alienware
Banned
So here we are. Here we are over a decade after the original Duke Nukem game and we finally have Forever in our sweaty mitts.
I won't bore you with the history of Duke Nukem but I will digress for a moment back to those days and explain what sort of a game the original was.
It was funny. It had new ideas in it. It wasn't perfect. That is the quick way to sum it up.
Its main rival (and only one at the time) was Doom. Doom was hard core and brutal. It did not make you laugh and it was a great game. It was, at times, quite frightening. Duke was about as far removed from that as possible, but the two games pretty much gave every one anything they could want at that time.
Fast forward on, it's now 2011. Again I am not going to rant on about what has happened during the last decade or so (because every one seems to have forgotten about Zero Hour and so on) and am going to try and concentrate on the now.
The game finally launched on Friday and we can actually play it now. Now as you may have noticed my review has not started out in the same way as any other I have read so far. They usually start along the lines of "The graphics in DNF look rather old and dated" which is, in my opinion a case of "No ****, Sherlock !". But a part of me simply doesn't get why people feel the urge to bring that up. Has the entire world become so god damned fickle that all they want is good graphics? It bloody well seems so from where I am sitting right now. First thing out of the reviewers collective mouthes is to firstly whine about how long this game has taken to come to fruition and then onto whining about the graphics. Then it usually leads on to whining about the gameplay and so on.
This has annoyed me quite greatly. It seems that anything that really matters in a game has been long forgotten and due to this the game is being written off pretty much immediately. I also find it very hard to believe that reviewers have managed to review this game already. There are numerous stinking reviews around at the moment that came out so quick my head was spinning. There is, of course, a reason I say this and I have factual evidence to back it up. Upon reading over the Guardian's review where the game was really hit hard I then went to look for a bit more honesty and I checked Eurogamer. Not that any of it mattered to me of course because I already liked, nay loved, the game.
And in an interview with Randy Pitchford a couple of days ago I managed to pick out the following.
I made a note of it. After all, it was a big occasion. 3:35pm, 9th June, 2011. The exact moment it became real, when a courier arrived at my door with a package it would be fair to say I'd been waiting some time for.
Hmm that's a little odd ! Moving on I then discovered
Despite signing my life away to 2K Games, the publisher apparently still didn't feel comfortable enough sending the game out until less than 12 hours before its general release.
Now I don't quite understand how The Guardian managed to procure the game before Eurogamer nor for that matter any one else. It seems 2k had decided to treat every one in the same way and make them wait until release day. Some have insinuated that they were trying to hide a stinking game, others have put forward that they may have been trying to prevent leaked copies before the game had even launched. So unless the Guardian had some how managed to defy physics and part the red sea they had less than 13 hours to get their review out. And I think I have figured it out. They simply wanted to be first.
Unsurprisingly they failed to mention any of the game's strong points. They missed the humour and the boat it would seem. Apparently the game is terrible and deserves a 2 out of five or in old fashioned terms forty percent. Now call me old fashioned again, but to me if a game scores forty percent it is usually broken beyond repair and, hardly playable. Games like Pit Fighter on SNES come to mind, where the screen would jerk and you were dead. Superman on the N64 also comes to the forefront here as well and you can add Dr1v3r or whatever the **** it was called to that list as well.
Buggy, broken and unfinished games. Hmm now I was beginning to worry. Had 2k and Gearbox rushed it out due to their missed release date recently? And the answer, I am pleased to announce, is no. The game works perfectly fine and (at least) on a PC it runs perfectly well with good load times.
Duke Nukem Forever to me at least is a game that has breathed life back into the very meaning of the word game. Let's take a look at what the Oxford defines as a game shall we?
–noun
1.
an amusement or pastime: children's games.
2.
the material or equipment used in playing certain games: a store selling toys and games.
3.
a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.
Let's take a note of a couple of words in there. Amusement being the first that sticks out. Amusement is something that amuses you, makes you smile and more importantly leads to laughter. Duke Nukem does that in abundance. Looking at the last line? well, I guess we could apply that to modern games but still the word amusement is used.
