UPDATED 09:10 EDT / MARCH 20 2015

“Conker’s Big Reunion” will release in April, and it’s everything no one wanted

Conker Project SparkFan’s of the 2001 cult hit Conker’s Bad Fur Day had almost given up hope that a new game would be made in the series. Now, after over a decade, Conker fans are finally getting their wish. Sort of.

On April 23, a new campaign called Conker’s Big Reunion will be coming to game making platform Project Spark, giving players the chance to design their own Conker game and levels in Project Spark’s sandbox.

The release will feature characters, enemies and thousands of other assets drawn from the original game, as well as episodic content following Conker as he meets up with old friends for the first time in 10 years. But with Project Spark’s E rating, can the new release possibly live up to the crude humor of the original, or will the new content fall flat without the soul of the old Rareware magic?

The story of Conker

 

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released in the waning days of the N64 a few months before the arrival of the Nintendo GameCube, and it was … a little weird.

The game itself was an irreverent spoof of many sci-fi, action and horror films, including The MatrixBram Stoker’s DraculaSaving Private RyanAlien and others.

Created by Rare Ltd., the same studio behind kid-friendly games like Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong RacingConker’s Bad Fur Day featured copious amounts of swearing, sexual innuendo, and even a giant pile of feces that sang opera and ate sweet corn. Yeah.

But while the game was a bit lewd and ridiculous, it was also charming and, at times, really funny, and it went on to become something of a cult classic. Even today, copies of the N64 version of Conker’s Bad Fur Day can be found on eBay for around $100, nearly triple the cost of popular games like Super Mario 64.

Ever since Rare was gobbled up by Microsoft in 2002, fans of Conker have been skeptical that a new quality game in the series would be produced, especially after the release of Conker: Live and Reloaded, a remake of the original game for the Xbox that had some of the game’s dialogue and original scenes censored at Microsoft’s request.

While the remake performed well at the time, it was also criticized for its censorship, and if Project Spark follows the same route, its hard to imagine fans will react any better. It is also hard to figure out who the intended audience is for Conker’s Big Reunion, as it certainly isn’t the long-awaited sequel fans have been asking for.

Screenshot via Project Spark/YouTube

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