“Come get some.”

You know that line from Duke Nukem 3D, right? Of course you do. Pretty famous (ripoff), and probably one of the fan favorites from the game. But still a ripoff.

Under normal circumstances I’d complain about the gratuitous line stealing from The Evil Dead movies and Army of Darkness, but you know what? They sound legitimately unique, even coming from a twelve-year-old game which borrowed the line from a movie that came out four years prior. And that basically sums up Duke Nukem 3D — elements in the game stand on their own, even if they are blatant ripoffs.

I bought Duke Nukem 3D the day it came out in 1996. After getting my money’s worth out of the shareware version (and waiting a few hours to download it, at 3.4k/sec most likely), I hitched a ride to the local Media Play (whoa, mid-90s flashback) to grab the game. And. It. Blew. My. Mind. The scatalogical humor, the action and violence, and the hilarious one-liners were the ideal combo for a 14-year-old kid. Everything that DOOM did, Duke 3D ratcheted up ten-fold and then some. Beyond instant personality, Duke 3D‘s mechanics were awesome and the level of interactivity at the time (lights, water, a JETPACK) was unparalleled. This game was truly a jump in interactvitiy.

However, something seemed to overshadow the game. That somehting was Quake. The 3D Realms-built  (heh) BUILD engine on which Duke, Shadow Warrior, and Blood (most notably, but there were some awful games using it too) ran was about as good as it could get for 2.5D, as Quake quickly pointed out in its own shareware version. Side note: the first enemy I killed in Quake was the dog on the first level (sorry, Lassie) and I ran a circle around it to make sure it was a real 3-D object and not a 2.5D sprite. Perhaps I should have kept that to myself.

ANYWAY, until Quake came along, Duke Nukem 3D was essentially the coolest game ever, and I’m really thankful 3D Realms decided to bring it back for the XBLA because I had forgotten how awesome it is (and I apologize to anyone who was on the receiving end of my scathing comments about DOOM being a better game. DOOM still wins, and has since 1996, but the margin of victory is much slimmer than I had remembered).

Duke 3D translates to the XBox perfectly. As well as any shooter on it, I think. The controls are fluid, and even with the engine’s limitations with looking up and down, the game’s presentation is still incredibly immersive and full of personality.  And, any reason to avoid using the stupid DOS shell* in Windows is a good enough reason to purchase the game.

* this is an exaggeration. I have a MacBook.

But seriously, the main reason games die in obscurity is because the platforms they ran on died too, so the Xbox Live Arcade is absolutely the best thing for any decent game for DOS, among other platforms. 3d Realms did a phenomenal job with this game and even implemented a playback system to replay captured moments very quickly. This is a great idea in general (see my Braid review) and it works really well in this game as well, both for multiplayer and single player games (you can reply the moments before you die to figure out a better strategy, for instance).

Are the graphics dated? Of course. The game lived in an era when pixels, big and fat pixels, were the norm and accepted. In fact, this game never ran on 3D accelerators out of the box, which I still think was a mistake but that is neither here nor there.

Is the voiceover quality poor? Uh, yes. Really poor. But, it’s funny and that sort of makes up for it. But a little work here to clean up the voiceovers would have gone a long way.

Is the level design horrifically primitive? Well….sort of. One of the most annoying parts to the game is that, on many levels of the game, you can’t move on until you’ve found one key, or one switch, or one hidden door, or whatever, and they can be maddeningly difficult to find. This was just the zeitgeist of the mid 90s first-person shooters, though. The difficulty didn’t come from the AI, which obviously wasn’t very sophisticated. Instead, it came from level design, which seems like a great idea on paper until you actually try to find the switch, which is behind one of the “trapped half-naked woman in a vine” sprites, and you have to blow her up to get to it. See how annoying that is? I am not even going to post a screenshot of what I’m talking about because Tipper Gore is going to flood my comments section for indecency (again, whoa, 90s flashback).

The game is still a whole hell of a lot of fun, and I’ve spent the last week playing through every level and trying to get every secret, kill every monster, and hone my skills online.

For $10, this might be the best deal on the XBLA. I’d get it right now if I were you, except that the XBOX Network is still down, so you’ll obviously have to wait. I just hope it has a longer multiplayer shelf life than DOOM did.

Overall, the game is pretty fantastic. Some parts are ripoffs from its source material (Bruce Campbell, DOOM, probably Die Hard too). but does that really matter? No, it doesn’t. The game has aged better than many of its counterparts, and it’s a blast to play on the XBOX Live network. The main criticism lies in the lack of splitscreen gameplay but that is my only real gripe. Not the end of the world.

My favorite Duke line, for the record, is never spoken in the game. It’s written in one of those post-boss fight, one-screen endings. Episode 2 to be exact. “Guess again, freakshow.” Hilarious. The original writing wins, in my opinion. Let’s hope the writers stick to that notion for Duke Nukem Forever. 9 out of 10

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This entry was posted on October 1, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: 3d accelerators, Braid, Bruce Campbell, Die Hard, Digital Download, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Games, media play, Quake, Reviews, Tipper Gore, XBLA, Xbox Live

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