I decided to play some of the Xbox Originals that I either still owned, or got from Games With Gold. It was a great break—start a new game without the worry of a hard(or even impossible) achievement list to complete! I did a couple over the past few weeks, and here's the good, bad and inbetween.

I started last week with Armed & Dangerous, a LucasArts classic from 03. This is one of the first times I've played an Xbox Original on the Xbox Series X, and other than the cutscenes(for obvious reasons) the quality was massively impressive! 60 frames and all!

The game itself is pretty simple, but where it really shines is its sledgehammer humor and it's ridiculous weapons. Unfortunately there aren't very many in terms of variety, but the ones they do have are crazy enough to try out and enjoy vigorously, such as the Vindaloo Rocket Launcher or the Topsy Turvy Bomb. Without a doubt my favorite weapon is the Land Shark Gun...which is one hundred percent exactly what it sounds like...and one thousand percent as delightful as you may expect it to be.

While the graphics themselves(at least during the cutscenes) were pretty cringey, even by 2003 standards, and the story was a little hard to follow, the humor is really what pulls it together. Although it’s a T rated game, the jokes are mighty crass, but not too explicit for younger audiences. Either way, it had me howling with laughter.

Which lead me unfortunately to the other end of the spectrum—another Xbox Original I tried simultaneously. Conker: Live and Reloaded. Now, I knew that this was going to be a Mature rated game, as Conker had long lost his way since Diddy Kong Racing.

What I didn’t know however, was that this wasn’t a sequel that I had missed—it was actually a remaster of the legendarily infamous Conker’s Bad Fur Day! Now when this first came out, holy crap was it so controversial. I remember vividly when I was a kid—it was sealed in a box case, and wrapped in plastic, AND it was locked behind a glass display! NO ONE could get this game unless their parents, their wife and their tax attorney was present. Of course, being such a huge Rare fan, I was even more curious about the game, but eventually I settled for (insert Sonic game here) and by the time I was old enough, there were newer and more exciting games to play. I guess decades of South Park and generations of console upgrades has spoiled me, because upon finally visiting this game for the first time, I could not enjoy it at all. The characters were boring and insipid, the controls were sloppy in my opinion(there’s a move you have to perform to get around, and it’s pretty much the Flap Flip from Banjo-Kazooie, and the concept of simultaneous button pushing has been removed completely and I end up either crawling awkwardly, or falling right off the edge) and the gameplay has no direct “path” whatsoever. Not to mention, it turns out that the ‘adult humor’ in the game is really not that adult. Now looking at the Wikipedia page, apparently the Xbox remake was censored from the N64 original(seriously? So many games with so much ‘worse’…) but from what I saw before I eventually just gave up, it wasn’t much worse than Lubbo the Toilet’s septic tank from Banjo-Kazooie. And what an appropriate segue—this ‘M’ rated game still tries to be a game for kids. Disney-esque music, menial tasks and condescending ‘guess what’ dialogue made me feel like I was being talked down to like a child anyway. I don’t know if I’ll continue to try this game or not, but it feels pretty damn draining on my mood to play it…so maybe not.

Ironically enough, for Conker’s Bad Fur Day, his fur is actually rendered very nicely.