"Why I am not so great" - Duke Nukem
Of course, back then my PC lacked some bells and whistles and by the time I got my first sound blaster, I already knew Duke 3D by heart. And all of a sudden... OMG, he talks! It was my first encounter with sound in computer games. And it was the best possible introduction I could have hoped for, I might add!
A couple of years later, a friend of mine heard of something sinisterly labeled "network" so three enthusiasts of us, stretched some cables across our balconies and then I entered the LAN world for the first time. And there was Duke again, together with me, taking my first steps in multiplayer.
Somewhere in the meantime I purchased something called Duke: The Apocalypse which was basically a collection of community levels that smelled of sewer in August a mile away but basically was my first introduction to mods, too.
I am taking my time and wasting yours, to write this profound introduction, only to emphasize what Duke Nukem means to me. Please, admit that if I just said I was waiting for this game with anticipation, it's just not the same.
And sure enough, the impossible happened. After 15 years of waiting and what seems like half a dozen changes of engines and rights, after all the jokes about the development process, Duke Nukem's sequel is here. I must admit, when I first heard that much-loved and truely talented Gearbox have buckled down to the task to finally revive the already dead and buried Duke Nukem, I was thrilled. I mean, seriously, Half-Life: Opposing Force, Brothers in Arms, Borderlands and port jobs on Tony Hawk and Halo... What could go wrong this time? Plus, the guys were trumpeting far and wide how they were real fans of Duke 3D and some of them had actually worked on the game before.
Well, way to go for the marketing team of Take Two. Please, note that in none of the prerelease materials, they have ever said this game is worth anything. They suggest it is great, but they never really say it. Duke states: "After 12 f**king years, it's gotta be good." But it isn't.
I fell for that trick, too. Not being the pesky teenager anymore, but rather a well trained economist with considerable marketing experience, I still felt butterflies in the stomach when I heard that Duke lives! I should have used Raid. From the moment I got my hands on the box, there was something wrong with this game: the cover was plain ugly, the installation was only 4GB (suggesting low-res textures)... even the name of the publisher (Take Two) in my mother tongue could be translated into something like "in your face" with lots of exclamation marks... I could not resist the urge and opened my Internet browser to check some reviews while the the game copied useless files to my HDD. Wtf, 3,5 by Gamespot!!!!?!?! 4 by Videogamer, F (like "failed") by someone!!! Oh, sh*t! I wasn't expecting that. Still clinging to some wretched spark of hope, I start the game...
Where do I begin? See, Gearbox have done so many things wrong, this game is not just a huge fail as Duke 3D's successor, it is just plain bad on it's own, THEN it is a huge fail, a disaster even, as Duke 3D's successor.
The first thing that will make you want to put your finger through your eye into your brain and swirl it around will be the game's graphics. They are so 2008, as Fergie would say, it makes you think the developers saved one engine change the only time when they shouldn't have. But I have never been a graphics wh*re so I made a test. I dusted off a precious CD from the top shelf of my collection and installed Duke Nukem 3D. After a couple of hours with the 320X200 glory that Duke 3D provides, I can safely conclude that my much disputed over forums opinion that games can be fun, regardless of graphics, is actually spot on.
So it must be something else? In my opinion, Duke Nukem Forever's worst downfall is its level design. The Unreal engine has always been bad for creating open-space environments so the new Duke plays in one-way corridors all the time, even when driving vehicles. Levels are short, linear, uninspired, lack coherence and are divided by really long loading times which on occasions can stretch as much as half the time you need to actually play through the level. Seriously, sometimes loading times are brief, as Gamespot states, but in one other case, I died and loaded the last checkpoint. I got up, called a friend, dressed up for going out and grabbed a quick snack from the fridge. The level was still loading. I am neither exaggerating, nor this is an isolated case. In fact loading times are so tedious, I got nervous towards the end of the game and decided to lower the final mark by 0.5 only because of that. And so I did.
Duke Nukem Forever is ill balanced, too. Generally, the standard health meter from the past is gone as in most new games and is replaced by a rechargeable shield in order to make the game console-friendly (read "easy for the casual gamers, a.k.a lamers"). In this case, it is ego meter which is stupid on its own. In addition to that, it makes the game extremely easy on PC. There is even an auto-aim option in the menus. Wtf?! Still, at some points the game difficulty skyrockets without warning and puts you in unfair situations. Particularly, the examples given by Gamespot with the bridge boss and the staircase-of-death come to mind.
In addition, you can only carry two weapons and can easily end up in the wrong situation with the wrong weapons. Me, for example, dived in a sunken complex armed with two slow-rate, low-clip weapons only to be besieged by scores of octababies who swim fast, bite hard and force you to drown while trying to hit them with the lousy rail gun underwater. I must have spent at least 3 hours looking at the loading screen, until I get past this point, being forced to struggle with the weapons I had at my last checkpoint.
What did Duke get right? Well, while true that the humour in the game is not what it used to be, it is not bad, either. In my opinion, it is exactly what I expected from the game, only times have changed. 15 years is a lot of time and nowadays to make yourself heard, you do not need to just tap someone on the shoulder, you have to smack them with a sledgehammer. Pissing and getting blowjobs in a game wouldn't impress my underaged sister anymore.
Still, the game makes a lot of (often mocking) references to games like Dead Space and Half-Life, and movies, too. Some of these are fresh but the best ones don't even try to be funny. For example, there is a level where Duke is dreaming up some strip club. The level involves some really out-of-place item fetching and no action whatsoever, but in some purposeless back room on one particularly generic desk, there was a whipping top, spinning, never stopping. At first I was like, wtf, then I realized and it made my skin crawl. No references, no hints, no nothing. The little thingie was there only for the very few that will spot it and will get it right. I am talking about Christopher Nolan's Inception.
Another one of the game pros, in my opinion, is that they kept much of the original sound effects and the voice actor for Duke. Whether this will appeal to someone or not, is strictly individual, but I was longing for Duke so much that hearing John St. John say, "What? Did you think I was gone forever?" filled me with inspiration.
For closing comments I should say that, honestly, the new Duke is not completely worthless. It actually becomes better as the game advances (save for the totally inexcusable ending), but it never escapes the limitations set by the terrible level design and poor graphics. The biggest issue with this title is that it was supposed to shake ground, but instead it squirms in the presence of even average titles like Alice: Madness Returns which no one even considered a competition. I remember a preview from 2007 or so which stated Duke should never come out because after 10 years of waiting, nothing can live up to the expectations. Those guys were right but the thing is, this game we get now, in 2011, it seems like it is not even trying...