Screenshots :.
Duke Nukem 3D
360
Matt
14-10-2008
"Hail to the king!"
"Explosion ahoy methinks."
"Ho ho ho, how very sly."
As a slice of retro entertainment, Doom on the Xbox Live Arcade is awesome. Yes, it’s true that first-person shooters have moved on somewhat since the early-to-mid nineties, but just booming through a classic run-and-gun shooting a bunch of sprites can get curiously addictive in a simplified fun kind of way (you know, like discussing beer with chavs or politics with the local village idiot), so it’s into the very same slot that Duke Nukem 3D (almost wrote Forever there!) slots in. Hail to the king, baby.
I have fond memories of Duke, having played it as a 13-year old (ssshh, don’t tell the ESRB) back on release in 1995, at which time I was still hoping that 3D Realms would do a proper new Commander Keen game. At that point, Duke’s move into 3D was a state-of-the-art romp through lewd jokes and hilariously corny quotes, but as you’d expect it’s showing its age now with its jaggedy sprites and environments and the like. Nonetheless, it is still great fun to blast through.
There are a couple of reasons that this is the case. The first, and most important one, is that the game is obviously a wry piss take of 1980s action films, and it’s still as amusing today as it was back then. Some of the lines Duke comes up with (the famous ‘I kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all outta gum’ being one such example) are proper cheese, and the game continues to throw oddball moments at you as you progress; you often find posters of rather slinky (if a bit pixelated) women dotted around. You come across aliens frequenting a pole-dancing club. You catch a monster in the toilet. You can use that toilet. Awesome. It’s massively over-the-top American action movie stuff, and it’s brilliant. It’s also fair to say that it makes you wonder where gaming’s sense of humour has disappeared to these days.
A slightly curious addition to the main game is a DVD-style timeline that pops up when you die, offering you the chance to backtrack to any point in the level’s proceedings and continue from there. On the one hand this is rather useful as the original Duke 3D came well before checkpointing was ‘the done thing’ in FPS games so it saves you a heck of a lot of backtracking, but on the other it slots you into the mindset that you can run around blasting things like an idiot and just try again if you fail, leading to you often having to repeat the same section over and over. Add in the fact that the game is actually bloody hard and often throws completely unfair enemy ambushes and explosions your way and you get what adds up to be a fair chunk of repetition kicking in.
You keep playing though, because it’s great fun. The range of weaponry is pleasingly wide, with the little pistol being quite handy even on latter levels if used properly, the classic shotgun, some kind of dual-wielded rocket launcher and an awesome shrink ray that then allows Duke to stamp on your now tiny foes and squish them into the floor. As you progress through the game’s levels (39, spread across numerous chapters) you come across a myriad of alien foes to battle against, from the Pig Cops to some strange one-eyed brown things that like swiping at you with their oversized claws. Lovely.
Not quite so lovely, sadly, is the fact that the game itself plays in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with two static images left and right to pad out a widescreen display. It’s not a total deal breaker, of course, but it would have been nice to have a bit of 16:9 going on in there. That thumbs down is countered by the inclusion of online multiplayer in both co-operative and deathmatch modes, both of which work very nicely and add a good dollop of longevity into what was already a game of pretty decent length.
At 800 points (approx £7 for those who like their prices in actual factual cash) you can’t say fairer than that, really. Much in the way that Doom scratched a particular itch, Duke 3D scratches that itch further, giving us a simple, fun piece of gaming history that stands up to latter, much more complex and sprawling examples in the genre remarkably well. It’s hard to fathom why, some 13 years after release, I can be reviewing a retro re-release of this before the sequel has even seen the light of day, but until Duke Forever comes out (er, if it ever comes out) Duke 3D serves as a great reminder of times gone by.
I have fond memories of Duke, having played it as a 13-year old (ssshh, don’t tell the ESRB) back on release in 1995, at which time I was still hoping that 3D Realms would do a proper new Commander Keen game. At that point, Duke’s move into 3D was a state-of-the-art romp through lewd jokes and hilariously corny quotes, but as you’d expect it’s showing its age now with its jaggedy sprites and environments and the like. Nonetheless, it is still great fun to blast through.
There are a couple of reasons that this is the case. The first, and most important one, is that the game is obviously a wry piss take of 1980s action films, and it’s still as amusing today as it was back then. Some of the lines Duke comes up with (the famous ‘I kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I’m all outta gum’ being one such example) are proper cheese, and the game continues to throw oddball moments at you as you progress; you often find posters of rather slinky (if a bit pixelated) women dotted around. You come across aliens frequenting a pole-dancing club. You catch a monster in the toilet. You can use that toilet. Awesome. It’s massively over-the-top American action movie stuff, and it’s brilliant. It’s also fair to say that it makes you wonder where gaming’s sense of humour has disappeared to these days.
A slightly curious addition to the main game is a DVD-style timeline that pops up when you die, offering you the chance to backtrack to any point in the level’s proceedings and continue from there. On the one hand this is rather useful as the original Duke 3D came well before checkpointing was ‘the done thing’ in FPS games so it saves you a heck of a lot of backtracking, but on the other it slots you into the mindset that you can run around blasting things like an idiot and just try again if you fail, leading to you often having to repeat the same section over and over. Add in the fact that the game is actually bloody hard and often throws completely unfair enemy ambushes and explosions your way and you get what adds up to be a fair chunk of repetition kicking in.
You keep playing though, because it’s great fun. The range of weaponry is pleasingly wide, with the little pistol being quite handy even on latter levels if used properly, the classic shotgun, some kind of dual-wielded rocket launcher and an awesome shrink ray that then allows Duke to stamp on your now tiny foes and squish them into the floor. As you progress through the game’s levels (39, spread across numerous chapters) you come across a myriad of alien foes to battle against, from the Pig Cops to some strange one-eyed brown things that like swiping at you with their oversized claws. Lovely.
Not quite so lovely, sadly, is the fact that the game itself plays in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with two static images left and right to pad out a widescreen display. It’s not a total deal breaker, of course, but it would have been nice to have a bit of 16:9 going on in there. That thumbs down is countered by the inclusion of online multiplayer in both co-operative and deathmatch modes, both of which work very nicely and add a good dollop of longevity into what was already a game of pretty decent length.
At 800 points (approx £7 for those who like their prices in actual factual cash) you can’t say fairer than that, really. Much in the way that Doom scratched a particular itch, Duke 3D scratches that itch further, giving us a simple, fun piece of gaming history that stands up to latter, much more complex and sprawling examples in the genre remarkably well. It’s hard to fathom why, some 13 years after release, I can be reviewing a retro re-release of this before the sequel has even seen the light of day, but until Duke Forever comes out (er, if it ever comes out) Duke 3D serves as a great reminder of times gone by.
8/10