curiousities - BKPC and BKPC 2

er, less of a curiousity, more of a forgotten relic of a time long gone.

i remember back in 2002, back when i first got internet, i used to participate pretty dang heavily in the Banjo-Kazooie community for quite some years. while places like Banjo-Fella's Breegull Aviary and Da-Breegster's Breegull Feather Data Base are now lost to the winds of time, i do have a little memento from that period here today.

there were a countless amount of Banjo-Kazooie fangames back in the early 00's. while most of these were fairly ambitious projects that never made it past the demo phase, there did exist a few finished fangames featuring the friendly furry and his feathered friend.

er, poetic nonsense and alliteration aside, we're going to be talking about one of the more well-known Banjo fangames from that time. because i'm a nostalgic dork. and yes, there will be download links.

BKPC was developed by Yumblie and Bhlaab some time around 2000 or so, during the peak of the Banjo community. while i'm not 100% sure if it was the very first Banjo fangame, it was definitely one of the most popular ones at the time, if not the most popular.

gen recs - Conker's Bad Fur Day

been meaning to do an actual game recommendation for a while. it'd kind of be a stretch to say these are reviews; i find it hard to rate things on a 1-5 scale, so i just say things from my own experiences and say whether i like it or not. whether you want to check these things out is up to you.

quite a lot of video games have been described as an "experience"; to me, an "experience" is something you never really forget, whether in real life or video games. for video games, what people view as an experience really depends on who you ask; people fondly look upon platformers like Spyro and Banjo-Kazooie for their colorful worlds and cast, adventure/RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time for their epic scale and story, and games like Doom and Mortal Kombat for being those types of games that you played when your parents weren't around to scold you for playing violent stuff like that (or if you were particularly unlucky, you got scolded for playing them anyway).

well, it'd probably be a stretch to call Conker's Bad Fur Day as epic a story as FF7, but it's definitely got some colorful characters that also tend to use equally-as-colorful language. alongside some other things that parents would probably yell at their kids for seeing/hearing. and yet said kids still played it anyway because it had a cartoony squirrel as a playable character. also bathroom jokes. how they managed to get ahold of copies of the game is a mystery, though probably not one that's too lost to time if we have 12-year-olds playing Call of Duty and GTA and all that.

so while i work on the next segment of my Disgaea 1 manga readthrough, why don't we give this game a bit of a look-at? though keep in mind, this game is M-rated for a reason, and the warnings on both the ESRB rating and the box itself will remind you of that (front cover/back cover ; images courtesy of DKvine).

so yeah, unless cursing, cartoony bloody violence, sexual themes, and poop jokes are your bag, steer clear for the now.