There's something especially unsettling when cartoon creatures go bad. Maybe I wasn't exposed to enough anime as a child, but when I first saw Fritz the Cat, needless to say, I was disturbed. So having also missed Conkers Bad Fur Day on the old Nintendo 64 back in the day, I approached the Xbox version with just as much trepidation, praying that there would *not* be any furry nudity and drug use this time around'.

My prayers were answered, sort of. For those of you unfamiliar with Conker, he is, at first glance, your average squirrel, who after a night on the grog (END: average) gets so utterly wasted that he wakes up the next day in a strange and unfamiliar place. So with nothing but a killer headache and some sort of cartoon equivalent of the Bag of Infinite Holding, he sets out on a series of increasingly ridiculous and downright hilarious adventures to find his way home to the missus- no doubt for a serious scolding!

To all extents and purposes, Conker is a third person platform adventure game, but despite the cuteness of it all, this is *not* a game for the kids. It's as though the developers wanted to take Disney-esque adorability and thrust it into the most depraved, outrageous, and just plain wrong settings they could get away with in an MA15+ rated title.

Conker: Live and Reloaded is essentially a direct remake of the original game, with only a few minor changes along the way. Roughly 2/3 of the game is the aforementioned platform adventure title, which has less emphasis on Conker-combat and more on squirrel puzzle-solving. This section, which was probably pretty damn impressive five or so years ago, is quite standard when compared with today's games. The platform elements are run-of-the-mill jumping, climbing and a bit of exploring, and only the context makes Conker stand out from the colourful crowds.

Try to imagine, if you will, rolling giant balls of poo up a mountain and urinating with tremendous force on fiery imps to extinguish them and you've got a decent idea of what Conker is all about. It's toilet humour at its best and worst, so if you're offended by such base vulgarity or if swimming in crap makes you squeamish, perhaps Spyro: A Hero's Tail is more up your alley.

The boss battles are even worse, if such a thing is possible, and range from giving diarrhea to cows right through to smashing the balls of your enemy with a pair of bricks. Nor does it stop there; the boss creatures themselves aren't much better'most notable is what I'd hazard to call a cack-o-demon called the Great Mightypoo, who is essentially a giant shit-monster who seems like he'd be more at home with Gilbert & Sullivan than Johnson & Johnson.

It's a bloody weird game to say the least, with some very British humour that you'll either love or hate within the first hour of play. Even if the humour or action isn't quite to your tastes however, it's worth slogging through to the last few chapters of the game, which are not only hilarious, but also completely different in terms of gameplay. If you've seen much about Conker (or played the demo), you'll be familiar with the cinematic-spoofs the game is renowned for, most notably of 'The Matrix' and 'Saving Private Ryan.' Obviously both films are pretty old now and we've all seen them both ripped off in the last couple of years, but the way Conker handles it is still worth seeing.

You see, what I've yet to mention is just how awful Conker's combat is in the early parts of the game. It's literally a matter of swinging your baseball bat, backing off to avoid an identical counter-attack move from the enemy, then swinging again. Rinse and repeat about half a dozen times and you've won. It's so far from inspiring gameplay that you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd actually stopped playing and entered into some sort of Sisyphean rock-pushing nightmare.

But once you hit the last couple of chapters, all this changes and Conker becomes a gun-wielding killing machine, slaying zombies and Tediz (the plush-toy equivalent of Nazis) in equal doses. The controls are problematic here too, but the fast-paced combat is so far removed from the meandering melees of the early game that you probably won't notice.

It does beg the question though: why are the controls still so sketchy? Maybe it was acceptable half a decade ago, but in the modern marketplace where there are so many platformers with tight controls and a decent camera that Conker just feels sloppy. Jumping in particular is more of a headache than it should be, and heaven forbid you want to manoeuvre that camera in an enclosed space! It can really detract from the experience, and given how utterly unforgiving Conker can be in places, it adds a lot of undue frustration to what is an otherwise rock solid game.

Conker vacillates between simple and obscure in an extremely frustrating manner. On the one hand, pretty much all you do is mindlessly jump with A and press the B button from time to time, either as an attack or a context-sensitive command. On the other, there are times where you will have absolutely no idea what the $@&! you're supposed to be doing and how to go about it. Conker does very little hand-holding, and it's almost entirely up to the player to glean what their next course of action should be. This is one of Conker's biggest problems really: it's easy to pick up, but can be very, very difficult to advance.

One thing Rare have spent considerable effort enhancing are the graphics, which look really, really damn good. Again, it's not really anything we haven't seen on the Xbox recently, but the style and art coupled with the high resolution textures make for a visually pleasing experience. You can easily imagine Conker as a CGI cartoon looking as good as it does, and this goes a long way to minimising the performance pains caused by the controls.

As does the sound and music, which is easily the highlight of the game. The dialogue is absolutely hilarious and delivered wonderfully by the voice talent. Conker sounds just like you'd expect a cutesy widdle squirrel to sound in a game, and to hear some of the foul and offensive comments that come out of his mouth make the whole experience classic. The music too is outstanding, with that Tim Burton sort of style that makes family-friendly sound dark and twisted.

The biggest twist to Conker: Live and Reloaded comes from the 'live' part of the subtitle, because the game now boasts a full Xbox Live (and system link/split-screen for the broadband bereft) multiplayer mode, which takes builds upon the trigger-happy gameplay of the latter levels. Essentially, it's a Squirrel vs. Tediz objective-based deathmatch that fans of Unreal Tournament on the PC will be right at home with, although there's a straight-up deathmatch option for those so inclined.

Multiplayer takes place over a series of mission-based maps in both the Old War and New War setting. Typically, one side is assaulting the other, either trying to capture a base or destroying a key objective. The mission mode encapsulates play styles like capture-the-flag and domination, and overall there's a pretty good range of things to do. You'll get to play as one of six specialist classes, much like Star Wars: Battlefront, ranging from rocket-launching demolishers to fire-tossing thermophiles. Each class has its own specific skillset, and Conker doesn't encourage too much deviation from this- you either play to your strengths or die gruesome, furry deaths.

Actually, you'll do quite a bit of dying regardless of your class- cutesy animal life expectancy in Conker is pretty much on par with the rest of the game. Plus, the high number of players means you'll often do your dying suddenly and oft times inexplicably. But overall it just contributes to the frantic sense of play, which can be a lot of fun, except when it gets too laggy.

The biggest problem is that it's sometimes a little too hectic; given how crowded the screen is with user interface already, adding dozens of players and on-screen effects can cause a bit of sensory overload. This is less of a problem in smaller games with fewer players, but the trade-off is that it's not quite as much fun as a full-house.

At any rate, Rare were thoughtful enough to include a new series of levels, titled Chapter X, to help bridge the gap from the singleplayer game to the multiplayer. It's played entirely with bots, but does a bang-up job of introducing you to the reasonably complicated and frantic multiplayer and all its intricacies. It doesn't teach you everything or promise to make you a master though; you'll only get that by playing extensively, and even then it's debatable whether you can comprehend every obscure nuance of this mode.

One of the more interesting features included is the career-style Xbox Live aspect, that allows you to earn medals and bonuses the more you play online. These are mainly from gaining kills, but can also be gained from healing or repairing. The bonuses make you far more efficient with a given class, can allow you to use different weapons and abilities, or just unlock new avatars and things like that. It's a nice touch, and one that rewards consistent players, but it also has the side-effect of dissuading casual players who'll get reamed by tricked-out Teddiz and super-squirrels. Coupled with the already complex multiplayer, Conker's foray into Live is not newbie-friendly.