Duke Nukem Forever

[Cyber Rat]

In all honesty, and with an appreciable level of bias, they would have been better off releasing a Duke Nukem skins and audio DLC pack for Bulletstorm.

 

Epic's marketing campaign "Duty Calls" was a better example of a parody of shooters, DNF seems to have no self awareness and is just plain bad.

 

I'm gonna go mildly offtopic and say something about Bulletstorm which I thought it did very well despite not living up to my expectations (in spoiler tags since it is a spoiler for BS):

 

The thing about Bulletstorm is that throughout the whole game, you go on, shooting whoever the fuck you want, how you want and enjoying it. It's a mindless shooter. Parodies like the Big Bad Evil Guy who is so obviously evil but in the flashbacks, everyone is all "Wait, he is EVIL!?" All the typical action tropes played straight... And then, near the end, the BBEG gives you a Hannibal lecture. It was something that I didn't see coming and I think the game pulled it off great, regardless of how overdone it is.

 

[SanaEquiesterer]

One level in particular takes place in an alien nest where Earth's women are being inseminated by giant penises. The women writhe and moan in a fairly humiliating fashion, and they regularly sob with no small amount of implied misery. In essence, the women look like they're getting raped. In fact, they are. That's the big joke of the level. The aliens are raping the women to create babies.

 

Jim Sterling is doing his usual here and blowing this out of proportion. Allow me to clear something up since I've played through this level.

 

The alien hive level does feature women being held hostage by aliens, some against a phallus-like fleshy pillar. It also features these women dying as little critters pop out of their stomach. They make moans of agony, cry for their daddy, retch (audibly, not visibly), and I heard two "I thought it was safe to swallow" comments. But at no point are you seeing women being inseminated by giant penises or raped. While the women are nude on the upper half, they are covered by a bikini-like garment on the bottom. Nothing appears there that would imply something is inserted into them. If there were women being raped in this game it would have been rated AO, would it not?

 

Up until where I've played, the game feels like a Duke Nukem game. But anything that he says or does that might have been funny twelve years ago is not. I feel like it is just over the top now. The only time I've found things mildly funny were when Halo was referenced and when he made a combined Dead Space/Duke3D joke. But if the developers wanted to show just what the aliens are doing to the women they abduct and how bad it is, then they shouldn't have had Duke making jokes at their expense, much less slapping alien tits and probing sphincters in the same level.

 

As far as gameplay goes, DNF seems like it was originally an old-fashioned health bar style FPS where you grabbed medkits to restore health. Instead, Duke has a rechargeable shield (his Ego) that works like rechargeable health in any other shooter these days. The problem is that it feels like they decided to change from one to the other half-way through development. You don't quite get the cover to allow recharging sometimes, and if you're ever face to face with more than one melee pig cop, you're done.

 

The HUD is just backwards. Ego is upper-left, remaining ammo is upper-right, and your items are lower left.

 

The game gives the appearance that it is another half-assed PC port. Horrible texture pop-in, to the point where sometimes only reloading a level will load it back; sloppy menus that show they only cut and paste image files for keystrokes instead of console buttons; and no save function (checkpoints only). Fortunately, there is a fair bit of tweaking you can do with the controls and the video settings, so it handles okay.

 

If this came out when it was supposed to with all of the features it has, it would have been great. Now it is sort of okay. I'm sure you've all read at least one review, so if you want to play it, just borrow, rent, or wait until it drops to $5 during a Steam sale.

[WTF]

You know I really didn't want to wade much into the DNF thread because honestly right now it's the in thing to hate. It really is. I believe Sana's pretty much made a good post about its pros and cons.

 

The true issue with the game is Duke hasn't aged well. For instance do you remember all the racist/sexist commercials and films back in the 50s and 60s. Now imagine if someone just released one of those 'unreleased' films from back then now as if it were a new film. What would the general reaction be? It'd be one of disgust, hatred and people would be like it's shit.

Technically and conceptually this game is a Frankenstein monster put to life and set out to breathe because people wanted to release the game and revive the franchise. The game runs on a UE2 engine that'd been badly optimised and no it's not going to be that good. But if you do tweak it and give it a few fixes then yes it can work and you can get it running to look quite decent.

