years. If anything, the most "modern" aspect about the game is how the difficulty has been scaled back. It's still certainly challenging, but unlimited continues and mid-level checkpointing after game overs makes it a lot less frustrating when you bite it. I found myself entering into a sort of Castlevania rhythm where failure only meant another chance to approach a level armed with foreknowledge of enemy patterns and item locations, and building a new route accordingly.

Pocky and Rocky still play like how you would expect them to, but you're quickly given a new technique that allows you to set crystal balls that ricochet your attacks, and a chargeable shield that reflects most incoming projectiles. These new skills can sometimes be tricky to set up, especially in later stages, but I suppose it needs to be balanced out somehow given the absolute havoc you can unleash with them. The roster is also expanded with three new characters, all of which offer more varied movesets over Pocky and Rocky. Ikazuchi is easily my favorite among the three with her homing electrical spell and snappy dodge making her feel both nimble and overpowered. I was less a fan of Ame-no-Uzume, who attacks using two Options positioned at her sides, giving her a broader base attack while leaving her open down the middle. To make up for this, she can float over bottomless pits and bodies of water, but in more narrow passageways having her spell power at 0 feels more punishing than any other character.

My one real complaint about Reshrined is that there's NOT. ENOUGH. ROCKY. Look at that little guy! You're telling me I can only play as him for three levels!? AND one of those is just a boss fight where the whole gimmick is the boss runs left and right? Get outta here... Docking a whole star for that. Yes I know I can play the whole game as him in free mode, but I've always had a hard time doing a second run of any arcade game right after finishing the first.

The game is of course great to look at. The sprite work is incredibly detailed and colorful, and you can tell a lot of care was put into the animations. There's some weird censorship in the US release where they covered up Ame-no-Uzume's chest in cutscenes, which feels a bit unnecessary but also kinda appropriate for a game that is so closely trying to emulate its 90's predecessors. Speaking of, the translation isn't great. Some lines of dialog just sound off, but maybe that's just me. The plot is fine for what it is (see: time travel shenanigans), but also bizarrely convoluted for a Pocky & Rocky game. The cutscenes can go on a bit long too, which I don't entirely mind because they are great to look at, but the pacing of free mode feels a whole lot better.

Like other Tengo helmed Natsume games, it comes at a pretty steep price for the amount of game you're getting. I prefer to look at it as supporting quality work. Reshrined takes maybe an hour or two before you're watching the credits, but the game just plays so good that I really don't mind dropping 30 bucks on it. No doubt it'll hit 10 dollars on PSN as routinely as Wild Guns Rearmed. In any case, I'm a big stupid freak for Pocky & Rocky and I just had to have it on disc along with, like, 50 AAA batteries. My cup runneth over...

Proof that Grasshopper is straight up incapable of making the same games it used to, opting instead to make something with next to no substance and a failed attempt at capturing previous styles. Shading looks nice but these animations are disgustingly stiff which is a death sentence for an action game.
I got sick of the "story" when it was clear that the whole game was going to just be a circus, roll up and see what the wacky dudes at Grasshopper are doing! Her head rotated 180 degrees and she's a spider now! WTF!!!!
just go away lol

Well, we are at the end of my little Character Action Game marathon. At the same time this is also my 350th review on the site, so what better game to cap both of these off with than the underappreciated Capcom cult classic, God Hand.

I have known about this game for, I wanna say the past 2 to 3 years thanks to my buddy Simon who showed me of course, the SsethTzeentach Review of the game. What I saw looked like some of the most comical shit ever made in a video game, and made it all the more surprising to me that this was the last game created by its developer, Clover Studios.

My friends have all gassed this game up to me for years now, and so I finally decided that 2022 would be the year I would play God Hand.

So now allow me to make a huge disclaimer: I fucking suck at this game. I doubt that's a huge surprise, God Hand is known to be a very challenging game and it will kick your ass, as it brutally did mine.

So do not take my opinions here as fact, but just as my personal views for my first playthrough, as God Hand is meant to be played many many times.

Right from the offset, God Hand comes at you in full force with its vibes, showing the "Graphic Violence, Discretion is Advised" statement that had been put in both Devil May Cry and Resident Evil games at the time. The image of course showing a screen of our protagonist Gene kicking an enemy in the testicles until his face turns blue.

Then there's the menu theme.

