Duke Nukem Forever Delayed

[OzzyKP]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...Forever-Review

Yep, they officially say it sucks unless you're a brain dead 12 year old.

The review lambasts the game for being similar to all other shooters. Umm, do they take such a harsh tone on all those other shooters? The reviewer expects a radical revolution in the genre and is petulant after not seeing it. What huge revolution do the once or twice a year Call of Duty editions give the field? Not much I'm guessing.

I don't play many shooters myself, but in the random smatterings of Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty I've come across in recent years I didn't see anything all that innovative or new. Just shinier graphics. *shrug* They are fun, in their own way, but it seems like a pretty simple formula and hard to screw up.

[Al B. Sure!]

The multiplayer system has evolved considerably since Call of Duty 3.

As you play, you gain experience which allows you to rank up which unlocks weapons. Meanwhile, you also gain COD points which is money you use to purchase weapons, equipment, attachments to weapons, perks, contracts which if fulfilled can fetch you more COD points, gamble your points on special game modes, killstreaks, facial and weapon camouflage, customized sights, and so forth.

The multiplayer meta-game is pretty complex for these modern first person shooters.

I think anyone who hasn't played a multiplayer shooter since the likes of Quake 3, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, the original Call of Duty, etc. would be amazed by how deep the multiplayer has become.

[Al B. Sure!]

Oh yeah and challenges which gives you experience points if you complete them... hitting a certain number of bomb plants in demolition or getting a certain number of kills with a silenced weapon... stuff like that.

Plus theater mode where you can play-back your previous games, make clips, and upload them to the internet.

**** your combat record in Call of Duty Black Ops gives you mountains of statistics: your kills, deaths while using, Kill/Death ratio, and accuracy for every weapon; your kills with equipment/killstreaks; how often you were killed by each weapon/equipment/killstreak; your personal bests (everything from 'most multi-kills in a match' to 'most rescues' of team-mates); heatmaps which show the locations on the game maps of all deaths that occurred in every game you've played in the last X days, showing the hotzones with the most player traffic; heatmaps showing what parts of your opponents' bodies you shot over your last X enemies... on and on...

Lobby leaderboards let you see your score per minute, kills, deaths, and other pertinent information in every game you've played in each game mode.

[Asher]

Ars Technica rips this game: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/review...-offensive.ars

Duke Nukem Forever: barely playable, not funny, rampantly offensive

In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It's not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you the player would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

There's a feeling among some fans of Duke Nukem that anyone who dares to give a bad review to a Duke title simply doesn't understand what the game is trying to do. We need to relax, goes the argument, relax enough to laugh at the rampant misogyny and hateful stereotypes on display throughout the game. If a review suggests that it's not funny simply to hear someone use dirty words, that's the reviewer's failing, not an issue with the game. Any hint that constant jokes about penis size aren't the height of comedy? The reviewer must not have a sense of humor.

The fans are wrong. One can laugh at jokes about men and women, and there's nothing wrong with being risque, but Duke is thoughtless, backwards, and belligerent. Duke Nukem Forever is the kind of game where you find a pack of cigarettes whose cover shows a mustached man wearing leather—and they're called "Faggs." At some point, matters of personal taste become simple questions of basic decency.
An uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner

The opening of Duke Nukem 3D was iconic. Within seconds of launching the game, you found yourself in exciting combat within an impressively interactive world. You could show a film on the screen inside a movie theater and find hidden rooms and weapons. The game rewarded you for exploring, and the shooting itself was satisfying. The whole experience had little padding to it, and the "mature" elements of the game added flavor to what was already a wonderful game. If impressive level design was the cake, paying strippers was the icing.

But in the Duke Nukem Forever universe, the situation is reversed. The game seems only to exist in order to do things like show a pair of twins performing fellatio on the main character.

And while Duke Nukem 3D threw us into the action within seconds, the new game spends an interminable amount of time asking us to run through the bland environment, learning how to use "Duke Vision" to see in the dark and do everything but fire a gun at a bad guy. What happened to the action-packed game with the ribald humor? This is a title that thinks you're going to be so impressed by seeing the hint of a breast, you'll forget that nothing else is happening.

The first 30 minutes of the game consist of moments where people idolize you—oh, and you can turn the lights on and off. You walk through a museum where relics from the first game are stored, which gives you a hint at how this title was put together. While Gearbox obviously remembered all the neat little details that made Duke such a classic, they didn't remember to put those details in a good game. The game is hollow.

And that's before you come to the really offensive bits. Just in case you didn't feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)

The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.

Update: I apologize for the confusion, as was pointed out in the comments if you wait long enough they explode due to the aliens growing inside them. You may now mock me for getting out my gun to try to escape the game just a little bit quicker.

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

This is what passes for humor in the game. It's not racy, it's not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It's like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it's interactive—and you're the uncle.
An impossible job?

"This is an execution of 3D Realms' design," said Steve Gibson, the VP of Marketing for Gearbox, when I first played the game. "We didn't redesign the game at all. We took their concept, their design, and their ideas, and we finished them. We polished them and executed on them."

(I still remember the moment when Gibson told me that he didn't like the term "toilet humor"; he referred to the jokes in Duke Nukem as "base humor." But when you deal with both urine and feces within seconds of the game's opening, no other term will do.)

Gearbox had an impossible job, and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford may have been blinded by his love for the character and the classic game. His adoration of Duke has been plain, as has the team's devotion to the original vision for the game, even though the game features ideas and mechanics that feel a decade out of date. Duke Nukem Forever makes more sense if you think of it as something found in a time capsule, not as a new release that is being sold for $60 and is expected to compete with newer, better games.