Now let's take a look at what the term FPS means shall we? First person shooter. Or, a game that is designed to be viewed through the perspective of another one's eyes as we would see it ourselves. We call this term first person. Shooter? that one's rather simple. It means we have guns that we can shoot. Does Duke have that covered? well, of course it does. Any game that meets that criteria is a first person shooter. So how in the name of all that is holy the game is being called dated is quite simply beyond me. No really, at times it has had me sitting here scratching my head questioning my very existance. I think I have it figured out, though.
Does Duke have poncy suits to wear that talk to him and make his life easier? no. Does he even need them? no.
Does he have telekinetic powers and all sorts of glossy **** attatched to him? no. And he doesn't need them, either.
And it just goes on. So what does Duke have? well, he comes with humour and comedy and at the same time his escapades are a lot of fun. They are entertaining and most importantly going back to the word game they are amusing. True amusement.
So what do we have to compare Duke Nukem Forever to? sadly not much. Over the last few years it seems the entire world has become belligerent. All we seem to want to do is charge around in realistic urban type enviroments 'pwning' the competition. God I am so ******* sick of modern games, seriously. Personally I don't like war. It isn't nice and it isn't fun. Try sitting down and speaking to some one who has actually been there and seen the true horrors. I remember speaking to my grandad once about it and it wasn't until I turned 18 that he decided to grace me with some actual events from WW2. I now wish I had not asked, because his tales put images in my head that I really did not want to see. Bullets catching the underside of a metal helmet before going around inside and scalping the poor sod on the recieving end and all sorts of other unimaginable horrors.
Is that something we really want to glorify and mask under the name 'game' so that we can push it onto kids?
Call me old fashioned, hell, call me anything you bloody want to. I don't care. Accuse me of smelling like Aspirin and piss whilst you're at it. I am proud to be neanderthal like in the way I see these modern FPS and that's it. I highly doubt that it will ever change and if it does some one would have to put forward a genuine reason for acts of such brutality and nastiness.
So there. I have now made a clear cut case for why Duke Nukem has a very welcome place in the 'gaming' world. He's fun, he's stupid and silly and you can't take him seriously. If you do? you're a bloody idiot. I read a second review that was complaining about the long loading times on the Xbox 360. I can not believe that the reviewer went on to complain about the hints and tips the game was giving him while he waited for it to load. Personally I noticed tips along the lines of "Whilst reaching into the toilet and picking out faeces to throw will not reduce your ego levels it just isn't very nice" or something along those lines. Seriously, do people actually think the game's developers are being serious?
So Duke has recieved and enormous slating thus far all apart from one review I read which was a bit more honest. But let's see what we have had in recent times to compare him to shall we?
Call Of Duty 18 - Wow we can't believe you are dumb enough to keep paying for these games.
Crysis - It sure was. A classic example of how a **** game can garner up great reviews simply as it looked very pretty. It had a stupid suit, a confused plot (look, who am I supposed to be ******* up here? foul mouthed Koreans? Aliens? or both?) at the time of launch there was not a home computer that could run the game with the maximum settings enabled. People threw away bucketloads of cash to make this game look nice and then post their frame scores on the internet. Eh? what does any of that have to do with the word game? If you give something to a person then the least you can do is make sure that it works. GTAIV is another shining example of this. When Rockstar released it they stated "High graphical settings are reserved for future systems". What they were really saying is "Look. We've spent a lot of time trying to make this game work well and we ******* suck. It's buggy and crap so we will use that excuse instead of trying to actually fix it".
Crysis 2 - Looks lovely. No directx 11 as we were promised and more of the same yawnsome linear stuff we had before. Yes, Crysis allowed us to wander off of the beaten track on our pretty island, but doing so only made it longer and harder to find your way back.
And I could go on. Every FPS over the past few years has been the same. It's what the people want you know.