I sat there for a solid 2 and a half minutes just, absorbing the absolute bop that is the menu theme. All of the music in this game is fucking excellent, from the theme of Fat Elvis, this absolute bop filled with Elvis Presley sounding noises and a sensual backing track, to the intense rocking theme of your rival Azel, quaintly named Devil May Sly. It's all fucking phenomenal and gets you in the mood.

Of course, what follows after the music is also one of the funniest games ever made. Usually I find weird voice acting to be laughable for the wrong reasons but here I'd honestly argue that the weirdness is 100% both intentional and what makes the game work. Elvis being the most stereotypical version of a Hispanic male, which I also am (Hispanic, not stereotypical lol), gave me a good amount of laughs as he cracks Spanish curse words calling Gene all sorts of things from "pendejo" to "puta" and all that in between.

There's just so many funny moments, like when you encounter these Super Sentai looking mofos and they have these weird Stich like voices, doing weird poses and then you kick them into the ground like a nail and proceed to stomp their heads into the dirt. Or the scene with Gene kicking the thugs out of the window, and the last thug agreeing to get kicked out midscene with a tiny head nod.

And that humor stays in the gameplay as well. You have various ridiculous moves that you can and will use on your opponents, like your Roulette Moves. These can vary from beam like attacks, a flurry of punches, getting a Home Run with a Baseball Bat you summon, or my personal favorite: Kicking people in the balls.

The attention to detail is great too, because that kicking in the balls move only applies to male characters, and will not effect female or robotic enemies, and a specific boss who lost their testicles in the war.

Going more into the combat, my friend referred to it as a "spiritual sequel to Resident Evil 4", which makes sense given that both are Shinji Mikami titles. Both games work with an adaptive difficulty that changes depending on the skill of the player. It's a lot more subtle in RE4, but in God Hand it is the game.

The better you perform at the game, the higher the Tension Gauge goes up. It grows from Level 1, to Level 2, Level 3 and finally Level Die. Full transparency, the highest I ever got was to Level 2 because even on the lowest levels this game absolutely dominated me with its Alexander the Great obsessed cast of characters.

Combat works as follows: You use the Square Button to use the combo chain, which you can customize, the Triangle Button is your combo cancel move, and the X button is your spacer move, with Circle being your Reaction Command button.

All of the moves, for all buttons except Circle can be customized to whatever you wish. You want your Square Combo Chain to be an assortment of kicks, or a near infinite juggle combo, you can do that. You want your combo cancel to be a Pimp Smack, you can do that. The level of customization is endless, and even outside of that you have direction based moves that can also help you.

Let's say you do a spot dodge, you can press Triangle during it to do a slide kick which can easily knock down crowds of opponents and works great as crowd control option. If you're particularly skilled, you can knock an enemy high up in the air and press Back and Triangle to do a Shoryuken, and chain it multiple times until you do a forward triangle to kick the enemy in front of you, using them as a projectile to knock down other opponents.

All of these can help to take down the hordes of enemies you face, alongside the power of the God Hand. When you raise your God Hand Meter high enough, you can press R2 to activate the awesome powers of a God, and absolutely decimate your foes. They cannot block the attacks, and you are invulnerable while using it. Truly, an awesome ability.

This does bring up though certain other aspects of your playthrough, resource management. In your first playthrough of God Hand, unless you are some supernaturally gifted God of Video Games, you are going to suck ass. You will often find yourself breaking open various containers be it boxes or jars to get health, Roulette Wheel meter, God Hand meter, and cash. These drops are entirely random, as the game doesn't want you to rely too much on them.

This creates a system I call the "Gamble". Where you have to base your current battle situation around the resources available to you. Do you get a fresh fruit that restores your health while you're topped off and let it sit for later on in the fight, or do you get a Roulette Wheel card. You gotta take the risks and see if you'll survive.

Gambling honestly is a central mechanic to this game even outside combat, your hub for God Hand's sake is a fucking Casino on a remote island. You can play Slots, Blackjack, Poker, or even bet on racing these Poisonous Chihuahuas. (Always bet on Lucky Clover, should be obvious enough). Gambling is a major way of winning money both in combat and out of it, so to say that this game is very much about gambling is correct.

Of course a skilled enough player can work well without luck, but that was not me and it will not be you either on your first go.