 

Now getting into the game's story and stuff. I haven't played it. You know what I knew it would be bad. Duke games have always been bad, people seem to have conveniently forgotten how bad they've always been. When the game was previewed all the 'previewers' just wanted more booze and strippers. I mean it was held in Las Vegas and had both of those in plenty. Everyone raved about it and said it was awesome. Mostly because of that and because the game was finally coming out after all these years. People seemed to have conveniently forgotten that a) the game would not have aged well, B) it's now targeting a different audience, with different sentimentalities and many who have grown up from their juvenile days and c) various reasons (which I'll get into ). People let their enthusiasm get the better of them. I dunno why people fall for advertising and marketing so easily (oh wait scratch that I worked in advertising so I do know why but still when you work behind the scenes you find it so weird that people fall for it because we honestly never believed that people would buy some of the stuff we sold but they did and it was usually surprising cause we'd mostly see through that in other products).

Some of the things were badly executed but have they not been in a Duke game before? Oh yeah they have. I don't know why people expected any different. It's like going to a Star Wars film and not expecting to see light sabers and the force. Of course we didn't expect the midichlorians which this game does in some ways but not as bad as that still.

 

Regardless I don't think this game is as bad as people make it out to be. What I mean by that is. It's just like how Duke was always. and if you expected any different then you just fell for the hype. I'm going to find it hilarious when a Blood sequel eventually gets made and people take offense with that (it's probably going to happen). Or if Snatcher gets re-released and people think oh you should not be beheading people like that. In 1988 it was ok to do that. In 2011 not so much.

 

Also there are far more disturbing things in fiction than this. For instance the human centipede 2 was rightly banned and I know actors who've worked in those films (one of them well enough). Honestly they hate the film as well. It's probably going to scar someone who watches it. If you want to read why the BBFC banned the film you can read it here --> http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=31162

Fortunately none of the actors I knew were the ones who went through the scenes with such stuff but you do get the idea.

 

In the case of DNF, it just should not have been released and there should not have been this ridiculous amount of public interest in it either. I do feel sorry for the Redner group when what they actually were saying was that some companies should not be given the games to review. What they meant was that not they hated negative reviews but they just wish reviews were fair even if they were negative and not just something to start flamewars. Though the tweet was worded wrong and led to them being let off by 2K.

[NeoStarr]

I finished the game the other day, loved every second of it, really looking forward to playing through it again. I waited until after to read the reviews and stop by here to see what other people had said about it. Some of the reviews are just straight up trolling; Giant Bomb in particular; though going through this thread it seems the article about rape in the game is absolutely absurd as well (not to mention they had the exact same shit in Duke3D; NSFW but see: youtube dot com /watch?v=ZYTk-cW_wQ0). With the more reasonable reviews though, a lot of the ones that fell between the 4-7/10 ratings, they seem to tear 3 things apart in particular. The first two are graphics and controls, which wouldn't have bothered me regardless since it's all aesthetics (plus I've always used CoD's tactical setting). The big thing I gotta disagree with though is people calling the game dated like it's a bad thing.

 

I've been playing Build engine shooters pretty regularly for the past few months in anticipation for this. Mostly I like BLOOD the best but Duke takes a close second. I've always thought that the Build/Quake engine period was probably the golden era of FPS games, but lately I've been finding that the more I play these old games the less I enjoy modern shooters. A lot of the gameplay in shooters these days just has too slow a pace; you're spending too much time hiding behind cover waiting for your health to replenish, there's hardly any excitement in finding new weapons, and its becoming more and more rare that you'd have any reason to explore the environment aside from the off chance that you might grab some arbitrary collectible that some dude happened to drop X amount of off on each level for your achievement. When I saw that they added regenerative health and limited guns I was kind of worried that it was going to play like your typical shooter and with Duke themes thrown in. Luckily that wasn't the case; this is really like a time capsule of gameplay. Where I expected to be sitting behind cover waiting for my health to regenerate I found myself running around dodging bullets long enough to have the same effect. When I expected to be able to use whatever gun I picked up to kill enemies I found myself having to find a balance between ammo count and the weapons efficiency against whatever enemies I would be facing (which honestly works a lot better than Duke3Ds "10-weapons-with-little-ammo" system). When I expected to run to the next checkpoint I'd find myself distracted by 10,000 little comments Duke and friends had to make along the way. It really plays like a Build engine game and it's refreshing because of it. It's very clearly a game that has held the same design fundamentals since 1999 and I think it's a better for it.