Now Battlefield Bad Company 2 managed to actually attract my attention. The reason for this was simple, it had some thought put into it for cantakerous old ******* like me. It had a single player game with more in it that any game of its sort for a long time. Modern Warfare lasted me about five hours. And what was annoying was I purposely took breaks every hour as I heard it was short, but alas, it was all done and over with in five hours. I then (for the first time) reached out to the online multiplayer only to be reminded why I did not like online multiplayer.
I mean ****, all I want is a decent game to play with some care to making sure it's going to last me. Is that really too much to ******* ask? it seems so.
So let's get into what you get with DNF.
Gameplay.
It's a FPS and it works. You get a nice assortment of guns to use that all have that lovely old school charm. They work quite well and require some thought as to which one you are going to need in order to stay alive. You can only carry two at once, but Duke is human. He doesn't have a suit that gives him superpowers. Now I do know that this idea has been lifted from other games but I actually quite like it. The game is also quite hard. And this is another thing that seems to be annoying people. It seems in this day and age in a game we should be so powerful and so mighty that we can simply wander through it guns blazing and come out of it in a few hours completely unscathed. Let me remind people that games used to be sodding hard. Very very sodding hard. Doom took me months to complete and involved hundreds of deaths. It required working out coupled with skill and thought. It wasn't mindless like a Call of Duty title. There are lots of play styles in the game. Some are more subtle than others but they are all perfectly fine. The first one, obviously, is using a firearm. Does it do this well? check. They all work perfectly well. The second one is controlling a small radio controlled car. Work? check. Then it's onto being shrunken down and having to drive this car. Does it work? check. And it just goes on, and on, and on.
There are many scenes that feel like you are in Half Life 2. Take the full sized monster truck level for example. It feels about the same as the buggy up the mountain level in Half Life 2. Those were among my favourite levels in HL2 (you can add the fan bike thing to that too). Then there are levels that feel like they were inspired by Donkey Kong Country's Mine cart madness. Fun. Just lots and lots of fun.
And whilst the game itself is tricky and quite hard it does share the same theme as Half Life 2. You are never stuck long enough where you give up and usually always seem to be able to work it out within a reasonable ammount of time. This, to me, is a good thing and makes a good game.
The gameplay styles change quite a bit too. There is a lovely level of diversity between play styles. One moment you are being shrunk and taking cover behind bottles of mustard and ketchup and the next you are standing in a scene that can only be described as a full blown John Wayne movie. Your truck runs out of gas so you jump out, shotgun in hand and wander through a small dusty western town whilst enemeies appear from the doors of what look like saloons for you to take shots at. All the while a country style song plays along and when it actually dawns on you what is happening you can't help but laugh. I mean it's classic Western. CLICKCLICK, BOOM rings out of your shotgun as you imagine yourself strutting along in spurs. It's just like a scene from Blazing Saddles and equally as humorous.
And the humour? it's never ending. The first piece of which takes place at a whiteboard where they mention the name Prophet who just so happened to be the lead character in Crysis. However, Prophet is a complete dumbass who says things such as "If I knew what was going on that guy over there wouldn't be missing an arm". All very funny indeed, if you get it. Then when you turn around there is a projector screen that looks like it came straight out of Fallout 3 and again has a funny line on. Then when you go down to appear on a chat show the show is called "It's late !". I mean really, does any one actually think this game is supposed to be serious? It handles well and thus it plays well. Mission accomplished. It also feels completely and totally like a Duke game. I don't know what else any one could expect really. Had it been uber modern then no doubt it would have been slagged off for not being true to the original.
The bosses in the game are truly spectacular. They're not some hardened Russki weilding a large machine gun, they're huge enormous great things. They also come back to life if you're not careful, so be sure to jump on and go in for the kill !
