Topic: Pure Xbox Game Club - On Indefinite Hiatus

I finished Still Wakes the Deep again. Like @NintendoByNature I am glad I played it, there was just enough I enjoyed, but also glad I didn't pay for it. I'm not sure I have a whole lot to say to write one of my longer reviews that I haven't already said in comments above.

My rating: 6.5/10

@Balta666 I also won't vote this month as I'm on holiday and won't have time to play anything.

Happy first day of August! So I guess we’ll be playing the most-voted game soon?

@Pastellioli yes, I will send an update shortly.

@Balta666 Ok! I’ll wait.

Heck yeah, been waiting a few months for this!

Oh dear, I have committed the most cardinal of sins and not played the game that I voted for 😱. I have broken my own rules but I have had way too much on this month. I still plan to play it though.

Anyway, I will make myself useful and change the thread title!

Going to start now. Can’t wait to discuss the game with everyone! Let’s hope my second playthrough goes well.

Just finished the first chapter this morning and getting onto the next one. The moments are still so charming and silly! The most well-known part was this moment with a bee and a sunflower, and when you get onto that part, you’ll see why. The aiming during a few of the segments with projectiles was a bit off since there isn’t an aiming reticle, but it wasn’t bad. I’ll go back to playing later.

@Yousef- consider it done! Thanks

@AgentCooper thanks for the words! Vote added.

De nada 😉

Already completed the chapters Sloprano and Bats Tower. Sloprano was pretty funny (both ironically and unironically) and the boss was pretty memorable. Bats Tower was fine, but I forgot that Conker runs out of breath pretty fast during the underwater segments and the camera sometimes refused to move at times. The bosses are pretty wild and absurd, but they are a bit too easy for me to beat since I know what to do.

I am on the entrance to the next chapter, Uga Buga, but the entrance is maybe one of the worst parts I remember experiencing. You have to avoid getting killed underwater by these sets of fans and you are forced to redo the part if you get killed, and it requires timing. I’m stalling a ton since I’m so anxious I’ll die in one-hit and need to restart it. I want to use the chapters function to skip it, but that’d be cheating.

The game is still fun and I still find a lot of charm in it and its fun and crass writing, but it has some pretty awfully designed parts in its levels. The next chapter is honestly one of the game’s worst since it’s loaded with a lot of annoying, bad tasks and level design, (especially with this mini game they throw in nearing the end of the chapter) so I’m not looking forward to revisiting it.

Well Conker is a game I have finished once back in the N64 days, I remember both enjoyed it for its humour and design but also being fairly often lost and frustrated with the platforming/combat.

I own live and reloaded from games with gold so I have started that the other day to see the differences and oh boy how good this game looks!

First impact is the quality of the voice acting and a reminder of how much I don't like the Mumbo Jumbo of banjo's games, secondly is the inventiveness of its scenarios specially to the end.

I found the platforming way less of a trouble than I remember (maybe from better camera than the original) apart from the fact, quite often the jump input would not trigger and I would fall to my doom and surprisingly I never got lost. The only parts I needed a hand was in understanding how to beat the bosses as they can be quite cryptic (and still dying a lot to execute but it is also great that you can skip cutscenes after the second time forward).

I ended up finishing the game in two sittings and falling in love with it for a second time. It is my second favourite Rare game after Perfect Dark!

@Balta666 I am pretty new to Conker, I only played it for the first time last year and finished both the original and the remake. This is the first time I am attempting a second full playthrough of the original.

I am playing through the original but I do like some parts of the remake over it. The controls and camera are really better, and I do find the graphics to be so beautiful and outdo the graphics in the original by a ton, though I wish the cartoony look, vibrant colors and aspects relating to it were kept in the remake, and the censoring on some mild swear words is a bit silly and they don’t even have the same meaning as the f-word. A fun fact is that the remake was originally being made as being fully uncensored and uncut, which was its selling point, but they were forced to censor it a bit more because of Microsoft not wanting to offend people. I also find the voice acting great, it’s more impressive when you find out it was all done by three people. So many different ranges! The original was pretty impressive technically for the N64.

And definitely agree on the combat. The original has some awful, awful combat and the lack of an aiming reticle during the gunplay just makes it worse. The shooting gameplay gets worse later on during one of the game’s final chapters since it requires you to be alert and fast. Also not looking forward to getting to that too…

@Pastellioli I forgot to mention it here but yeah the voice acting is something way above the average quality of its time and indeed the war chapter specially has some parts that are...

@Balta666 The War chapter is so bad in the original with its difficulty paired with the bad gunplay and slower controls. The remake definitely does the gameplay and controls better. It’s a shame, cuz it’s easily the coolest moment and chapter in the game for me but its the hard difficulty and bad gameplay there that makes me not want to replay that part again, but I’m going to have to! The timed escape was awful, paired with you having to retain a good amount of health and avoid getting hit by lasers. I should have gone to the remake instead for this month, but it’s too late since I’ve made a good amount of progress in the original. I’m still stuck on the one-hit blade segment, and at this point I just feel like using the chapter function this once to skip it, but I don’t think the chapter function counts as a full playthrough. The game is so great but it’s also hard to revisit.

EDIT: Finally got through the underwater fan segment without using the chapter function! I wasted an hour on it lol. Took a lot of time and patience. Time to move onto my most least favorite level in the game by far!

I played Live & Reloaded a while back and couldn't really see what all the fuss was about. I thought it was fairly mediocre to be honest and didn't even finish it. The the novelty of the crude humour got boring pretty quickly for me and it was all just a bit 'meh'.

@dmcc0 I don’t really mind the humor and do think it works but the gameplay is easily the worst part for me. Sort of now starting to realize how bad the game (especially the original) plays and the levels being crammed with bad objectives. It has to be the novelty crude humor that overshadows the bad gameplay and why no one talks about the awful gameplay and level design.

@dmcc0 @Pastellioli the humour is not to everyone taste but I do enjoy the 4th wall breaking quite a lot (I see a lot of Conker's in Deadpool adaptation nowadays).
Gameplay wise of the OG it is a bit of its time while wanting to do a lot. I particularly like that more than levels you have an over world divided by load screens and it is difficult to play 15min without seeing a new and creative idea (on top of homages to pop culture of the time)

@Balta666 The humor is one of the games strengths, and it’s biggest strength is it’s comedic and crass writing and characters. The comedy in it really makes the game more memorable, and the humor is also used to subvert expectations and cliches and tropes associated with kiddy platformer games. The movie and pop culture parodies and homages are the best. The coolest thing is how they are used in relation to the theme of the level they are in, and for me it never felt super random or forced. The game is pretty creative with its ideas and the game can take a lot of surprising and sometimes unexpected turns with its objectives when you do play it for the first time.