Depending on your point of view, Conker Live and Reloaded is either a re-make of a four-year-old game with a new multiplayer mode, or a brand new game that, as bonus, throws in a remake of a four-year-old game. As you would expect, its publishers are eagerly pushing the "new and shiny and fresh" angle.

Some background: In the spring of 2001, Conker's Bad Fur Day was released for the Nintendo 64. The PlayStation 2 was already in stores, the GameCube and the Xbox were around the corner, and the N64 was clearly on its last legs, a distant second place in the battle for market share. Bad Fur Day made a critical splash but failed to make cash registers ring. It was too late. This was a terrible, terrible pity, because Bad Fur Day was just about the greatest thing ever to happen in all of video gaming.

The hero of the game was a cute little red squirrel named Conker. When we met him he was staggering around a pub (the quaintly named "Cock and Plucker"), swallowing many, many pints. He telephoned his girlfriend and told her not to wait up. His vision went blurry and doubly. He lurched out the front door and barfed hearty all over the cobblestones.

Ah, we all thought, now this is something different. Conker awoke in a farmer's field the following morning with a severe headache, profound nausea, and no idea where he was. His mission was simple: he needed to go home to bed. So we took control and found the little fellow a glass of fizzy relief, and then we went adventuring.

The N64 was home to dozens of cute and sweet "platform" games. There was Mario, of course, and there was Glover, and there were Rocket and Gex and Banjo and Kazooie. Game after game after game featured fuzzy critters jumping on crates and rescuing princesses, stopping only to collect golden coins or golden puzzle pieces, or occasionally to learn a lesson about friendship. Bad Fur Day fit right in, except that Conker had an outstandingly salty vocabulary and the big villain was a forty-foot pile of corn-speckled brown who called himself The Great And Mighty Poo.

No, we thought to ourselves, surely this game won't ask us to move boulders around by peeing on them. How wrong we were. No, we thought, surely this game won't pit us against a brass monster and ask us to smack him repeatedly in the balls with a brick. How wrong we were. No, we thought, surely this game won't ask us to feed a herd of cows an overdose of prune juice...

Holy cow was Bad Fur Day ever terrific. It was puerile and immature and it thought burping was hilarious, but it was the most delicious 15 hours of fun any video game console had ever offered. It was profoundly great. It is too bad hardly anyone bought it.

Today, four years later, the development studio that made Conker is a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary, and Live and Reloaded is on store shelves. The "Reloaded" part is the original Bad Fur Day with much prettier graphics, a few minor changes to the play mechanics, and a great number of annoying load screens. Funny how the wimpy old N64 never needed to resort to those.

You will be glad to hear that nearly everything that made the original so glorious remains in this version, although a few more of the cheekier cuss-words are bleeped out. A large audience that missed it the first time will get to play it, and for that we should all give thanks.

Here's the thing, though. The new part of Live and Reloaded, the part Microsoft is trying so hard to get everyone to pay attention to, is the online multiplayer segment. It is fine. Actually it is really very good. It pits friendly squirrels against evil Teddy bears in a fierce battle of heavy ordnance and splattery blood. If you like other multiplayer shooting games on Xbox Live, you will like this one. The regular players are very skilled, the newbies get killed a lot, and in a few months there will be nobody left on the servers but the skilled regulars. It is a very competently-made game. It looks terrific.

It is not groundbreaking, though, and neither is it even all that immature. It is big guns and respawn points and a collection of maps to run around in. It is not the best part of the package.

So Live and Reloaded is primarily a remake after all. That is OK. The Great and Mighty Poo lives again.