The graphics (uh oh !). They're fine. At times they're actually quite lovely (see screenshots at the bottom of the review). I really can't see what is wrong with them. They're clear and precise and don't give you a headache (so long as you turn off motion blur). I won't sit here and ponder on this because I am ******* sick of seeing people discect them. IT SHOULDN'T MATTER YOU SHALLOW VAPID TWATS.
Sound. Funny. Duke's one liners are hilarious and you will no doubt gather a few favourites that you wait for him to say. My favourite right now is "Douche !" but then that word always seems to make me laugh.
The music plays along in the background and is usually themed to the type of level you are playing on. Again it works well and doesn't become a distraction.
Longevity.
Ahh, the old thing that we used to cover in reviews but don't bother to any more because no one cares about how long a game lasts now !
I've put in about ten hours now and the end is nowhere in sight. I hear that hardened gaming pros have completed it in thirteen hours but no doubt it will take me longer. I have also heard that upon completion the game will unlock the classic Duke Nukem. That would be a very nice touch and an extra bonus.
Multiplayer.
Old fashioned apparently. Sorry readers, can't tell you anything more than that. The way I see this game is as it was intended to be, a single player experience. So the ins and outs of the modes don't really appeal to me.
Final words and thoughts.
So there we have it. Duke Nukem is a great game and picks up where the last left off. If you went into it expecting anything more then you will be dissapointed. It takes off where Duke left off and builds momentum from there, but at no time does it feel like anything else. Sure, there are scenes that resemble other games but all the while Duke hollers out one liners and obscenities to remind you that you are playing his game. I will absolutely be playing this game through again because I really do like it that much. It makes me feel very happy. Not just because it is so much fun, or so childish, or so silly, but because I feel happy knowing that this game was designed for me. It wasn't designed for me to go off and make friends and then play them on the internet, but it was designed on the sole purpose of being a game that I could play. If I wanted to sit around and have a laugh with my friends I would do so. I would phone them, get them down here and go to the beach fishing or something. I wanted a game, I got one. It really couldn't be any simpler.
Every criticism I have heard on this game can be reversed into praise. "It's old fashioned !" so am I. "It feels dated" but what if there were more people out there like me who were actually missing that sort of game or had spent the last six years yearning for it? What about us? "Duke's one liners are silly and annoying". But what if they made you smile? what if they had you rolling around in fits of laughter?
The thing is, Duke hasn't changed one bit. Infact, the voice is absolutely identical so I can only imagine the same actor took care of it. I mean, IT IS Duke. Were people expecting anything else?
If you watched the trailer or the teaser videos and you laughed like me and thought "******* hell that looks like fun" then you will get just that. Seriously it IS those trailers. All of the bits that you watched that got you excited are there for you to play. It isn't a dissapointment unless you make it one.
This game is going to seperate people into categories. There will be those who are too young to get it and this is fair enough. You can't expect them to go back in a time machine to a time more innocent where our heroes were cigar chewing gun carrying muscle men and nor would you want to. Those were our days, our times and what we grew up on. Then you will get the people who just don't 'get it' and will think it's stupid. It's supposed to be stupid, that's the whole ******* idea. Then of course you will run into a smelly old fool such as myself, who has had an absolute whale of a time with it.
I truly feel that I have wasted my time writing a review for this game, in the same way that every one else has. The people who are going to love it are going to love it no matter what you do and they are going to buy it irregardless of what some snot nosed reviewer is going to say. They are the ones who have been very lonely for the last ten years or so and will be genuinely thrilled that he has made a return.
We now live in a world that takes itself very seriously. It is no longer considered cool or politically correct to be childish and silly and laugh. The problem is that we never took the time to look around and realise that we have robbed ourselves of a lot of fun by doing so. There are no "funny" games any more. They have all been replaced with horribly realistic simulations of war.
All I can say is "Hail to the king, baby, it's raining blood !"
The humour begins.
Come get some ! The first boss. A part of which (I couldn't quite work out which, a testicle? an eyeball?) you kick a field goal with after you have defeated.