In another refreshing sense, God Hand also lets you avoid entire encounters if you have what you need. If you just feel like you want to proceed through a level and aren't locked behind keys or the like, you can easily avoid combat in general. I wouldn't recommend avoiding all combat obviously, but if you're in a risky situation it is a completely valid option for progression. You aren't given a grade at the end of the level, the only thing decided is the bonus money you receive, and when you die you keep any money you gained from before hand. It results in the game not actively demoralizing new players unlike in other CAGs, which I find gives it more of an appeal than most. It also helps that the individual levels are themselves, very short. With there being 9 stages, with various small levels within each. It makes you feel like you aren't losing much progress when you die.

It's shit like this that makes me question how this game flopped. Everything here is incredibly appealing to a casual player, and there's all sorts of tech that more advanced players can learn and master. So why is it that this game got a 3 out of 10 on fucking IGN. You want my guess? The reviewer got to the first boss, thought it was unfair, and dropped the fucking game.

God Hand is a game that instantly brought a smile to my face, and even when I would get frustrated due to the many challenges, there was always a funny moment or a goofy encounter that would soon follow.

You can kick men in the balls, suplex a man in a Gorilla suit, fight Elvis, spank dominatrix women, get your ass beat by actual clowns, and save the world. What here is not at least somewhat entertaining?

Also this game had a ending dance sequence before Bayonetta did, so Bayonetta is easily the inferior copy of God Hand.

I implore you to play God Hand, or else I'll dragon kick your ass into the milky way. I'm Alexander the Great, and this has been God Hand.

P.S.

COME ON, HOW WAS THIS CLOVER'S LAST GAME?!?!?!? YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS! YOU KICK MEN IN THE BALLS!!!!!!!!!!

Remember those fucking terrible Simpsons games on NES? Well, Imagineering were pumping out that shit so hard that they even had it's engine infest other IPs.

Swamp Thing plays pretty much exactly like Bart Meets Radioactive Man, which came out literally around the same time as this apparently. Same abominable control scheme where run and jump are the same button, same exact sound effects and same ruthless checkpoint system/or lack thereof. This game though is worse than Radioactive Man, because despite the fact you're playing as a superhero, you're apparently less competent than Bart pretending to be one. Swamp Thing can punch and shoot shit after he picks up the ammo for that particular attack, but is deathly allergic to doing so while crouching and it feels like enemies easily lumber into you on accident when you attempt to hit them due to shitty hitboxes.

The most amount of hilarity I got out of this game was the visual of probably the most shy enemy in the history of video games; some guy hiding in his house tossing slow-moving knives out his front door. At least I assume someone's throwing them, I don't think the knives are sentient, but the obvious shoot reason was that they didn't have enough time to animate someone throwing them.

I love that the image for this game on here is just some person's ebay listing (I think), it goes really well with how low effort this game was in general. By the way, no this is not worth the hundreds it's going for on ebay. It's complete highway robbery, this game ain't even worth one tenths of a didgeridoo let alone a complete one.

a weird one to try and rate over 20 years later. is it a timeless video game? ...maybe? being completely honest, there was a solid decade or so where i felt this had aged poorly, and that other games were becoming more refined with their controls, had greater scope, better ideas, etc. none of that really matters to me now—it no longer needs to be all the things that i feel were eventually surpassed by other games—and in a full circle kinda way i love this one now almost as much as i did in 1998. almost.

Played as part of Rare Replay.


In the hands of a more sophisticated writer and more than two voice actors, this could have been something special. The Rare Replay documentary about the game explains that it was essentially Rareware’s Rage Against the Dying Light moment - power players within the company were sick of gluing googly eyes onto broomsticks and bedknobs and wanted to deconstruct their own irreverent image by gluing googly eyes onto pints of beer and making them say FUCK instead. 

It's an exciting concept, and one that's appealed to me for some 20 years - as someone who religiously purchased Nintendo Official Magazine in the late 90s (even when there were no Nintendo games to read about), Conker's Bad Fur Day has always occupied a special place in my mind - during some of Nintendo’s worst droughts, this game was repeatedly trotted out as a “COMING SOON!” attraction to stop people trading in for the PlayStation - and it did work, to some extent. I (thought I) was far too young for it and that my parents would cast me out for even suggesting that we buy it, but was nonetheless inextricably drawn to the idea of a Banjo-Kazooie game where I could see boobs and drink pints. I'd 100%'d Kazooie, Tooie, and Kong 64, and really wanted to try on my big boy pants with this game - as someone who only owned an N64 for most of the fifth generation of consoles, I was emotionally starved of pseudo-mature gaming content. In the end, I forgot about it in the same way most people did - by watching it be crushed under the arrival of the GameCube only a few months later. It's only because Rare Replay pretty much handed this game to me on a plate that I've even bothered to give it a try.

