Topic: Pure Xbox Game Club - Halo 2 (Nov)

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.

Hey everyone! Hey, Balta! Gonna be an early birdie once more and vote for Gears of War 2.

I’ll play Conker once I clear a few stuff this month. Won’t take long. Have fun everyone.

@Yousef- consider it done! Thanks

@Balta666 Super, thanks for continuing the good work of running this thing 👍

I’ll pop a vote for Mafia: Definitive Edition for September

Obrigado!

@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.

Update on my progress: Maybe midway through the game, have about three or four more chapters left. I made progress on Uga Buga and almost done with it, but I’m now onto the racing minigame, which is going to absolutely frustrate me a lot. I already struggled with a few parts of this level. It’s absolutely not my favorite and I can’t wait until I get it done.

EDIT: I was quickly able to finish the racing mini game. It surprisingly wasn’t as bad as I remember it being and I’m just going to assume that I sucked at it when I played it for the first time, but it was occasionally annoying and the dino obstacles have an absolutely terrible hitbox. Despite completing it fast, it still really doesn’t change my opinion that this is a terribly designed level. The racing minigame is so random and it seems like they threw it in there without much thought. I’m onto the boss of the level, but I’m going to deal with that later. Luckily the boss is easy to deal with compared to the other tasks in the level.

However, the funny humor is still there, and an early part I did like was the prehistoric nightclub. That’s maybe the only good part but some issues it has is it not telling the player what to do and you aren’t able to move closer when moving the rock partygoers down the doorways. The remake does fix that issue, but I’m playing the original.

The part where your tasked with using a bomb to destroy the caveman ecosystem was annoying, but it probably was because I sometimes wasted a few seconds trying to avoid getting hit inside the entrance to the location where you use the bomb. You pretty much have to do the task without pausing or stopping in order to get it down in time, and that’s what I pretty much forgot when I kept doing it. I honestly think I’m getting a bit worse at this game!

@Pastellioli It's a pleasure reading your deep reflection and your take on Conker's Bad Fur Day and the Xbox remake so well explained. 😊

@Pastellioli the race thing took me quite a few tries on the remake! Mostly from hitting was though as I found that jumping cleared the hitbox on the dino's legs.
The bomb part must have been changed in it though as it was by far one of the easiest things in the game

@Balta666 I remember the bomb part being easy to get through when I played the original for the first time, I just think here I kept screwing up and stalling for short periods of time when I entered the mouth of that animal cave. The key to getting there in time just before the bomb goes off is not stopping, not even taking short pauses. The only difference I remember the remake having was there being a visible timer on screen. I have gotten a bit worse at parts of the game, given the bomb segment was a part I never revisited on my short game sessions with Conker.

The race took me way too long to do when I first played the game last year, but this time it only took a few minutes. It wasn’t a flawless run, I still messed up and I’d immediately die, but after playing it I sort of think the race wasn’t entirely bad, but I would have preferred the level not having one and it was a super random moment they put in, but, gameplay shifts and random moments are what Conker is known for!

Ok, made more significant progress! Only have two chapters left until I finish the game up. I'll probably be able to complete this later today. I completed Uga Buga now, the final boss was pretty easy, though I still wouldn't say I like the other parts of the level. It's full of so many bad objectives and only has one good part, probably one of the game's worst levels in terms of objectives and level design.

I also got to Spooky, it wasn't hard, but the area is pretty big and the tasks get repetitive. Didn't mind some of the repetition, but it could have been better. You have to walk around places of the mansion to get three keys one at a time and go back and forth to the door to put them in the keyholes. You have to be careful with the last key, cuz when you pick up a key, you can't put it back down and you're stuck with it until it's put in a keyhole. There is a door you need to open by pulling a lever before getting the last key, and if you grab the key before using the lever, you have no choice but to retry again since you cannot open the door. Gunplay was a bit better here, but the aiming was slightly off, though I cheesed through the zombie segments by staying on top of a surface (in this case, it was a tombstone and some shrubs) and slightly staying on the edge and aiming and shooting at the zombie's heads until all of them are gone. That's what I'd suggest doing since the poor aiming with the shotgun makes shooting the zombies on foot hard. I liked the mixture of horror with goofiness, and I think the chapter did that very well. A lot of people mention the segment where you are a bat as being hard, but I always found that to be pretty easy to do.

I got to do the rest of the chapter Windy with the queen bee getting her hive stolen again, that part was also fairly easy, the shooting there was a bit better since there is an aiming reticle, but it still was not precise, though that is to be expected for a game that released on the N64. I had to shoot sort of aimlessly to kill the wasps, but it worked pretty well. I can remember struggling at this part when I first played it, but I am just going to assume I was bad at it initially.

Got onto the beginning parts of the Its War chapter, but I am not super hyped for the later parts of this one... it is so cool, but this is where the bad gunplay in the original shines a ton and makes the game so much more frustrating to play, though luckily this is the last part of the game I don't like, so when I finish the chapter, I won't have to worry a lot about the bad gameplay.

Completed the first parts of the Its War chapter, and I already got on the beach and I’m getting a bit more inside the enemy base. Left off at the part with the surgeon Tediz. That part is so easy to do. I entered the base without losing health, usually I die at the part where you enter the base.

Surprisingly I was able to do a lot of the parts correctly and retained a good amount of health. The gunplay is better, there’s an aiming reticle that surprisingly works better than the previous part with the beehive turret. The gunplay is a bit slow and you can only really shoot well if you pull the trigger to aim closer (since that uses the aiming reticle) but its done better here than previously. It’s easy so far, but the later parts after the surgeon Tediz are going to be so frustrating for me to get through. The lasers are so bad. The chapter requires being really careful, and you have to be very alert and fast when the Tediz show up.