Duke Nukem.. Forever

In development for over a decade.

You don’t really need to say much more than that. Duke Nukem 3D was the culmination of the generation that grew up on Rick Dangerous, Commander Keen, Doom, Quake… and eventually got to play the filthiest, nastiest most vulgar video game known to man kind.

Then they decided to build a sequel. You have to feel it for that team. If you’ve ever been a part of a product development you know the feeling of trying to balance perfection with your fear of what people may say if you ship something terrible. For the 3D Realms, that stress carried on for over a decade, through delays and engine changes, all the way to the eventual bankruptcy. Duke Nukem Forever became the norm for vaporware, even beating out Al Lowe’s Leisure Suit Larry 4 – The case of the missing floppies in the category of disappearing sequels.

Vaporware or not, lines from the Duke Nukem franchise are still quoted by geeks and it’s become a part of the geek vernacular.

Reviews

After the rights were purchased for Duke Nukem Forever the new company had a very short timeline to ship the product. Gotta hand it to them, they made it out fast. The reviews for the game were terrible – although most focused on irrelevant things such as how this FPS didn’t really fare well against the Call of Duty franchise – or how the game was somehow too profane and filthy.

Being somewhat of a product manager / enterprise architect, I wanted to hold the game in my hand and play it, regardless of how terrible it may be.

Secretly, I hoped the studio would have put a molding cheese sandwich in the cover as the final, ultimate prank, to all that bitched about the delays.

It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum..

Pack lot’s of bubble gum folks, levels take forever to load. Even by Xbox standards.

From there, forget what you know about 1080i and AI, the motion of human characters in the game hasn’t made it out of the 90’s.

But the animation of unloading a shotgun into the nuts of a pigcop falling from the ceiling – all 2011 baby!

That aside – The game is absolutely phenomenal.

If you like Duke Nukem… it was worth the wait.

No, it’s not as polished or as smooth as Call of Duty. It’s no Halo. It’s Duke Nukem, he’s back and he’s as filthy as they come.

Throw a pipe bomb towards your to-do list and kick some alien ass.