 

That said though, the only real disappointment for me was how unfinished the game when it was finally released. The second half of the game just peters out into a slew of gunbattles and half finished set pieces. I'm someone who followed development of this game all too closely for 12 years, and while the first half was exactly what I expected the second half had so many parts that just felt like there should have been more or where stuff was clearly missing. The forklift section in particular stands out as something that would have been a pretty good puzzle mechanic if they had actually used it for more than an optional secret. I would have also liked to see more of the staples of Duke3D gameplay; namely par times for each level and a lot more secret areas. Nonetheless I've had a lot more fun duking it out in the second half of this game than I've had throughout the entirety of a lot of shooters just because of the old school mechanics. I even love Dukematch, though nostalgia is very much clouding my judgement there because they left the jetpack/devastator combo intact despite 15 years of imbalance (not that I would have it any other way *WHOOOOSH-PEW-PEW-PEW*).

 

Anyway, can't wait for Duke Nukem 5 (*snicker*).

[Thorgi Duke of Frisbee]

I finished the game the other day, loved every second of it, really looking forward to playing through it again. I waited until after to read the reviews and stop by here to see what other people had said about it. Some of the reviews are just straight up trolling; Giant Bomb in particular; though going through this thread it seems the article about rape in the game is absolutely absurd as well (not to mention they had the exact same shit in Duke3D; NSFW but see: youtube dot com /watch?v=ZYTk-cW_wQ0). With the more reasonable reviews though, a lot of the ones that fell between the 4-7/10 ratings, they seem to tear 3 things apart in particular. The first two are graphics and controls, which wouldn't have bothered me regardless since it's all aesthetics (plus I've always used CoD's tactical setting). The big thing I gotta disagree with though is people calling the game dated like it's a bad thing.

 

I've been playing Build engine shooters pretty regularly for the past few months in anticipation for this. Mostly I like BLOOD the best but Duke takes a close second. I've always thought that the Build/Quake engine period was probably the golden era of FPS games, but lately I've been finding that the more I play these old games the less I enjoy modern shooters. A lot of the gameplay in shooters these days just has too slow a pace; you're spending too much time hiding behind cover waiting for your health to replenish, there's hardly any excitement in finding new weapons, and its becoming more and more rare that you'd have any reason to explore the environment aside from the off chance that you might grab some arbitrary collectible that some dude happened to drop X amount of off on each level for your achievement. When I saw that they added regenerative health and limited guns I was kind of worried that it was going to play like your typical shooter and with Duke themes thrown in. Luckily that wasn't the case; this is really like a time capsule of gameplay. Where I expected to be sitting behind cover waiting for my health to regenerate I found myself running around dodging bullets long enough to have the same effect. When I expected to be able to use whatever gun I picked up to kill enemies I found myself having to find a balance between ammo count and the weapons efficiency against whatever enemies I would be facing (which honestly works a lot better than Duke3Ds "10-weapons-with-little-ammo" system). When I expected to run to the next checkpoint I'd find myself distracted by 10,000 little comments Duke and friends had to make along the way. It really plays like a Build engine game and it's refreshing because of it. It's very clearly a game that has held the same design fundamentals since 1999 and I think it's a better for it.

 

That said though, the only real disappointment for me was how unfinished the game when it was finally released. The second half of the game just peters out into a slew of gunbattles and half finished set pieces. I'm someone who followed development of this game all too closely for 12 years, and while the first half was exactly what I expected the second half had so many parts that just felt like there should have been more or where stuff was clearly missing. The forklift section in particular stands out as something that would have been a pretty good puzzle mechanic if they had actually used it for more than an optional secret. I would have also liked to see more of the staples of Duke3D gameplay; namely par times for each level and a lot more secret areas. Nonetheless I've had a lot more fun duking it out in the second half of this game than I've had throughout the entirety of a lot of shooters just because of the old school mechanics. I even love Dukematch, though nostalgia is very much clouding my judgement there because they left the jetpack/devastator combo intact despite 15 years of imbalance (not that I would have it any other way *WHOOOOSH-PEW-PEW-PEW*).

 

Anyway, can't wait for Duke Nukem 5 (*snicker*).

Jeff Gerstmann isn't one to troll. Everyone has different personal tastes, so there's a good chance that this game is a love-it-or-hate-it scenario.