A Gaming Journal

Duke Nukem Forever Demo

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Like everyone else who likes the Duke Nukem franchise, my love for it is because I grew up with it.  I think Duke Nukem is something you only enjoy for nostalgia; while Duke Nukem 3D stood among the best gameplay-wise back in its time, games have grown since then, more than anyone can measure.  So Duke Nukem Forever doesn't try to revolutionize anything or create an amazing gameplay experience, it tries to remind you of what all the better games are lacking: the history you have with Duke.

A friend of mine expressed surprise that I would actually like the Duke Nukem series, since it just doesn't seem like my kind of thing.  Which is true, to an extent, except for two things.  One, as I mentioned before, nostalgia.  Two, it takes every opportunity to make fun of itself and everything around it and like it.  I can forgive a lot of stuff if it has a good sense of humor, and that's something lacking in military shooters like Halo and Gears of War and Call of Duty.

The demo was released yesterday, and I played it for about 15 minutes.  I died, horribly, and my overall opinion of the entire thing was incredibly negative.  It sucked bad and I was just going to cancel my pre-order right then and there without even finishing it.  I picked it up again today, determined to at least beat the demo before giving Duke the middle finger, and I came away a bit surprised.  It still has a lot of sucky aspects, and there's no way in hell I'm spending $100 or even $60 on it, but on the second playthrough, there was a certain draw it had.

Many people have expressed their opinion of the demo by saying "My expectations were already realistically low, but damn this thing sucked", and I can understand that...but I think as much as they'd like to think their expectations were low, they actually weren't.  Underneath it all, I think most everyone wanted this game to come out and surprise them, that the 12-year wait would actually be worth it, and even though it might look a little dated, there was a really amazing potential GOTY underneath it all.  And there's no way it could have been that - it's impossible from something with about twenty developer studios and 12 years of botched work.

Playing the game the first time actually sets your expectations where they should be - rock bottom.  Playing the second time, you aren't holding out hope for a great shining breakthrough moment, or a one-liner that will be as quotable as any line in Portal.  And because of that, you start to see the good points in it a little more, because you've already experienced the bad.

That said, you should never ever ever feel that way about a game.  I mean, you're spending $60, you shouldn't be saying "Well, the game was okay after I thought it was the most worthless piece of shit ever and I lost all hope in it".  That's bad.  But, Duke Nukem Forever is a unique case: it could never win.  It had no chance, no hope, of ever trying to live up to any expectations anyone had of it, even the most modest ones.  There was too much built up in it, for all parties, subconsciously and consciously.

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The demo consists of 2 levels.  The first level is a re-creation/expansion of the last level of Duke Nukem 3D, fighting the huge cyclops alien in a football field.  The second level is part driving and part cave exploration.

When I took my time exploring the scenery and all the little things in the game, I was blown away.  And that wasn't a good thing - there was too much.  All I could think of was, "If they didn't create a special animation and action for dispensing hand soap, they could've had the time and resources to actually tighten up the shooting and make this fun".  In fact, as I was playing, I made a list of all the little tiny completely useless things that were programmed in.  Don't get me wrong, I like interactivity, I like awesome little things you can do and making the world feel real, but the depth they went through for all this just showed the level of psychosis George Broussard had.  It was like he was playing a demo level and every time he came across any object, he demanded the animators and programmers make it realistically usable.  It stopped being a shooter and started being a weird life sim shooter.  Or, as Alex said, "He's turned into Peter Molyneux."

• Fully usable urinal with actionable pissing and flushing.
• Fully usable toilet with actionable pissing and flushing.
• Fully usable soap dispenser with animated soap.
• Fully usable sink that actually fills to the top when you leave the water on; it then slowly drains when you shut the water off.
• Fully usable showers.
• Fully usable water fountain which requires button presses to activate once your POV leans over it.
• A piece of shit you can pick up and throw around the bathroom.
• This piece of shit has about 10 unique lines of dialogue that were actually recorded for it every time you pick it up.
• I am dead serious.
• Fully usable dry erase board that is like a mini-game in itself; you can swap between 5 different marker colors and an eraser to draw any kind of masterpiece you want.  This is a joke on a 360 controller where you can't even draw a convincing cock and balls.
• This was just in the first two rooms.

Things like this can make a game world feel deep and fun when they are put on a game that feels...well...good.  And done.  On a half-baked game, it just feels like their priorities were completely fucked up.

Getting past that comes to my single biggest gripe about the entire game: the weapons.  This is something there is no defending.  If it weren't for this, I might even keep my pre-order.  But the fact that they've limited you to carrying only two weapons is disgusting.  This is Duke Fucking Nukem.  Half the point of the game was the amazing crazy weapons, and now they're reduced to set pieces instead of something fun and usable.  I have no idea what the developer's reason was for this, but I can hazard a guess: laziness.

When you cut the player's ability to carry more than 2 weapons, you're basically forcing them to follow a very specific route down the game that you've designed.  You know exactly what weapons they'll have at any given time.  They'll only have weapon x when you give it to them for an area, and you can rest assured knowing they can't overpower anything, because they're limited to one main weapon (pistol/shotgun/chaingun maybe) and one specialty gun (sniper/rail gun or RPG).  Now you can lazily script your encounters and boss fights based on how you want the player to play them -- only give them ammo for the devastator if you want that kind of fight.  Give them a shrink ray right before a lot of small enemies to show that off.  It's no longer about the player making decisions about what weapons to use, or which ones they like the most...the guns are just another piece of the scenery and backdrop of the game now.  That isn't cool for a FPS.

The second biggest grip is related to the first: difficulty.  The game is brutal.  Even on the easiest difficulty, I was getting torn apart with only a few shots from the weakest enemies.  And the health meter is just bizarre.  It can take 2 shots to drain it completely, but another 5 shots to kill you once it's completely empty.  It makes no sense.

The driving and the monster truck (and the need to fill it up with gas) is another gratuitous detail-explosion that can't stand on its own.  It's a desperate act of them thinking more is better, instead of...well, better being better.

Lastly, the little gripes....the load times are awful.  Truly, truly awful.  And this is already being run off the hard drive, and it takes about 45 seconds to load up one level.  Considering the decidedly last-gen graphics (note that isn't a knock against the game), there's no reason it should take so long to load up.  And the ending montage trailer just confused me; why would you using the work "fucking" in huge block letters in your trailer, but you censor out a stripper's ass?

So what were the good points, you may ask?  To tell you the truth, I'm not sure.  There's a feel to this game, though, that showed the creators really were passionate about it, and really wanted it to be incredible.  And even though it falls flat on its face, that passion still comes through in the game, and makes me at least want to experience what hundreds of people spent twelve years of their life on.

So in the end, my second playthrough taught me something valuable...I didn't walk away hating the game, determined to cancel my pre-order and skip on it entirely.  I am now going to walk away from the game, cancel my pre-order, but will totally pick it up when it hits $19.99 on Amazon 3 days after release.