First post, by Kerr Avon
Someone mentioned Duke Nukem 3D in another thread, and since it's still such a fantastic game, and Duke appears in so many games, I thought it would be interesting to discuss them, and see what other DN games are available.
Personally, I've never played Duke Nukem 1 and 2. I think they're PC-only 2D platform games, what are like, and are they still worth playing? Are they still available, do they have any addons, etc?
Duke Nukem 3D (PC)
Duke Nukem 3D came out after Doom (of course!), but to me it was better than Doom in every way except atmosphere (Doom was eerie, DN3D's atmosphere of danger was too compromised (in my opinion) by it's humour and satire to come across as unsettling). The weapons, level/object interaction, 'real world' feel of the levels, the desire to explore, and the fun factor were all much better in DN3D, I think. Come to think of it, I think the enemies in Doom were better, since they seemed more threatening than in DN3D, but again that's at least partly due to the atmosphere of the two games.
Duke Nukem 3D, aside from System Shock and Doom 1 and 2, is probably the oldest PC game I still play. If you haven't played it, but you like first person shooters, then you really should. It's proper old school, with enemies who have little A.I. (though to be fair, they never get stuck behind scenerey, so there are far worse examples of in-game A.I.), no regenerating health, no on-screen prompts to treat you like an idiot, no on-screen arrow telling you where to go next (you have to explore the levels to find the objective/exit)*, and so on. It doesn't have many of the later first person shooter 'improvements', which is fine by me, as I hate weapon carrying limits, cut-scenes every five yards, NPCs who continually spout the same five lines randomly every thirty seconds, etc.
Oh, and make sure you try some of the mods, such as Duke it out in DC, Starship Troopers, Critical Mass, and Fusion.
Also, Duke Nukem 3D is one of the few games that's had it's source code released to the public, and as such it's been recompiled and improved for various machines, including the original XBox, the PSP, the Dreamcast, Linux, and even ported back to the PC, as an enhanced Windows port (http://www.eduke32.com/). eDuke32 is great, as is the port for the original XBox**, which even supports mods!).
* On the subject of FPSs being dumbed down, when Perfect Dark (N64) was released in 2001, it didn't hold your hand, and everyone was happy with it. When it was re-released, exactly the same, in 2010 (for the XBox 360), lots of new users complained that it didn't give you any clues and just left you to work out what to do. For example, (in both the 2000 and 2010 releases, since they are the same game) in the first level you are dropped onto the roof of a skyscraper, and told to locate and enter the basement. Players in 2000 somehow realised that since a basement is traditionally at the bottom of a building and they (the in-game character) were on the roof, then they should make their way down through the building to the ground floor and look for a basement entrance. Yet some players in 2010 seemed to find this less than obvious....
** I HATE the way Microsoft are calling the XBox 3 the XBox One, which means us loyal users of the original XBox can't call it the XBox 1 anymore in case it confuses people. How can you call the third XBox the "XBox One"? It's not only stupid, it's unfair to people who have stuck with the original XBox.
Duke Nukem 64 (N64)
The N64 version of Duke Nukem 3D, called Duke Nukem 64, is great too, being largely the same, but with some changes; some for the better, such as overall better weapons, a co-op mode, and (very stupid, sadly) bots in multiplayer mode, some for the worst, such as no in-game music, no mirror effects, and no parallax effects (no city skyline effects, which is OK, and no stars in space, which is just ridiculous).
They also made some changes to please Nintendo's family image, which resulted in the very good (I think) change that you no longer kill the trapped women to 'save' them, you instead properly save them by teleporting them to safety, the ridiculous change that they reskinned the adult bookstore as a gun store (seriously! Apparently selling guns is more acceptable to Nintendo's way of thinking than selling porn magazines), and the Steroids pickup was renamed 'Vitamin X'.
The game makes a few changes to some levels, misses out some levels from the original, and adds some from the Atomic Edition DN3D pack. DN64 is not set up as episodes, so you can't start at the Space Port or Raw Meat levels, only at the first level (Hollywood Holocaust). Then again, you don' lose your weapons when you get to Space Port or Raw Mean, unlike in Duke Nukem 3D, so it's swings and roundabouts.
One thing that might put PC users off DN64 is that you can't save at any point, only between levels (i.e. when you've completed a level). This is because back then PC FPSs allowed you to save at any time, whereas console FPSs only allowed you to save at the completion of a level, for some reason. Nowadays most FPSs just save automatically at (too frequent, some would say) checkpoints, but back then console FPSs didn't allow in-game saving (well, some might, but I can't think of one), and since DN64 lacks regneration health, the lack of mid-level saving might turn some new players away.
There's actually a PC mod based on DN64, available from http://www.moddb.com/mods/dn64. I've not tried it, so I don't know how faithful it is, but since it's a mod for the PC version, I imagine you can save anywhere.
Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (N64)
Note: This is not connected to the PC mods of the same name (well, one is called "Zero Hour", the other is called "Duke, it's Zero Hour"), even though one of the mods is supposed to be based on the N64 game, it's really nothing like it at all.
