“As you got farther away from things, it didn’t just look like a mass of pixels, it kept looking like an object that you were walking away from,” Eddy said. He saw an early version of Duke Nukem Forever in 1998, and remembered being impressed by the level of detail in the game’s graphics. Outside the Vegas club where I played the Duke demo, I ran into Andy Eddy, an editor at Best Buy’s magazine who has been writing about games since the 1980s. While Duke Nukem Forever righteously recalls the old days of fun shooters that didn’t take themselves too seriously, it also looks pretty dated. Pitchford says Duke will take 16 to 17 hours to play, about twice the length of modern shooters. This sort of thing was expected of first-person shooters 10 years ago, when such games were generally padded with all sorts of excessive ridiculousness. (Imagine this happening to Master Chief.) Tiny Duke then hops in the young fan’s radio-controlled dune buggy and putt-putt-putts all over his casino, doing jumps off craps tables and red leather stool cushions. At one point, an alien poison shrinks Duke down to action-figure size. You can fire one off in the men’s room, then admire yourself in the mirror.Įven after all this, the shooting doesn’t really begin in earnest until you’ve played through more wacky segments. You can sign an autograph for a young fan. You can play his pool table and pinball machine. So before you start blowing things up, you live the life, wandering as Duke through the 69th-floor penthouse of his Vegas complex. But there’s a method to this sluggish madness: Duke the character may possess all the depth of a kiddie pool, but for the game’s fiction to work, players must feel like they’re taking on the role of the cigar-chomping egomaniac.ĭuke is not the sort of personality-free camera-on-a-stick that serves as the protagonist of many first-person shooters. In fact, for the first hour of the game, it seems like Duke Nukem Forever wants you to do anything but shoot aliens. The game takes its sweet time, deploying plenty of puzzles, goofy minigames and segments that ask the player to do nothing but walk along and soak up the atmosphere, admiring the paintings on the walls of Duke’s mansion. Duke Nukem Forever bucks this conventional wisdom.
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