Conker's Bad Fur Day had the unfortunate luck of being released on the Nintendo 64, a system that's audience was comprised of mostly children. It also didn't help that developer Rare's M-rated masterpiece came out near the end of the console's life cycle. The result was a devastating one-two punch that left hundreds of unsold copies of the game collecting dust in Toys R Us bargain bins. However, Conker's arrived on Xbox in the spirited update Conker: Live & Reloaded, and his new lease on life will ensure that millions of hungry consumers will give him his due. Whether they'll want to stick with him though is the real question.

Here's the deal. Conker: Live & Reloaded is basically a rehash of the N64 original except some events have been re-scripted (so you won't always be able to solve problems the way you did in the N64 version), the graphics have been given a significant boost, and Rare's tossed in a very delicious multiplayer component that, next to this title's raunchy and over the top humor, will be the driving force that'll push this game into the hands of hungry consumers. However, all of the problems that plagued its predecessor have successfully survived the hardware jump and some of them make this game truly monotonous.

Like other games, Conker suffers from occasional frame rate stutters and some laggy online play, but that's me being nitpicky, especially since none of that hampers the gameplay. The real problem starts with the glitch that sometimes renders the jump button inoperable. There were several moments where Conker needed to jump onto something but he didn't perform the action because he was standing on an edge. Case in point, early on you'll come across these two boxes, one blue, and one pink. The pink one's on top of the blue one because she (it's a she) is afraid of this nasty-looking mouse that's scampering about and farting. After taking care of the problem the pink crate leaps off the blue one and you can then hop on top of the blue, jump to the pink, and then jump to a set of pipes that'll give you access to the roof of a barn. The problem is whenever Conker approaches the edge of the pink crate things get all funky. The same goes for when I actually reach the bottom pipe. If I move too far to the left his animation stutters and once again, I cannot jump, but if I move a little to the right suddenly everything's just fine!

I could've excused this problem if this were the only spot where it occurs, but I wound up running into this glitch on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, that's not the only thing that annoys me. The camera, while decent, is far from perfect. It works well if I'm maneuvering the little guy around wide open spaces, but as soon as I run into a narrow corridor or go for a swim it gets stuck right behind his head or some other place that obscures my vision, and what happens is I become disorientated and accidentally turn around.

This leads me to the game's biggest issue, which is the constant and unavoidable back tracking that one must do to figure out where they're supposed to go next. In other words, Live & Reloaded is just too damn open ended for its own good. I'm not a baby who needs his hand held throughout an entire game, but at the very least I would have appreciated some scripting that nudged me along and told me where I was supposed to go. I enjoy running through a world and figuring out puzzles, but Rare needed to at the very least notify the player of when he or she has actually cleared an area. I was just left to wander around and revisit old places, and I mean, the game looks absolutely gorgeous, but the appeal wore off after I aimlessly wandered in excess of 25-30 minutes at a time, and the worst part is the opening cinema shows all this cool stuff, in particular Rare's homage to some of Hollywood's classic films such as Alien and Saving Private Ryan. I wanted to get to all that of this as soon as possible, but upon realizing that I'd been left stranded in this strange world without many cues I began to care less and less. I certainly didn't want Rare to make Live & Reloaded linear, but at the same time, there's a certain level of freedom that simply doesn't work in videogames.