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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Conker's Bad Fur Day is yet another mediocre 3D platformer from a developer who really ran them into the ground, which has been injected with a large amount of scatological humor and dirty jokes in a desperate attempt to raise interest through scandal.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: Well, there's a few suggestive lines from that sunflower, and an entire feces-themed level ending with an operatic singing mound of it as a boss fight. Then there's the two bits where you have to urinate on monsters to proceed, and it is indeed well documented that the game was originally planned as yet another cutesy platformer.
Why I Like It Anyway: Aside from a fair amount of the toilet humor and profanity actually being fairly funny in context, the real appeal of Conker is that the cutesy wholesome vibe of the game was not the only aspect of the game taken in a radically different direction after the poor initial showings of a Conker's Quest in progress. The gameplay is also a radical departure from the collect-athon nature of Rare's games from the era.
For those who are unfamiliar, during the N64 era, Rare had an amazing tendency to create games where players were forced to repeatedly traipse about through rather bland levels, collecting every coin, banana, puzzle piece, symbol, trinket, doodad, and token. Many will agree that the end result was a lot of pointless busy work, with no real satisfaction involved, coupled with extremely bland and uninspired level design.
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Conker's Bad Fur Day has a decided lack of collectables. The first half of the game does involve an open ended hunt for anthropomorphized wads of cash in order to proceed to new areas (which will shout out things like "Hey! There's some money over here!" when nearby), but these are end-of-level prizes, like the stars in 3D Mario games, allowing you to always focus on actually progressing through the game, not searching for items you may have missed.
Said progression, as a nice treat, rarely comes down to basic by the numbers platforming. CBFD is almost a graphic adventure disguised as a platformer, constantly presenting the player with obstacles that require strange lines of thinking and puzzle solving. What portions of the game are comprised of straight-up action meanwhile are also highly varied. As a scarecrow drunkenly attempts to explain, throughout the world you will constantly come across "context-sensitive buttons." Standing on one of these and hitting B will cause you to do something which makes sense in context. Under attack from waves of angry bees? Out comes a machine gun turret to deal with them. By a beer keg and surrounded by fire elementals? Get loaded and start... extinguishing the flames. Standing behind a crumbling pillar in a loving recreation of the lobby scene from The Matrix? Do a slow motion areal summersault to the other side of the room. It's the sort of interface one might label as "sandbox-like" if sandbox games were defined as a concept at the time as they are now.
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Aside from the constantly changing gameplay, the real appeal of the game is the surreal adventure-logic by which you progress through the game. The overall goal of Conker is a rather simple one. After getting very drunk and taking a wrong turn, he's simply trying to find his way home. Never really coming across a clear path to familiar territory, he simply wanders the countryside, dealing with the inhabitants of the world in one way or another, hoping that he'll eventually blunder into his goal. Some characters need you to help them, others will impede you unless you somehow end or at least ruin their miserable lives. More often than not, as events unfold, you will need to do both.
Our general premise is that Conker's Bad Fur Day is set in a wacky, Warner Bros.-esque cartoon world, wherein everyone is a miserable misanthropic jerk, and darn near everything is anthropomorphized. A large clockwork apparatus for instance will be in a non-functional condition because several gears have decided that they really don't want to be impaled on phallic crankshafts anymore. At one point, an angry hillbilly haystack must be driven to attempted suicide, only to result in a boss fight against the giant malevolent haystack he was keeping at bay. A door is locked by a key that will run away from you and must first be knocked unconscious with a frying pan. Catfish need combatting with dogfish. Let's not even get into the relationship between bees and flowers.
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Aside from the warped cartoon humor, Conker packs in quite a bit of parody that tend to work pretty well, if only because they come out of nowhere. At the risk of spoiling things for people, one late-game boss fight starts as a straight-up tribute to the end of Aliens, right down to Conker being strapped into an industrial lifting mech, then suddenly turns into a spoof of Super Mario 64, forcing you to grab the alien by the tail and spin in circles to hammer throw it out the airlock.
Finally, while you wouldn't necessarily expect it from a puzzle oriented platformer, CBFD features several surprisingly solid multiplayer modes, most of which are some variation on FPS style deathmatch scenarios, like an assault/defense of a heavily fortified beachhead, or a capture-the-flag style bank heist. Strange? By today's standards yes. For an N64 game though, this was really par for the course. The rest of the game however is a very unique experience, and worth one's time if the premise doesn't put you off too much.