Bad Fur Day does manage to achieve its "NOT FOR KIDZ" destructive-deconstructive goals to some extent - the first few hours are genuinely eye-popping in the way they very unsubtly put Banjo-Kazooie in the crosshairs. Even the game’s strict adherence to a “no collectibles at any time” policy (aside from an admittedly funny cutscene that tries to explain why these games have floating pieces of honeycomb everywhere) feels like a self-inflicted attack on the house Rare had built by the turn of the century. Bribing scouser beetles (who are all voiced by one guy who can barely stifle his own giggles on the production track) with wads of shrieking sentient cash is an initially novel experience that I genuinely can't compare to any other game I've played, but by the third time you’ve done a fetch-quest for yet another a drunken inanimate object with big tits, it kinda becomes apparent that Chris Seavor and his surprisingly small team were more or less just thrashing around a playground with very little direction. There wasn't all that much of an image for them to deconstruct.

The Conker team's admission in the Rare Replay documentary that Bad Fur Day was more or less a directionless mess of sandboxes until someone on the team decided to incorporate a series of movie parodies is an altogether unsurprising admission. It was the year 2000, and this is the video game equivalent of Scary Movie. I was there! I remember! Referencing pop-films by just straight-up recreating them with your own characters was peak comedy at the time! After a certain point, though, the game is essentially just chaining parody cutscenes of varying humour and quality together using stiff player movement that makes Banjo's mobility look like Mirror's Edge or Metroid Dread in comparison. You can probably imagine how poorly a bullet-time parody handles on 64-bit hardware, even with the power of the mighty Expansion Pak behind it.

The final cutscene (I watched it on YouTube after becoming all too tired of carrying around slices of cheese with Yorkshire accents) - where Conker fruitlessly negotiates with God/The Programmer to get his girlfriend back - is a rare bit of introspective deviation from a game that is otherwise all too content to lean on 6-vertice polygonal gore and a fart soundboard for its content, and I wish the game had done more things like it instead of what we got. If the game leaned more into questioning its own existence and the value of Rare's house-style in general, I think Bad Fur Day could really have struck a chord with those of us who grew up snatching jiggies in Tik Tok Woods or whatever those Banjo levels were called. The "no collectibles" rule is a striking statement of intent at first, but ultimately Rare prove themselves wrong by demonstrating that grabbing bananas and musical notes are an intrinsic part of what made their mascot platformers so satisfying - without those cute little distractions, all you really have here is a drunk-walking simulator set in a muddy 3D world that's been stripped back to its threadbare essentials in order to make room on the cartridge for as many crude voice lines as Robin Beanland could scavenge from the cutting room floor of an early-2000s South Park recording room.

As a developer who’s also made a game that heavily leaned on “British” “humour” at the arguable expense of gameplay, I should probably be more charitable to this game than I’m being right now - but there’s only so many times you can hear Conker call a female-coded pile of faeces a huge bitch before reaching for the Home button. While I admire Chris Seavor for having the audacity to make Yamauchi-era Nintendo publish a video game as deeply offensive and provocative as this (the Rare Replay documentary mentions that Nintendo financed a recreation of a tacky British pub at Spaceworld to promote the game, and even Miyamoto checked it out!), I think provocative art should have a sense of purpose (I am kinda repeating my Twelve Minutes review here, sorry), and it's clear that Rare's C-team were kinda scrambling haplessly to turn their pet "what if a squirrel said CNT" concept into something that players could spend a couple dozen hours with.

With Bad Fur Day*, I feel Rare squandered a perfect opportunity to rudely set the sun on their goofy Saturday-morning SNES and N64 era and move ahead to something new. This could have been their Kill the Past moment, but instead it's more of a Vague, Lengthy Gesture Towards the FUCKING Past moment. As I'm always saying on Backloggd, it kinda pisses me off when developers try to send-up or tear-down genres by making stodgy, broken or tedious imitations of said genre. What's the point? Maybe I'm asking too much of an N64 mascot platformer, but I can see the same potential my child-self imagined in there somewhere. Sadly, another of my Rareware white whales has been slain.