I'm probably going to be the only reviewer that would dare to write this, but I think Duke Nukem Forever is one of the most important games of this generation. It's not because of the game itself that I say this though. I say this because Duke pulled back the curtain to reveal the true nature of "professional" game reviewers and let us see just how corrupt, hypocritical, and spoiled they really are.
First order of business is yes, I did play and enjoy the original Duke Nukem 3D on PC way back in 1996. You know how if you have brothers or sisters, their clothes get passed down to you when they either outgrow them or get something new? Well, my dad does the same thing, but instead of passing down clothes, I get his old electronics and computers when he upgrades! So in 1996, he was giving me his old computer because he had built a new one for himself. He me bought Duke Nukem 3D soon after but once I installed it on my "new" computer it ran so slow it was unplayable. I think the game required a 33Mhz processor or something equally as ludicrously underpowered compared to today's tech. So he ended up giving me his just built computer just so I could play Duke Nukem 3D! One of my lasting memories of that summer. To this day, I have never bought a computer, I've just recycled his old ones! My pop is always good to me like that.
While I really liked Duke Nukem 3D, I haven't been staying awake at night dreaming and praying and hoping for a new game for 15 years. Far from it. I would hear about the development of the sequel here and there over the years but not really be interested. But there was enough nostalgia and good feelings about the game I played over a decade ago to make me want to try out the new one.
If you haven't played Duke Nukem 3D, no worries. It's been so long ago that the only thing I remembered about it was that Duke fought some aliens with guns. And at the end he beat the crap out the alien leader and saved the Earth. So the sequel has a completely different plot from that game. In Duke Nukem Forever, the Duke has to fight against aliens with guns and then beat the crap out of their leader AND save the Earth! The aliens don't want to just conquer us. They want our women to impregnate and give birth to even more hideous monsters!
Saving Earth does have its perks. 12 years after the events of the first game, Duke is now a national icon, owning his own restaurants and strip club, starring in movies, and even having a museum dedicated to his exploits. He also has two Charlie Sheen-like "goddesses" living with him, and they are eager to please in ALL ways. That's when the aliens from the previous game return for revenge on his royal Dukeness. At first, they act like they have peaceful intentions, even making contact with the President of the United States to show they're not hostile. Duke is ordered to stand down but soon finds himself under attack by the aliens who also kidnap his two chicks!
A lot of the negative reviews for Duke Nukem focused on one sequence where kidnapped women are taken by the aliens, impregnated, and then made part of the scenery of their hive. Yes, they are naked with poorly modelled boobs bouncing as they writhe in despair and ecstasy. But what's so OFFENSIVE about that? Yes, monsters burst out of them, but why is this any more disgusting than the chest buster sequences from the Alien movies? And how many women have died in slasher flicks since the original Halloween in 1978? A LOT. How many zombie movies have there been where someone has to kill their loved ones after they turn into a flesh-eating abomination? A LOT! So I don't get how Duke being either forced to kill his girlfriends or letting aliens kill them makes a big splash in the lake of tasteless violence.
Do you know what I did when I came upon these impregnated women? I meleed them. If you hit them, you can knock them out, and it keeps the aliens from coming out of them. Maybe the reviewers were so entranced by their own bloodlust that they were ashamed to admit they kinda liked killing those women? Again, how is anything in Duke Nukem any worse than say, the Russian airport sequence in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2? These same corrupt hacks gave that game stellar scores! And that was actually meant to be taken seriously! I think some people forget that Duke Nukem is an over the top send-up of machismo. If anything has changed since 1996, its that most men are now pussies. Everybody is SO afraid of offending anyone that you can't crack jokes about anything without offending someone. Do you remember when PETA jumped on our President for killing a FLY? This is the day and age we live in. It's ok for "critical darling" games like God of War, Red Dead Redemption, or Call of Duty to have as much sex and violence as they want simply because they're popular.