Duke Nukem: Zero Hour is another N64 exclusive, and to my mind the best Duke Nukem game I've ever played. It's a third person shooter, but you can play it in first person mode (which I do) using a push-button-cheat (http://www.gamefaqs.com/n64/188913-duke-nukem … ero-hour/cheats or http://uk.ign.com/cheats/games/duke-nukem-zero-hour-n64-1965 depending on if you have a PAL or NTSC N64). It's got great level design, some good Duke Nukem style humour, good weapons, and is great for exploring. On the minus side, there is (again) no mid level saving or checkpoints (and unlike in DN64, this is a genuine problem here, as snipers can strip your health away very quickly whilst you can't even locate them quickly enough to kill them, it doesn't happen a lot, but it shouldn't happen at all)***. The game takes place over several time periods, with your weapons (and scenery, of course) changing to reflect the era. Some of the levels are really fantastic, and though the A.I. is again not great (but it doesn't get confused and walk into walls, fortunately) it does the job.
To me, Zero Hour is the best Duke Nukem game I've ever played.
*** One of the programmers and one of the designers of Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (the N64 game, not the mods) used to post on Gamefaqs, and they said that DNZH was shipped before it was entirely finished, which is why (a) there are no mid-level checkpoints (the levels can be very large), (b) the snipers take so much of your health per bullet, this value was intended to be lowered, and (c) there were going to be bots in multiplayer, but development time ran out, sadly.
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill (PlayStation)
I've not played this all the way through, so I'm not the best person to judge it, but I'll give my opinion anyway (lucky you!). The few levels that I played seemed OK, but didn't grab me. People tend to assume that Duke Nukem: Time to Kill is the same as Duke Nukem: Zero Hour, as they are both third person Duke Nukem games, with time travel story lines, but the games are actually very different (apparently two different studios were contracted to write a new Duke Nukem game, one for the N64 and one for the Playstation, with the stipulation that the games had to be third person shooters involving a time travel story, which is why the games are so superficially similar). Time to Kill is more of a Tomb Raider/shooter hybrid than Zero Hour (which is much more of a shooter), plus Time to Kill's levels didn't seem as interesting as ZH's, but to be fair I only got to the first time-destination, so perhaps the game picks up from then on. I never had a Playstation, so I played Time to Kill on a mate's machine, but he got rid of the game so I never got too far in it - from what I remember it wasn't a bad game, just not great, and I think I didn't like the controls, but it was so long ago that I played it that I can't be sure. I think I might have tried it out under emulation too, some time back, but with less than ideal results (hopefully by now Playstation emulation is much more compatible).
Can anyone shed more light on this game?
Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown (Playstation)
I had to google for this, as I couldn't remember much about it. I have played it, but a long time ago, so I can't remember much about it (though I think I hated the controls, but that might have been my N64-developed dislike of the PlayStation's controller). According to google's links, Total Meltdown has an exclusive fourth episode, but I can't remember if I even played it, let alone what I thought of it.
Again, can anyone say what the game is like, and if it's worth playing nowdays.
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project (PC)
This is another game that I've played but couldn't remember much about (not even it's name), but thanks to google I now remember that it's a 2.5D platform/shooter (i.e. the gameplay is 2D, but the graphics have are 3D but with a 2D-style camera), which I think I thought was disappointing since I was hoping for a new first person shooter (which means my judgement is irrelevant to the game's quality, of course...). I might track this down and give it another go (I seem to remember that the game is so old that I played the demo from a PC Zone or PC Gamer cover CD - how long ago those days seem!).
Duke Nukem Forever (PC, XBox 360, PS3)
Yep, spit spit, etc. A massively disappointing game, with maybe the longest gestation of any game ever (it was discussed at the time I bought my first PC, in late 1996, and only came out less than two years ago). To be fair, it's not nearly as bad as most people say (to listen to some players or review sites it's the worst game of all time), and I think if it hadn't had the Duke Nukem name on it, and hadn't been delayed for nearly a decade and a half, then most people would have said "It's OK, but there are much better games vying for your money". Part of the problem is it combines the worst of old school FPSs with the worst of new school FPSs. Plus the 'humour' is so overdone (and misses the point, it was supposed to be satire, not outright worship of the main character), which granted is insignificant compared to the game's gameplay problems, but it's still a genuine bone of contention for us fans of the Duke Nukem series.
Plus the earlier (non-playable) demos of the game, released across the previous ten years or so, look to be much more fun than the game they eventually gave us. Not a terrible game, if you ask me, but I'd say it's a 4/10 game at best. There are countless better shooters for us to (re)play, so I wouldn't recommend this to anyone at all, even if it was given away free, unless you wanted to see what all the disappointment was about.
By the way, someone has made a mod for DN3D, which is designed to be what Duke Nukem Forever was shaping up to be before the massive delays and changes that ruined the game. I've not yet tried it, but I intend to, so if you like the sound of it, get it from http://www.moddb.com/mods/duke-nukem-forever and please post your thoughts here.
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