Don't worry. Duke has already imagined himself in Dukes of hazard and yells out "Yeeeehaw !" so that you don't have to
Hail to the king
I won't bore you with the history of Duke Nukem but I will digress for a moment back to those days and explain what sort of a game the original was.
It was funny. It had new ideas in it. It wasn't perfect. That is the quick way to sum it up.
Its main rival (and only one at the time) was Doom. Doom was hard core and brutal. It did not make you laugh and it was a great game. It was, at times, quite frightening. Duke was about as far removed from that as possible, but the two games pretty much gave every one anything they could want at that time.
Fast forward on, it's now 2011. Again I am not going to rant on about what has happened during the last decade or so (because every one seems to have forgotten about Zero Hour and so on) and am going to try and concentrate on the now.
The game finally launched on Friday and we can actually play it now. Now as you may have noticed my review has not started out in the same way as any other I have read so far. They usually start along the lines of "The graphics in DNF look rather old and dated" which is, in my opinion a case of "No ****, Sherlock !". But a part of me simply doesn't get why people feel the urge to bring that up. Has the entire world become so god damned fickle that all they want is good graphics? It bloody well seems so from where I am sitting right now. First thing out of the reviewers collective mouthes is to firstly whine about how long this game has taken to come to fruition and then onto whining about the graphics. Then it usually leads on to whining about the gameplay and so on.
This has annoyed me quite greatly. It seems that anything that really matters in a game has been long forgotten and due to this the game is being written off pretty much immediately. I also find it very hard to believe that reviewers have managed to review this game already. There are numerous stinking reviews around at the moment that came out so quick my head was spinning. There is, of course, a reason I say this and I have factual evidence to back it up. Upon reading over the Guardian's review where the game was really hit hard I then went to look for a bit more honesty and I checked Eurogamer. Not that any of it mattered to me of course because I already liked, nay loved, the game.
And in an interview with Randy Pitchford a couple of days ago I managed to pick out the following.
I made a note of it. After all, it was a big occasion. 3:35pm, 9th June, 2011. The exact moment it became real, when a courier arrived at my door with a package it would be fair to say I'd been waiting some time for.
Hmm that's a little odd ! Moving on I then discovered
Despite signing my life away to 2K Games, the publisher apparently still didn't feel comfortable enough sending the game out until less than 12 hours before its general release.
Now I don't quite understand how The Guardian managed to procure the game before Eurogamer nor for that matter any one else. It seems 2k had decided to treat every one in the same way and make them wait until release day. Some have insinuated that they were trying to hide a stinking game, others have put forward that they may have been trying to prevent leaked copies before the game had even launched. So unless the Guardian had some how managed to defy physics and part the red sea they had less than 13 hours to get their review out. And I think I have figured it out. They simply wanted to be first.
Unsurprisingly they failed to mention any of the game's strong points. They missed the humour and the boat it would seem. Apparently the game is terrible and deserves a 2 out of five or in old fashioned terms forty percent. Now call me old fashioned again, but to me if a game scores forty percent it is usually broken beyond repair and, hardly playable. Games like Pit Fighter on SNES come to mind, where the screen would jerk and you were dead. Superman on the N64 also comes to the forefront here as well and you can add Dr1v3r or whatever the **** it was called to that list as well.
Buggy, broken and unfinished games. Hmm now I was beginning to worry. Had 2k and Gearbox rushed it out due to their missed release date recently? And the answer, I am pleased to announce, is no. The game works perfectly fine and (at least) on a PC it runs perfectly well with good load times.
Duke Nukem Forever to me at least is a game that has breathed life back into the very meaning of the word game. Let's take a look at what the Oxford defines as a game shall we?
–noun
1.
an amusement or pastime: children's games.
2.
the material or equipment used in playing certain games: a store selling toys and games.
3.
a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.
Let's take a note of a couple of words in there. Amusement being the first that sticks out. Amusement is something that amuses you, makes you smile and more importantly leads to laughter. Duke Nukem does that in abundance. Looking at the last line? well, I guess we could apply that to modern games but still the word amusement is used.
