Conker may be best known for his rather outrageous appearance in Conker’s Bad Fur Day but between that and his debut in Diddy Kong Racing, he actually had one adventure in his more innocent form: Conker’s Pocket Tales.

The story is simple, but also a little strange: it’s Conker’s birthday and he is celebrating with Berri. All of a sudden, the Evil Acorn comes along and steals all of the presents, kidnapping Berri at the same time. I’m not sure why he does it, but I guess he does have the word “evil” in his name, so it’s probably just a random act of evil. Conker then chases the Evil Acorn (and his accomplice Honker the Skunk) through several worlds to get back his presents and to save Berri.

The gameplay gives you a isometric perspective of Conker as he goes through woods, castles, wild west towns and lots of other exciting locations. To defend himself, Conker uses a slingshot to shoot conkers at enemies and he also has some kind of ground pound attack too. Honestly, you feel quite limited in your attacks. Acorns are the health units for the game and, strangely, you can just hoard huge amounts of these and become almost indestructible.

Really, a lot of this game is very strange: pretty much all of the characters apart from Conker, Berri and Honker are Acorn People, which are just acorns with googly eyes. Honker and the Evil Acorn are surprisingly violent and aggressive too – the Evil Acorn threatens to murder Berri and Honker actually shoots dead a random Acorn Person. You also go to a tropical island and compete in Olympic track & field events against Honker in order to win boat pieces – I am not sure how those things are logically connected.

Being so weird makes the game quite appealing in some ways, but I also found that it could be occasionally boring. A lot of the game’s challenges just involved pushing boxes around and pressing switches, which isn’t very inspired. A couple of times I wasn’t really sure what to do and I felt like I was wandering around the world aimlessly. But it does have that “Rare charm” that is present in most of the games made by Rare. It shares a lot if sound effects with the Donkey Kong Land games which I like and if you leave Conker idle you actually get to watch him pull out his Game Boy and start playing Donkey Kong Land, complete with music! It is definitely still worth playing, if only out of curiosity. Just bear in mind that this is not quite Rare’s best work.

Rating: 7.7/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

Rhythm Tengoku was a Japan-only Game Boy Advance game which was a semi spin-off of the WarioWare games. I say semi spin-off, because it’s connected in a somewhat unusual way: it takes the bizarre sense of humour, the mini-game based format and the exact same visual style (with some locations and other things looking identical, which presumably means it is set within Diamond City) but it’s mixed with a new rhythm-based gameplay.

You start by playing called “Karate Man” where you play as a man who has to punch objects that are thrown passed him in tune to a love song. Do well enough in this and you’ll unlock another game and it goes on like that. Other games which I found especially enjoyable included “Sneaky Spirits” where you have to shoot ghosts with a bow an arrow, “Vegta-Pull” where you have to pluck hairs from the faces of onion men and “Night Walk” where you hop across boxes in the night – all of these are done along to the beat of excellent music. Every so often you get “Remix” levels as well (which mix together a few of the games) and “Remix 4” has a song called “Wish Can’t Wait for You” which is actually a really amazing song which I now listen to all the time.

The one downside of the game is that, because it was never released outside of Japan, none of the in-game text is English and so sometimes I found it hard to know what exactly I was supposed to do in the games. I suppose I also would have liked a little more in the way of story and context (as there is essentially nothing at all) but this is a minor issue.

On the whole, this is an extremely addictive game which is almost therapeutic to play: there’s tonnes of replay value because you can always go back to improve your performance on a level, but even when you have the perfect rating, the games are all so fun that you’ll want to replay them for the pure pleasure of it. You get so into the games and the music that it’s just hypnotic. This is an amazing game and it’s a real shame it isn’t better known. Rating: 9.4/10

Buy it here.

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)

On Twitter recently the hashtag #7FaveGames has been trending and is essentially just a way for people to share their seven favourite video games. I’m not sure why seven is the number people are going for for this, but I suspect it might have something to do with the Twitter character limit. Anyway, for today’s blog post I wanted go over my own seven favourite games, as it seemed like a nice idea to elaborate on.

1. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest
   This is a game which is fun, full of memorable characters and just plain beautiful. The graphics are really good for their time and do a really good job of creating a world which looks both fantastical and realistic. This game was also the one which gave us Dixie Kong (who I love) and it has a really incredible soundtrack as well. Amazing.
   (read my review.)
2. Minecraft
   I liked Donkey Kong Country 2 a lot and I thought that maybe my enjoyment of it was clouded by nostalgia, meaning I would never enjoy a game quite that much again – Minecraft proved that wrong. The completely open world of Minecraft coupled with its strong creative aspect and ambient soundtrack is why I love this game so much. I also love that it crosses over with things like Doctor Who and Donkey Kong via skin packs.
   (read my review.)
3. Banjo-Tooie
   What I love about Banjo-Tooie is that it manages to build a real, living world out of the 3D platforming genre. The large interconnected world is so big and mysterious and it is populated with entertaining, memorable characters. Finding out the ways that all the different things you encounter fit together is hugely satisfying and it’s all so fun to explore.
   (read my review.)
4. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
   What I love about this game is that it takes the traditional Zelda story and combines it with an end of the world tale. In three days the moon is going to crash into the Earth and kill everybody – pairing this with the fantasy adventure that we’d come to expect of the series was simply profound. Exploring the world was so satisfying and getting to know all the characters and find out about how they had come to terms with their pending doom was incredible.
   (read my review.)
5. Mother 3
   I loved EarthBound and I wasn’t sure what to expect of Mother 3, but frankly it was even better. I never expected that a game, especially one that doesn’t have any voice actors, could be so emotional, but this is one of the saddest pieces of media I have ever consumed. The fact that such sad emotions are contrasted against a lot of humour and quirkiness helps them to stand out even more. An amazing game with a compelling story.
   (read my review.)
6. Fire Emblem: Awakening
   I already loved Fire Emblem before I played this, but this cemented it as one of my favourite Nintendo franchises. Not only does it have a deeply engaging and exciting fantasy story, but also a rewarding style of tactical gameplay. This is the only game I’ve played to really reward you for cultivating relationships between characters and it was really great to see friendships and romantic relationships grow between the characters as they went through the story.
   (read my review.)
   7. Animal Crossing: Wild World
   I have played a lot of life sims over the years, but this one is the one which captivated me the most. Whether it’s the fact that it’s hugely immersive and moves forward through time with you or just that there is so much to collect, I really loved this game. I honestly wanted to do every single thing in it.
   (read my review.)

I intentionally limited myself when writing this and kept it to one per series: this stopped me from just listing Donkey Kong and Banjo-Kazooie games! What would you pick?

(Don’t miss today’s Finger Puppet Show!)