Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Slap 'em if you got 'em- Duke Nukem Forever (PC)

I made this
After the legendary development hell, and the near legendary last-minute rescue by Gearbox, Duke Nukem Forever had no chance to meet any kind of expectation. Reviews were poor to scathing though the game sold more copies than expected, perhaps at the cost of longtime PR companies' reputation.




Humor

As a historical relic, it is a fascinating journey through trends in game design. Almost in chronological order, the game meanders it's way from era to era, adapting the conventions of the Half-Life 2 era, moving on through Doom 3, and eventually settling on Halo-esque recharging health and COD cover based shooting.

It is a startlingly ugly game both in tone and look. The early levels have a post-processed spit-shine, and depth-of-field is abused like a crack whore's dignity. Later levels become exercises in how unfinished the game can appear and still function.


that there is motion blur

Following a Duke who made famous by his world-saving exploits, locations include parts of Vegas and the desert. Women are plastic and disposable, thought they are obstensibly the point of the plot as saving them is the driving force for what resembles a plot.




Women hatred

The blantent mysoginy culminates in a unintentionally disturbing trip through a dark underground Hive where women are not only naked, and glued to columns but actively being impregnated by alien spiders. The only recourse is to watch them explode into baby spiders or to explode them by shooting them before they blow up.





Humor again

As an independant exercise in circle-strafing, DNF can be fun and early on the unapologetic sexism results in some funny moments but the game wears quickly.

that there is water texture

DNF is longer than expected or wanted, and after fighting the same three stage boss 10 times, I quit Duke 4 chapters from the end, but not before Duke quit me.

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