Uhhck. God. What a terrible game. I mean really.
Let it be known that I played Duke Nukem while I waited for my car to get repaired and exited the game when it was done, thereby violating the rule I established in the last post. When I returned home and summoned the grit needed to again submit myself to the pit of horrors that is Nuke Nukem, it wouldn't load, claiming that it couldn't find the requisite config file. Sure enough, following the file path yielded the requisite config file in exactly the place that it ought to be but let this stand as testimony to the fact that Duke Nukem is so bad that it can alter reality.
But, thinking of my numerous and vociferous readers, I actually reinstalled the motherfucker, thinking that I ought to do another real review, and, since I had it muted while I played at the car repair shop, maybe that it would be better with the sound.
Boy, was that fucking wrong.
But I get ahead of myself.
As we all know, Duke Nukem is a paragon of cheap video game thrills. He's an stereotypically muscular, machine gun-wielding action hero and he shoots mutants. The premise is in fact so typical that for a moment I entertained the idea that it was satire. How wrong I was.
Duke rescues big-titted women who, as they break free of their bonds, stretch and display their pixelated goodness for all to partake of. They'll usually thank Duke in a vapid or suggestive way and Duke will insult them with one of his "infamous" one-liners. More on that later.
Don't get me wrong, I think its funny to portray women as sex objects. But for Christ's sake, do it well. There was just no energy in any of these shenanigans. It felt as if the 8th grader in charge of making this game actually thought it would be cool to have whip-flicking dominatrixes as enemies.
Duke's one liners. I understood that I was going to dislike almost all of this game, but I had long heard reference to Duke's succinct wit in the video game community. What a disafuckingppointment. "Don't get your panties in a bunch" ?! Really? This is comedy? Upon dispatching a female foe, "what a pussy" ? I'm not sure if I could write anything so juvenile if I tried.
One thing that the one liners were good for (aside from purging) was to immerse me in a total sense of the late nineties. This is really the one redeeming feature of this iteration of Duke, the nineties time capsule. The game is peppered with references to pop culture happenings I had totally forgotten about. "Put it in a lockbox," for example. Is that from some SNL skit lampooning Gee Dub? There was even a lame joke where Duke tapped into a phone conversation between Bill and Monica wherein Bill invited Monica to come look at his cigars. That line is really the game in a microcosm. Nineties beyond belief, having someone do a mediocre Clinton impersonation, but all to deliver a joke that's so bad that's its caught uncomfortably between so-bad-its-good and so-bad-it's-just-fucking-dumbfounding.
It's also kind of an interesting peak at where video games were at in this point in time. The game really offers no exposition for its action, a few paragraphs of text quickly inform the reader that Duke has been asked by the Mayor of New York to kill the mutants who are attacking the city. And then inexplicably, Duke is platform-jumping around ledges and porches of the Manhattan skyline, shooting mutants who have decided to pace in these unlikely locations and fire guns at semi-random intervals. (The mutants are bipedal boars in cop's clothing. Duke's take on the situation: "I hate pigs") None of it makes any sense, and no where did it feel like it occurred to anyone that it ought to. It's a "game-play game". I think the difference is now that "game-play games" are flashy as fuck and at least have a well-told if horribly cliched storyline to follow.
Not that this duke game didn't look pretty flashy for its time. Even I found its 3d-sidescroller angle fresh, though it was maddening to see Duke come up against a "dead end" that could easily be circumvented if he would take two steps toward the camera and walk around the pile of indestructible boxes. I guess we should just thank our lucky stars that his pig-cop enemies were all on the same plane as Duke's machine gun, or the trip through this nineties nightmare would have been even shorter than it was.
Too bad, too bad indeed...
No comments:
Post a Comment