Now let's take a look at what the term FPS means shall we? First person shooter. Or, a game that is designed to be viewed through the perspective of another one's eyes as we would see it ourselves. We call this term first person. Shooter? that one's rather simple. It means we have guns that we can shoot. Does Duke have that covered? well, of course it does. Any game that meets that criteria is a first person shooter. So how in the name of all that is holy the game is being called dated is quite simply beyond me. No really, at times it has had me sitting here scratching my head questioning my very existance. I think I have it figured out, though.
Does Duke have poncy suits to wear that talk to him and make his life easier? no. Does he even need them? no.
Does he have telekinetic powers and all sorts of glossy **** attatched to him? no. And he doesn't need them, either.
And it just goes on. So what does Duke have? well, he comes with humour and comedy and at the same time his escapades are a lot of fun. They are entertaining and most importantly going back to the word game they are amusing. True amusement.
So what do we have to compare Duke Nukem Forever to? sadly not much. Over the last few years it seems the entire world has become belligerent. All we seem to want to do is charge around in realistic urban type enviroments 'pwning' the competition. God I am so ******* sick of modern games, seriously. Personally I don't like war. It isn't nice and it isn't fun. Try sitting down and speaking to some one who has actually been there and seen the true horrors. I remember speaking to my grandad once about it and it wasn't until I turned 18 that he decided to grace me with some actual events from WW2. I now wish I had not asked, because his tales put images in my head that I really did not want to see. Bullets catching the underside of a metal helmet before going around inside and scalping the poor sod on the recieving end and all sorts of other unimaginable horrors.
Is that something we really want to glorify and mask under the name 'game' so that we can push it onto kids?
Call me old fashioned, hell, call me anything you bloody want to. I don't care. Accuse me of smelling like Aspirin and piss whilst you're at it. I am proud to be neanderthal like in the way I see these modern FPS and that's it. I highly doubt that it will ever change and if it does some one would have to put forward a genuine reason for acts of such brutality and nastiness.
So there. I have now made a clear cut case for why Duke Nukem has a very welcome place in the 'gaming' world. He's fun, he's stupid and silly and you can't take him seriously. If you do? you're a bloody idiot. I read a second review that was complaining about the long loading times on the Xbox 360. I can not believe that the reviewer went on to complain about the hints and tips the game was giving him while he waited for it to load. Personally I noticed tips along the lines of "Whilst reaching into the toilet and picking out faeces to throw will not reduce your ego levels it just isn't very nice" or something along those lines. Seriously, do people actually think the game's developers are being serious?
So Duke has recieved and enormous slating thus far all apart from one review I read which was a bit more honest. But let's see what we have had in recent times to compare him to shall we?
Call Of Duty 18 - Wow we can't believe you are dumb enough to keep paying for these games.
Crysis - It sure was. A classic example of how a **** game can garner up great reviews simply as it looked very pretty. It had a stupid suit, a confused plot (look, who am I supposed to be ******* up here? foul mouthed Koreans? Aliens? or both?) at the time of launch there was not a home computer that could run the game with the maximum settings enabled. People threw away bucketloads of cash to make this game look nice and then post their frame scores on the internet. Eh? what does any of that have to do with the word game? If you give something to a person then the least you can do is make sure that it works. GTAIV is another shining example of this. When Rockstar released it they stated "High graphical settings are reserved for future systems". What they were really saying is "Look. We've spent a lot of time trying to make this game work well and we ******* suck. It's buggy and crap so we will use that excuse instead of trying to actually fix it".
Crysis 2 - Looks lovely. No directx 11 as we were promised and more of the same yawnsome linear stuff we had before. Yes, Crysis allowed us to wander off of the beaten track on our pretty island, but doing so only made it longer and harder to find your way back.
And I could go on. Every FPS over the past few years has been the same. It's what the people want you know.
