First post, by Kerr Avon
Great news for fans of really good first or third person shooters. Duke Nuke: Zero Hour, the superb Nintendo 64 exclusive, and arguably (or certainly, if you ask me) the only good Duke Nukem 3D sequel, was recently fan-ported to the PC!
Duke Nukem: Zero Hour is a third person shooter (which you can play entirely in first person mode if you prefer, as I do) where time travelling aliens are trying to wipe out the human race so you, as Duke, have to go to various time/place zones to prevent the alien invasion. In every time-zone you get to use period specific weapons as well as weapons you capture from the aliens.
A decomplication of the game was recently published, meaning that anyone can take the resultant code, and port it to any other computer or console, and now a PC port has been made available. It is early days yet, so it doesn't even support the mouse for the moment, but it's always being updated, so very soon it should be the ideal way to play this brilliant game.
Bear in mind that it is a Nintendo 64 game, and of course (for the moment, at least) there are no updated graphic packs available, so it will look like a game written for a 1996 console. But don't judge the game on it's looks, judge it on it's excellent level design, it's weapons, it's various times zones and era-specific weapons for you to use, it's occasional humour, etc. The game's only real faults are that the levels are long and you don't have the ability to quick-save and the game doesn't have mid-level checkpoints (though hopefully the PC port will add either checkpoints or quick-save), the (thankfully rare) snipers can take off too much of your health (one of the game's designers said, on the Gamefaqs N64 forum that he regretted this), and the frame-rate might be annoying for some (it's a very detailed 3D game on 1996 hardware) but the frame-rate is no problem on the PC port (yay!) since it's designed to use the PC's power to give a modern frame-rate.
Here's a quick review of the game (N64 version, of course, not the PC port) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YWzDAKgDIs
Or a longer breakdown of the game by the brilliant Civvie 11 (N64 version, again) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XYJ2Y9AJhg&t … 6ZXJvIGhvdXI%3D
Download the port from:
https://github.com/sonicdcer/DNZHRecomp
But you will need to find the N64 rom of the U (NTSC) version of Duke Nukem: Zero Hour yourself, then put it into the PC port's folder.
Edit: I should have said that the N64 (and so this port) is nothing at all to do with the fan-made mod of the same name for Duke Nukem 3D.