As for the levels, remember when you could walk around in Duke Nukem 3D, exploring the environments, finding the items, and locating the path needed to get ahead? That's over and done with. Duke Nukem Forever is one long corridor. You shoot your way through it, then there's a joke about a penis, then you shoot through another corridor—and then maybe you backtrack!—and then someone says something with curse words in it because that's edgy. With no exploration, no sense of joy at discovering something, there's no real way to forge your own path in the game. It's all point A to point B.

The joke in the image below may have been about Doom and shooters in 2010, but it still fits when talking about Duke Nukem Forever.



It's also not fun to die, only to be faced with a too-long loading time to get back into the action. In fact, the loading times in general are horrendous. When you miss a save point, have to wait a minute or so, then have to play through the same un-fun firefight... you'll want to quit—regardless of how many construction workers are in the next scene discussing how it's okay to "just look" at their aunt's breasts.

During one scene, after you blow up one of the alien pigs, Duke says, "Pork chop sandwiches." Now, I'm a fan of the Internet, so I know what he's referencing, but that's all this is: a reference. There's no joke here. It's like trying to sit through one of those awful parodies like Disaster Movie, where instead of telling a joke, the characters simply re-enact a scene from another movie.

The constant pop culture references in the game don't serve any purpose, and they never made me laugh. The only feeling they stirred in me was that my DVD collection may be too large.

Duke Nukem Forever even features "topical humor" that includes the ability to punch a Christian Bale-like character who is ranting about someone walking through his set. These jokes were stale years ago.

Fundamentally broken

Duke's original weapons remain, and they're fun to use, but the new sniper rifle and alien energy weapon are rather boring. There was no way to expand on the innovative ideas from the first game, even a little? Yes, you can find and use turrets now, but everything feels dumbed down; objects that you need to interact with simply glow.

When you hold down the left trigger, you don't bring up iron sights; the entire screen just zooms in a bit. There's no animation of lifting the gun, although at least with one weapon, you do get a scope. It all feels like something out of a game from 15 years ago.

Even worse is the fact that the game uses regenerating health called "Ego," which encourages you to take a few shots at the enemy, run for cover until your health returns, and then attack again. The full-on, guns blazing attitude of the first game (and even more recent titles such as Serious Sam) is completely absent. Duke Nukem Forever turns into a straight stop-and-pop experience, which is not what Duke should ever be. Not only that, but there is no cover system in place, so you find yourself scuttling for the nearest corner or pillar to hide behind.

Duke, the biggest, baddest-ass warrior that Earth has to offer, also turns out to have his limits: he can carry only two weapons at a time, Halo-style. No matter what you're shooting, you'll wish for something else; the game gives you little feedback about whether you've actually hit your target. The boring, glitchy shooting is utterly forgettable.
No reason to play this

Multiple developers have worked on this game for over a decade, so I don't know who to blame for the unplayable, glitchy, ugly, offensive mess it has become. No humor can make up for the game's rampant hatred of women, and the terrible writing and one-liners can't even be compensated for by good gameplay. The game's jokes about other titles are laughable when you see how putrid Duke is upon release.

Sure, it may still sell millions of copies due to the name alone, but it will disappoint buyers and make anyone with half a brain feel uncomfortable. I have no clue how a game so all-encompassingly ugly can suffer from so many framerate issues, but Duke finds a way. From a business and gaming history perspective, the fact that the title exists at all is fascinating; for everyone else asked to spend $60 on it, it's merely sad.

I'm a fan of humor that's willing to push the boundaries, but nothing is being sent up, mocked, or lampooned here. There's just no reason for what you see and hear. This is an ugly game that exists to celebrate ugliness. The people involved should be ashamed.
The Good

The game doesn't last very long

The Bad

Everything else

The Ugly

I have to install and play this piece of garbage on the PC to see how that version holds up, and make sure there's nothing to be salvaged from the multiplayer

Verdict: Skip

[Guynemer]

Honestly, if anyone ever thought this was going to be good, they ought to be forcibly castrated. There's no need for those genes to be passed on.

[Al B. Sure!]

Honestly, if anyone ever thought this was going to be good, they ought to be forcibly castrated. There's no need for those genes to be passed on.

Castrating HC

[Hauldren Collider]

I don't think you fully understood what I consider to be "great" about the game. It's primarily novelty. I never expected the game to be, you know, fun. But it's amusing to play with a group of friends, so you can chill and stop being judgemental.

[Asher]

A juvenile game for juveniles.

[Darius871]

The game seems only to exist in order to do things like show a pair of twins performing fellatio on the main character.

Wait wait wait. What's the problem with this?

[Asher]

It's poor CGI?

[Provost Harrison]

The sad thing is, I remember which Doom level that is mapped in the review above

Anyway, I don't know about you lot, but I am looking forward to Duke Nukem 5 now

[BeBMan]

Yeah, but since even the current edition is delayed forever...

[Al B. Sure!]

The sad thing is, I remember which Doom level that is mapped in the review above

Central Processing. Hated that map. I always got lost on it.


I wouldn't put too much stock on old FPS map design being that great; most of them were just mazes to lengthen up the game experience.

I mean look at the bottom right nonsense. That's nothing more than a confusing maze.

[Provost Harrison]

Ah yeah, Central Processing. I was thinking the name was Computer Station but that was the next one. I know the level like the back of my hand. Misspent youth and all that

[Asher]

Is DOOM why you want to be a marine, Alby?