In 2006, Rare decided to revitalize a fantastic brand that had languished for over five years: Conker! In case you missed his appearance on the Nintendo 64, I’ll give you a brief summary. Imagine if one of the puppets from Peter Jackson’s: Meet the Feebles was featured in a video game about his adventures the day after a late night out with the boys: that’s Conker’s Bad Fur Day (BFD), in a nutshell.

Conker’s: Live & Reloaded is the port of BFD to the Xbox, which features a new Xbox live-enabled multiplayer mode. I’d love to recommend you check it out, as there are many points in the game where I found myself laughing out loud. At one point, I was laughing so hard, I had to pause the game. There’s something just incredibly hilarious to me about an enormous pile of feces with a penchant for poo-slinging that only communicates by singing in opera-style.

But you’ll notice this blog update is a Headshot, which means that I’m supposed to shred the game, not endorse it. I’ll start my shredding by saying that as someone with a background in development, I understand how hard it is to find every last bug in a game. But STILL, I would think that major bugs would be uncovered prior to launch. And the bug that I found, its a doozy! I made it almost all the way through the game, to the end of the series of missions called “It’s War!”, where you fight an army of rampaging teddy bears. I was just about to jump onto the boat that was to ride me to safety when out of nowhere, there came a rocket from my 9 o’clock. Instead of blowing up, though, I magically appeared back in “Windy”, the central “sandbox” world from which most other worlds are reached. I was no longer in war garb, clad instead in my traditional blue hoodie. And a sound could be heard overhead, the sound of a door opening. So I took a long walk up a path to the top of a hill where a windmill once stood and then I saw it. The door to the world of war was floating ever-upward toward the heavens, for reasons unknown to me. I scratched my head, but continued to the Feral Reserve, where I was to continue my adventures. But alas, the weasel that was to recruit me for a heist was no where to be found. And due to the wonderfully unique auto-save feature of the game, I couldn’t load an old save. I was stuck. Completely and utterly. Over 20 hours of gameplay WASTED! Whether this bug was the result of a bad copy of the game (mine was a rental from Smackbuster), or a bug in the code, I don’t know. But the end result was the same…I was screwed.

The moral of the story is: DEBUG YOUR CODE, you saucy QA folks at Rare. DEBUG!

Sheesh.

-Vince

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Vince, Head Shot, Video Games. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.