By Daniel Rutledge
I loved Duke Nukem 3D back in the 90s and have been very excited about Duke Nukem Forever.
It’s been the Chinese Democracy of the gaming world, taking decades to finally get completed, but we now finally have less than a month to wait.
The significant amount of promotional videos released for the game only heightened my excitement and I eagerly attended a hands-on preview of the game earlier this week.
Even having seen the outrageous Babes and Faeces trailers, I was still fairly surprised at just how crass this game is. It is amazingly obscene!
The very start of the game has you (as Duke) standing in front of a toilet. You have to urinate to proceed.
You can then enter other cubicles, and if they have excrement in them, you may pick it up and throw it wherever you like. Whether or not you urinate on the excrement before you pick it up is up to you.
It turns out you’re in the toilets downstairs at a football stadium. A whiteboard has been set up displaying Operation Cockblock – a plan to destroy a large alien up on the field. You can draw on the board and, of course, the natural thing to draw is part of the male anatomy. Or maybe a reclining lady. Anything you want really.
After creating a bit of juvenile art, you then head upstairs to the field and kill the giant alien. This ends with you performing a field goal with his head, sending it sailing over the posts.
The camera then zooms out to reveal you’re actually playing a videogame within a videogame. Duke is sitting in his mansion playing the Operation Cockblock.
You put down the game controller and from the bottom of the camera pops up two heads. A pair of good-looking young female twins have been, er, servicing Duke as he plays the game.
Wow.
So yeah, I hope you can appreciate just how R18 this game is. There’s no actual porn or even nudity in what I saw of it, but the toilet humour and sexual references were really quite eyebrow-raising.
But that’s what the fans are wanting from this game and it’s those outrageous aspects of it that are the hilarious highlights.
The gameplay itself was fun but left a little to be desired when compared to most contemporary shooters. It’s clear the developers are emphasizing the fun and LOL factor over, say, impressive graphics, an engaging storyline or sophisticated shooter gameplay mechanics.
It felt kind of old-school in that I did a whole lot of strafing about while engaged in combat. To those of you that are younger gamers, well, in the ‘90s we were all about strafing.
There’s loads of nostalgic joy in the game for old Duke Nukem fans like the holoduke, the three-barrelled Ripper gun and its distinctive sound, the classic RPG and of course the updated pigcops. The game has a very distinctive visual look with some really cool looking monster bosses that are going to be great fun to kill in nice gory ways.
You can perform executions on wounded enemies which is nice. It’s fun to boot the head off some pigcop. But I did this just minutes after witnessing some of the awesomeness in The Darkness II, which included some really memorably brutal executions that were hugely superior to that on offer in Duke Nukem Forever.
I have to say that I wasn’t as impressed with Duke Nukem Forever as I’d hoped to be. It’s going to be a lot of fun to play through once, for sure, but it’s far from a modern classic.
Still, the crass humour of it is sure to provide a number of laughs and I am really looking forward to its release.
Duke Nukem Forever is set to be released June 10 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
3 News
source: newshub archive
