The real reason Bloodborne owns is that there are a truly absurd number of wives in this game, including;
- Lesbian Wife (Lady Maria)
- Other Lesbian Wife (Eileen)
- Likes-Biting Wife (Thiccer Amelia)
- Eldritch Monstrosity Wife (Ebrietas)
- Dollification Wife (The Doll)
- Medfet Wife (Iosefka)
- Breeding Kink Wife (Rom)

Anyone who was shocked by Miyazaki admitting he's a masochist really wasn't paying any attention

I beat this omnipresent monolith of bullshit on the 360, and more fool me for nibbling when it was offered up all shiny and new for the PS5 for £8.

Fuck me dead though if this isn't the definition of a polished turd. Or perhaps more like Dorian Gray's portrait - as this game somehow manages to keep it's impression of youth, the anarchic spirit of early-naughts R is locked in an attic, rotting, screaming out for someone just to kill it and be done with it.

Leaving all other complaints aside in the interest of my own sanity and retiring this forever, I don't understand how R get a pass for their game mechanics anymore. The combat is pure jank, the cars handle like you're steering melting butter around a frying pan, and WHO THE FUCK WANTS TO SPAM X TO SPRINT? In the bin, for good. Until they hire a UX/UI designer that's worked this side of the millenium and they sort all of their interface bullshit out (there's an entire essay on this that made me feel seen like nothing else, google RDR2 shit controls or something who remembers) I can honestly say I won't be back.

Gets a 1 star bonus for introducing me to Kendrick Lamar in 2013.

I played the campaign.

I can't stress enough how much of a technical achievement this is. Lightning shines everywhere and reflects every surface, particles fly through the screen and impact your eyes with immense force and sound. Every mission starts with a thunderous push that gets you immediately in action.

More real than life itself. It doesn't get any more realistic than this

After a short life break from gaming, I find myself with COVID, housebound, and nothing to do. Fittingly I've decided to punish my fevered mind with the weirdest shit in my backlog.

I'd guess this beautiful, alien creation is vaguely about being a round peg in a world of square holes - or a lone Dali hanging in an exhibition of renaissance paintings - but who can say for certain. While baffling and overwhelming for the first 15 minutes, confusion quickly falls away to reveal a mechanically sound micro-RPG with some of my favourite art and sound in recent memory.

How many of the following points apply to you will determine your suitability for this product:

1: A proclivity (past or present) for drugs
2: Overworked and underpaid
3: Depressed
4: Fantasise about the return of Guy Fawkes and/or billionaires toy spaceships burning up on re-entry
5: Tell people Bela Tarr is your favourite director when really its David Lynch
6: Feel the last remaining shreds of optimism for the human trajectory leave your body every time you open Twitter and yet another sickeningly bad faith talking head swings downward and is met with a resounding cheer
7: Proselytise experimental indie games providing there's some familiar mechanics
8: Have frequently tried to radicalise moderate friends and family by demonstrating any number of tangible examples of oppression and inequality the world over
9: Worry you may actually, permanently lose it one day, whatever "it" is
10: Have sat in a gallery staring at a Rothko or Pollock or anything similar that people call pointless, pretentious, not-art, whatever and F E L T S O M E T H I N G

If you've scored 6 or above on our Hypercapitalist Revenge Fantasy Suitability Test TM, may we offer you our most heartfelt sympathies, and welcome.

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.