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Conker's Bad Fur Day
Nintendo/ N64
EP is Squirelly for ConkerThere
were plenty of safer picks for game of the show: Anachronox seems
to be taking great strides towards the interactive story telling that
we hope video gaming will eventually become. Deus Ex is plowing
new fields of freedom and intelligence of gameplay. Halo will tear
to shreds the envelopes of graphical presentation, cooperative multiplay
and open range gaming. Metal Gear Solid 2 (which we decided wasn't
yet a game at all but a video demonstration) backed up show floor traffic
every hour on the hour as gamers gathered around the Konami Corral to
gasp at the visuals. The Blair Witch Project games and Ground
Control seem set to burst asunder their respective genres and Neverwinter
Nights is going to usher in the long dreamed of Golden Age of role
playing. The scope of Shenmue alone merits consideration, and again,
although bleem! isn't exactly a game, it's a genius product. Any
one of these games could easily have been accepted as the game
of E32K. We could even have copped out and mockingly called the PR posturing
of the big console companies at the show the Arena Deathmatch Game of
The Show they'd like it to be.
Instead, we chose to finger, on a fading game system, a fuzzy, textureless,
bad-ass little squirrel, Conker and his Bad Fur Day. It's
a risky pick and we know it. If Conker turns out only to be a pissy-mouthed
little vermin in an adolescent, potty-humour world with foggy old graphics,
we'll be scrubbing egg off our mistaken faces for months to come.
The fact that Conker seems to represent, at last, the recognition by Nintendo
that the people who grew up playing Zelda, Super Mario Brothers
and Excite Bike are now thirty years old and looking for gaming
content to match their, some would claim, maturity does not play
into our decision. Nintendo recognized this some time ago and the blood
spatters in Perfect Dark are evidence enough of Nintendo's understanding
of their consumer base. Besides, we're looking for the best game
of E3, not a representation of a shift in a specific company's philosophy.
What Conker seems to have that videogames so sorely lack is an intelligent,
grown up sense of humor. Too many games and game developers, in an effort
to attract more mature gamers and shrug off that nerd tag of kiddie
fluff have pushed towards darker and uglier themes: hell, gore, and effing
adult language. Very few games have been able to maintain a sense of adult
joy, which is what we are hopeful of from Conker's Bad Fur Day.
Now, one might validly point out that biting a boss's balls so his pants
fall down and your dinosaur can chomp a chunk out of his ass or urinating
a stream onto flaming enemies is hardly a grown up sense of humor, but
we would counter that the way said stream of urine wafts in the breeze
is indicative of a deeper, more intelligent sharper-edged wit. The dialogue
and cut scenes seem full of hilarious and satirical jabs at popular culture
and human nature. We trust Rare and think that if anyone can bring us
gaming with the style of Red Dwarf, Rowan Atkinson or Dennis Miller,
it is them. We know that regardless of Rare's success, we're going to
have to endure a dung heap pile of potty-mouthed wannabes, and that Rare
themselves may very well fall into that same trap. We have our steamed
towels ready to wipe the yoke off our faces if it happens.
Until then, our hearts are with Conker. We're naming his Bad Fur Day Game
of E3 2000.
-Jules Grant
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Anachronox
Ion Storm/ Eidos/ PC
Worth considering for the advances that Tom Hall and
his team seem to be making in the field of interactive story telling
and immersion into a gaming world.
Deus
Ex
Ion Storm/ Eidos/ PC/ Mac
Warren Spector demonstrated to us how on one level of
the game, there were three very different paths to success. We're impressed.
Shenmue
Sega/ Dreamcast
Yu Suzuki's vision for this project is on a scale many
times larger than any other game.
Neverwinter
Nights
Bioware/ Interplay/ PC/ Mac
The team at Bioware, headed by Trent Oster, is working
hard to provide every gamer who ever played a pen and paper RPG the
way to transfer that experience to the internet and perhaps improve
it through the magic of computer graphics.
Ground
Control
Massive Entertainment/ Sierra/ PC/ PS2
This strategy title that is putting battlefield tactics
back into real-time strategy caught everyone off guard with its impressive
showing.
Metal
Gear Solid 2
Konami/ PS2
It's a ways out, but there can be no doubt that Hideo
Kojima is one of the most creative and meticulous game developers in
the world. A true creative talent and one of the few games at the show
seeming to demonstrate the much vaunted power of the PlaySstation
2.
Halo
Bungie/ PC/ Mac
Jason Jones and his Bungie team are one of the few that
seem capable of stretching every genre instead of just the one
that they started with. Halo is most assuredly a ground-breaking game.
bleem!
Bleem/ DC
Continuing to show now neither fear nor respect for
Sony's flotilla of lawyers, Bleem has done Sega a prodigious favour
and made the Dreamcast an even better value. Hi-res PlayStation games
on your Dreamcast is just too brilliant.
Run
Like Hell
Digital Maven/ Interplay/ PS2
Producer Travis Williams has a sick, sick mind; 'nuff
said.
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> Drumroll Please...And The Game of The Show is...