I really think reviewers had already made up their minds about Duke Nukem Forever before it ever came out. The same goes for Alice Madness Returns. But when Ocarina of Time for the 3DS gets released, these same reviewers line up to lick Nintendo's ass! Duke Nukem and Alice took a lot of heat for their lack of evolution, but just because its ZELDA, Ocarina's gameplay hasn't evolved at all either. But we all know that most "pro" game journalists are Nintendo first party whores and they're like "OMG, a Mario toilet flushing sim? Man, this is gonna be good!". Or take a look at the Halo franchise. I played the first Halo game, then Halo Reach, and was stunned to find out that besides the better graphics, NOTHING had changed in 10 YEARS! But nobody is gangpiling that series! These same negative reviewers, after complaining about the stale gameplay and violence in Duke, probably pop in Call of Duty afterwards and are killing people for hours. Talk about STALE gameplay. I don't even have to read Call of Duty manuals because they're all the same! Nothing ever changes! I doubt I'll ever see a negative review for a Call of Duty game in my lifetime.
Of course, you all know that the Redner Group, the firm in charge of Duke Nukem PR, lashed out at the vindictiveness of some reviewers and threatened to not give them review copies of future games they handled. Yes, "pro" game reviewers probably went over the top when they compared Duke Nukem Forever to shit and writing that they wanted to VOMIT as they played it. To me, it's ok for bloggers to get off the chain. But if you're being paid to review games, you have to see the big picture and not run away with your own ego. I thought it was funny to see all these sissy-boy tweets on Twitter like "How dare you take away my free games?" I KNOW Duke would say "free games are for pussies!". It just showed how corrupt the reviewers are. They get free games from the publishers and seem to have forgotten how low on the food chain they really are. In essence, these game reviewers are the symbiotic parasites of the game companies, and they seem to have forgotten their place. The game companies do not need them. It's the other way around. There are so many people in our country out of work that can't even pay their bills and these reviewers are bitching about not getting free games?!
Bottom line: You cannot trust "pro" game reviewers. And really, how do you know they even play these games? There was so much focus on the naked women chestbuster scenes that it makes me think that most reviewers never even went past that point. I want some kind of verification system for reviewers so you know they played all of the game. For example, I'm on Raptr. You can go there and see exactly what achievements I have. You can see that I finished the game. There was a wanna be famous game girl reviewer that gave an interview and said she had finished about 5 games in the past couple of weeks, but in reality, she hadn't finished ANY of them! If all reviewers had to log into a game tracking service, at least you'd know how much they'd actually played.
I LIKED this game. It made me laugh. Yes, it opens with Duke taking a piss. I laughed. Yes, you could pick up a turd out of the toilet and throw it. I laughed. I played the goofiness to the hilt. When a little kid came up to me and asked for an autograph, and you were allowed to write on his book, I carefully sketched out "FU" and he got excited and told his dad "WOW". I laughed when the gay guy passed out because he was so overwhelmed when he met Duke. I thought it was funny when you had to find a vibrator, a condom, and some microwave popcorn in a strip club. I thought it was funny. Maybe I'm alone. Maybe all sex should be banned. And we should die out. Man, those Puritans sure did screw us up. They didn't have any problem slaughtering Native Americans, but SEX, OMG, its of the devil! And really, there's almost always a sexual element in violent horror and sci-fi movies. Some of these reviewers need to read a little Georges Bataille.
Sadly, as Duke Nukem progresses, its protagonist loses more and more of his personality and becomes just another faceless colorless 1st person hand with a gun. I thought the early part of the game was more enjoyable in terms of over the top dialogue and situations. It just had a lot more personality. The later stages of the game were more refined in the graphics department but lost the essence of Duke. His one-liners became more and more rare, the game began to take itself more and more seriously and lost me. I still liked it, but it just became another shooter at that point.
I felt really limited by the fact that you could only have 2 guns at a time. 3 would have been perfect. My favorite weapon was the Railgun, which was the equivalent of a sniper rifle. Less rate of fire but deadly with one shot if you could get it aimed correctly. But I always had to keep on dropping the weapons I liked to use because I didn't have room. Another thing that bugged me was with some of the boss fights, you could get stuck with the worst weapons possible because you would respawn at the beginning of the boss fight instead of being able to go find other weapons and then triggering the boss battle. And speaking of, can we think of something else besides boss fights? Basically, every game we've played since the mid-80s involves "Bosses". And what that almost always consists of is one giant monster sending wave after wave of minions at you at the same time you have to fight the main boss. Or you have to shoot arms off or hit certain weak spots. I'm just kinda bored with the whole process. There has to be another way.