Now Battlefield Bad Company 2 managed to actually attract my attention. The reason for this was simple, it had some thought put into it for cantakerous old ******* like me. It had a single player game with more in it that any game of its sort for a long time. Modern Warfare lasted me about five hours. And what was annoying was I purposely took breaks every hour as I heard it was short, but alas, it was all done and over with in five hours. I then (for the first time) reached out to the online multiplayer only to be reminded why I did not like online multiplayer.
I mean ****, all I want is a decent game to play with some care to making sure it's going to last me. Is that really too much to ******* ask? it seems so.
So let's get into what you get with DNF.
Gameplay.
It's a FPS and it works. You get a nice assortment of guns to use that all have that lovely old school charm. They work quite well and require some thought as to which one you are going to need in order to stay alive. You can only carry two at once, but Duke is human. He doesn't have a suit that gives him superpowers. Now I do know that this idea has been lifted from other games but I actually quite like it. The game is also quite hard. And this is another thing that seems to be annoying people. It seems in this day and age in a game we should be so powerful and so mighty that we can simply wander through it guns blazing and come out of it in a few hours completely unscathed. Let me remind people that games used to be sodding hard. Very very sodding hard. Doom took me months to complete and involved hundreds of deaths. It required working out coupled with skill and thought. It wasn't mindless like a Call of Duty title. There are lots of play styles in the game. Some are more subtle than others but they are all perfectly fine. The first one, obviously, is using a firearm. Does it do this well? check. They all work perfectly well. The second one is controlling a small radio controlled car. Work? check. Then it's onto being shrunken down and having to drive this car. Does it work? check. And it just goes on, and on, and on.
There are many scenes that feel like you are in Half Life 2. Take the full sized monster truck level for example. It feels about the same as the buggy up the mountain level in Half Life 2. Those were among my favourite levels in HL2 (you can add the fan bike thing to that too). Then there are levels that feel like they were inspired by Donkey Kong Country's Mine cart madness. Fun. Just lots and lots of fun.
And whilst the game itself is tricky and quite hard it does share the same theme as Half Life 2. You are never stuck long enough where you give up and usually always seem to be able to work it out within a reasonable ammount of time. This, to me, is a good thing and makes a good game.
The gameplay styles change quite a bit too. There is a lovely level of diversity between play styles. One moment you are being shrunk and taking cover behind bottles of mustard and ketchup and the next you are standing in a scene that can only be described as a full blown John Wayne movie. Your truck runs out of gas so you jump out, shotgun in hand and wander through a small dusty western town whilst enemeies appear from the doors of what look like saloons for you to take shots at. All the while a country style song plays along and when it actually dawns on you what is happening you can't help but laugh. I mean it's classic Western. CLICKCLICK, BOOM rings out of your shotgun as you imagine yourself strutting along in spurs. It's just like a scene from Blazing Saddles and equally as humorous.
And the humour? it's never ending. The first piece of which takes place at a whiteboard where they mention the name Prophet who just so happened to be the lead character in Crysis. However, Prophet is a complete dumbass who says things such as "If I knew what was going on that guy over there wouldn't be missing an arm". All very funny indeed, if you get it. Then when you turn around there is a projector screen that looks like it came straight out of Fallout 3 and again has a funny line on. Then when you go down to appear on a chat show the show is called "It's late !". I mean really, does any one actually think this game is supposed to be serious? It handles well and thus it plays well. Mission accomplished. It also feels completely and totally like a Duke game. I don't know what else any one could expect really. Had it been uber modern then no doubt it would have been slagged off for not being true to the original.
The bosses in the game are truly spectacular. They're not some hardened Russki weilding a large machine gun, they're huge enormous great things. They also come back to life if you're not careful, so be sure to jump on and go in for the kill !
The graphics (uh oh !). They're fine. At times they're actually quite lovely (see screenshots at the bottom of the review). I really can't see what is wrong with them. They're clear and precise and don't give you a headache (so long as you turn off motion blur). I won't sit here and ponder on this because I am ******* sick of seeing people discect them. IT SHOULDN'T MATTER YOU SHALLOW VAPID TWATS.
