I did not finish Project Spark: Conker’s Big Reunion: Episode 1, because I was let down by my hardware. I played it on the only platform available to me: a small, underpowered Windows 8 tablet. Now according to Microsoft’s new vision, any computer or device that runs Windows has the same experience. Unfortunately, they can’t guarantee that all their apps will work properly on different hardware.

Having a new Conker game is very exciting, since Bad Fur Day is near the top of my all-time faves list. Having genuine fans making a new official instalment, and with Chris Seavor—@conkerhimself—returning for voices, it was promising. The game looks fine too, although from what I played there was a concerning lack of polish (word bubbles not matching what was spoken, for example), along with the general slapped-together feel that comes with games made in dedicated game-creation software like this; Little Big Planet had the same feel at times.

I didn’t get to any actual gameplay apart from the learn-to-jump bit, but one of the big draws of Conker is the script anyway. Having the familiar voices (more or less) did wonders and it was humorous enough to soothe my doubts. It feels like a Conker game.

Of course, I was only able to play for, say five minutes or so, because of the incredibly frequent crashes that occurred as the little tablet struggled so, on top of very poor performance in-game. Simply getting into the episode was an ordeal in itself; would the menu crash this time before I could get to the store to purchase it (it was a free weekend, or I wouldn’t have persisted so much)? No, have to wait a few minutes while it launches again.

Compounding this problem, the game locks everything out—including the options to reduce graphics settings to try and make it run more reliably!—until you complete the super-tedious tutorial for both playing and creating games, as well as downloading user creations. Luckily for me, starting a tutorial then crashing the game convinced Spark that I had finished said tutorial, so it ended up being something of a boon.

I really thought it would hold out once I finally launched the episode, but after several minutes of play it finally crapped out on me again. The unreliable performance made a glaring design flaw apparent: this episode, at least, has no support for saving your progress. It apparently takes an hour to complete but with the way the tablet was handling the game, there was no way I was ever going to finish, let alone come back if and when the next episode is released. But in this day and age, we have Youtube and for that I am grateful. So thank you Dakota for reviving Conker, but I have nobody to blame but myself for trying to play on a woefully inadequate machine.

Oh, did I mention the controls? Ugh. Virtual buttons and joystick are never great, and even after attaching a bluetooth keyboard the inputs were never made clear and were in strange locations. I also didn’t have a mouse, nor should I need one eh Microsoft? But for this game apparently I did. The whole operation was a big interface mess, symptomatic of Windows 8 in general I think (downloading and updating the game were also very awkward). And that was my experience with Conker in Project Spark (note: less than 5% of my time spent with this program actually involved playing as Conker).