The load times were pretty abysmal. When you die, it takes 1-2 minutes for the game to reload. And when you get stuck on a boss fight, it gets to be pretty annoying. I mean, you're already frustrated dying over and over, and then you have to wait and wait and wait to begin again. The load times reminded me a lot of Burnout Revenge on Xbox 360. Speaking of, I really enjoyed the vehicle action in this game. My favorite sequences were on a freeway driving a Duke monster truck running over aliens, and then having to get out and fight, kinda like a cheap Mass Effect! You also get shrunk to Ant-man size at different times during the game which was kinda fun, because you get to drive an RC truck!
I would recommend this game. I had fun playing it. Yeah, I got stuck a couple of times and got frustrated with some of the cheap battles, but I always overcame in the end. Just don't take the game seriously. It had a lot of variety but is probably not for people that get offended easily or have a femi-nazi attitude. Speaking of, how come I never heard anyone complaining about how Duke was stereotyping MEN? It was almost like saying Duke Nukem Forever was a crap game was fashionable. Like you wouldn't be in the clique of game reviewers if you said you liked it. Or male reviewers were trying to score points with their overblown god-like respect for women with their female co-workers. Whoops, sorry, do game "journalists" even actually "work"? Do you really think there are no female sluts in the world? Do you really think there are no macho assholes like Duke in this world? Go to a bar tonight, and a majority of the people there will be sluts or assholes. Guaranteed. Imagine all the people....
My Grade: B+
Nicely written! You managed to rant relevantly while giving your opinion of the game, which is a hard thing to balance.
ReplyDeleteI also marvelled at how DNF could be down-rated for its (non-existent) misogyny, but Modern Warfare 2 -- where the game won't even let you stop the terrorists, you have to play along -- could get perfect scores. Most of the reviewers out there are inconsistent and hypocritical. They'll smash this apart for violence against women, but not say a word about that stuff in Shadows of the Damned (which is also filled with dick jokes and violence against women... and men... and demons...).
I'm also in agreement with you regarding the "journalistic" outrage over the Redner group's tweet. Getting free games is part of the business, but it's a CORRUPT part of the business, and these people who accept free games or paid vacations need to stop calling themselves journalists.
So anyways, nicely done, and glad you liked the game. It was a worthwhile purchase.
Thanks! I have Shadows of the Damned, but I think I'm gonna play the first Call of Juarez since I've never played it and the THIRD installment is coming out!
ReplyDeleteYeah, to me those journalists should see it as a privelage to get a game early for free. Instead they see it as a right. And you know, I don't think they always get time to play the whole thing or they have to rush through it or cut corners with the gameplay. So they don't really experience it as a regular player either.
Yeah, one of my formerly-pro friends says that I take my sweet time completing games. When I was getting free games (note: I was never a pro), I did rush through them, and it did affect my opinion because I didn't have the "cool down" time between chapters/levels that I give myself for games that I just play for fun.
ReplyDeleteThere's no cure for that -- writers HAVE to meet deadlines -- but that's all the more reason why pros need to practice critical thinking instead of just writing down their "experience" and assigning the first score that comes to mind. Consistent, critical thinking helps people apply their past experience to identify flaws and perks that will grow on them over time.
Mag/website editors need to do a better job of encouraging and enforcing that mindset instead of fostering a hype-driven "for gamers by gamers" image. Either that, or they should stop calling themselves "journalists" and admit they're just dudes writing about stuff based on a week of play (if that!)
In the case of DNF, I think the early opinion was that it was crude and misogynistic and EVIL, and it was just easier for the reviewers to leap on that bandwagon and turn in their aassignments, than to spend time thinking for themselves.
Never see a negative review for Call of Duty ?
ReplyDeleteBecause Call of Duty is good . And i love Duke Nukem 3D , i an great fan . But Duke Nuken Forever is a crap game , not because violence , its only a horrible game.
But the airport mission in Modern warfare 2 its a shit. I like more Black ops.