Sound. Funny. Duke's one liners are hilarious and you will no doubt gather a few favourites that you wait for him to say. My favourite right now is "Douche !" but then that word always seems to make me laugh.
The music plays along in the background and is usually themed to the type of level you are playing on. Again it works well and doesn't become a distraction.
Longevity.
Ahh, the old thing that we used to cover in reviews but don't bother to any more because no one cares about how long a game lasts now !
I've put in about ten hours now and the end is nowhere in sight. I hear that hardened gaming pros have completed it in thirteen hours but no doubt it will take me longer. I have also heard that upon completion the game will unlock the classic Duke Nukem. That would be a very nice touch and an extra bonus.
Multiplayer.
Old fashioned apparently. Sorry readers, can't tell you anything more than that. The way I see this game is as it was intended to be, a single player experience. So the ins and outs of the modes don't really appeal to me.
Final words and thoughts.
So there we have it. Duke Nukem is a great game and picks up where the last left off. If you went into it expecting anything more then you will be dissapointed. It takes off where Duke left off and builds momentum from there, but at no time does it feel like anything else. Sure, there are scenes that resemble other games but all the while Duke hollers out one liners and obscenities to remind you that you are playing his game. I will absolutely be playing this game through again because I really do like it that much. It makes me feel very happy. Not just because it is so much fun, or so childish, or so silly, but because I feel happy knowing that this game was designed for me. It wasn't designed for me to go off and make friends and then play them on the internet, but it was designed on the sole purpose of being a game that I could play. If I wanted to sit around and have a laugh with my friends I would do so. I would phone them, get them down here and go to the beach fishing or something. I wanted a game, I got one. It really couldn't be any simpler.
Every criticism I have heard on this game can be reversed into praise. "It's old fashioned !" so am I. "It feels dated" but what if there were more people out there like me who were actually missing that sort of game or had spent the last six years yearning for it? What about us? "Duke's one liners are silly and annoying". But what if they made you smile? what if they had you rolling around in fits of laughter?
The thing is, Duke hasn't changed one bit. Infact, the voice is absolutely identical so I can only imagine the same actor took care of it. I mean, IT IS Duke. Were people expecting anything else?
If you watched the trailer or the teaser videos and you laughed like me and thought "******* hell that looks like fun" then you will get just that. Seriously it IS those trailers. All of the bits that you watched that got you excited are there for you to play. It isn't a dissapointment unless you make it one.
This game is going to seperate people into categories. There will be those who are too young to get it and this is fair enough. You can't expect them to go back in a time machine to a time more innocent where our heroes were cigar chewing gun carrying muscle men and nor would you want to. Those were our days, our times and what we grew up on. Then you will get the people who just don't 'get it' and will think it's stupid. It's supposed to be stupid, that's the whole ******* idea. Then of course you will run into a smelly old fool such as myself, who has had an absolute whale of a time with it.
I truly feel that I have wasted my time writing a review for this game, in the same way that every one else has. The people who are going to love it are going to love it no matter what you do and they are going to buy it irregardless of what some snot nosed reviewer is going to say. They are the ones who have been very lonely for the last ten years or so and will be genuinely thrilled that he has made a return.
We now live in a world that takes itself very seriously. It is no longer considered cool or politically correct to be childish and silly and laugh. The problem is that we never took the time to look around and realise that we have robbed ourselves of a lot of fun by doing so. There are no "funny" games any more. They have all been replaced with horribly realistic simulations of war.
All I can say is "Hail to the king, baby, it's raining blood !"
The humour begins.
Come get some ! The first boss. A part of which (I couldn't quite work out which, a testicle? an eyeball?) you kick a field goal with after you have defeated.
Don't worry. Duke has already imagined himself in Dukes of hazard and yells out "Yeeeehaw !" so that you don't have to
Hail to the king
