Duke Nukem 3D - No Longer the King, Baby

[MrBaskerville]

The game is really ugly and the sound quality is lacking (everything sounds as if it was recorded in a tin box), of all the classic fps games, this is probably the one with the worst overall presentation (Where Blood might be my favourite). I also think it's a bit annoying that a bit too many of the enemies rely on bullets instead of avoidable projectiles. But with that said, it is a great and fun game, i really like the Level Design (atleast the original 3 episodes, Atomic Edition tends to be a bit confusing) and it does have it's own unique atmosphere.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I agree with this review. At the same time, I urge everyone to check out Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition, which adds stuff like working WASD/mouse aim, HD-ish graphics (not quite as HD as the proper 3D Atomic Edition mod, but still pretty good upgrade anyway), and just overall makes it more playable on modern machines. The game is old-fashioned, and that's both a hindrance and a strength. Megaton Edition makes it just ever-so-slightly less old-fashioned... for the better, I think.

That's actually the the only version I played. That might be why I liked the game so much. Maybe I'll try the original version and see if it's significantly worse. Did it really not have mouse aim at all? That seems so weird. The mouse is what makes shooters so good on the PC for me. I can't imagine playing that game without it.

Most PC games from that era didn't have mouse look. You used WASD keys to move and the arrow keys to look around. I think Duke Nukem 3D DID have mouse look but it was horribly nauseating as the whole game is projected onto a 2D plane, buildings and the sky... skydome, I was going to say, more of a skywall - and looking more than a few degrees up or down just made everything kind of skewer viciously across your line of sight. It hurts so bad. The Megaton Edition does in fact limit your vertical mouse movement, thankfully.

Games like DOOM and Rise of the Triad and Wolfenstein 3D... they were all keyboard-only. Which is alright, I prefer playing DOOM with the arrow keys on account of... well, you can't look up in that game anyway. (Duke Nukem 3D also has auto-aim a bit when you use a keyboard, so you don't need to fiddle around when fighting the flying enemies.)

Duke3D was one of, if not the first game to have Mouselook out of the box. Dark Forces was an FPS that had most of the innovations of the build engine quite a bit earlier, but it lacked mouselook. The dos version of Duke 3D has mouselook out of the box, but it's crappy without either a source port or tracking down a modified mouse driver from back in the day. And honestly, if you're not using a source port in this day and age, you're doing it wrong.

Edit: Actually it definitely wasn't the first to have mouselook. If nothing else, Bethesda beat 3D Realms to the punch with their XEngine games, including Daggerfall.

 

[Guilen-]

While I'm glad that the view of the game is heading in this direction, you gotta admit, this is only going to have the legacy of the game grow in infamy. When you think of it, isn't that what we wanted anyway?

 

[Ichigo]

Most of the old games i really liked when is was younger lost most of their charm after playing them 15 years later. I played diablo for month grinding like hell for items. If i play it today i de-install it after 30 minutes. Duke Nukem 3D lost much of its old glory too of course. It´s not 1996 any more. FPS moved into a completely different direction (one i hate btw). But there is still lots of things that made Duke standing out back then and today. It was the first game that came with lots of unique interesting weapons like the pipe bombs and environment you could interact with. Even for today thats nothing normal. Especially since the Halo developers thought it would be a good idea to remove all weapons from a game (where the weapons are the only thing that gives you any change during the gameplay) and let you play no story with just one fucking mashine gun.

 

[Lugbzurg]

None of this really seemed to say anything about why the game is bad, aside from the bit about Duke Burger. I'm seeing more reasonable, logical complaints about the game in the comments, like that the sound design was bad and that too many of the enemies had hitscan weapons.

It's not my favorite FPS, but it's a dang fine one. I think its successor, Shadow Warrior was even better (and not quite as degrading). If any of you haven't played it (I understand, it's not nearly as famous), but it's fantastic. Same developer, same playstyle (but polished up a little more), very much the same humor, set in Japan, awesome new weapons, and new features like ladders, turrets, and vehicles. There's also a reboot.

Although, the shooters I play the most are the Doom and Serious Sam games. Particularity with mods. (Brutal Doom, anyone?)

 

[Thedutchjelle]

Duke3D had major technical improvements over Doom...

In 1996 I was 14, and every day after school I'd run downstairs, boot up the computer and jump into the Build level editor for Duke3D. I have spent likely over 1000 hours making Doom and Duke maps. In Duke 3D, you could stack sectors so that one room was technically on top of another, but you could never look through the room on top to see the room on the bottom. If you did this the game would throw a fit. You always had to have a staircase/vent/teleporter. The game used no-clip sprites to make things like bridges.

Someone else mentioned interactivity; the build engine used tags so you could tag sectors or sprites with a numerical value to perform a predefined action. If you wanted to tag a light switch for example to say turn on the light, you had to tag the sprite of the switch with two numbers; the first number tied the switch to the area to be lit, the second number defined the action- like switch on/off. You had to tag the area to be lit with the same number as you had tagged the switch, then set the light level for that area when off and set the tag to the light level when on.

By the time you had finished a level, you had dozens or hundreds of little tags throughout, and god help you if you criss-crossed the numbers. Editing tags was the most boring part of level design.

Duke 3D was also a lot easier to get adult graphics in- but by then porn was all over the web anyway. Yes, Doom had a quite a few porn maps and sharing WAD files was quite popular back in the day.

Hehe, I too have poured half a life time in to the Build editor.

I loved DN3D as child as it was one of the few shooters ported to Macintosh, and it even had a map editor! I love building my own things so it quickly rose to my fav game for many years.

Sadly I have no idea how many of the maps in the campaign actually play because goddamn slimers are scary as fuck

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

None of this really seemed to say anything about why the game is bad, aside from the bit about Duke Burger. I'm seeing more reasonable, logical complaints about the game in the comments, like that the sound design was bad and that too many of the enemies had hitscan weapons.

It's not my favorite FPS, but it's a dang fine one. I think its successor, Shadow Warrior was even better (and not quite as degrading). If any of you haven't played it (I understand, it's not nearly as famous), but it's fantastic. Same developer, same playstyle (but polished up a little more), very much the same humor, set in Japan, awesome new weapons, and new features like ladders, turrets, and vehicles. There's also a reboot.

Although, the shooters I play the most are the Doom and Serious Sam games. Particularity with mods. (Brutal Doom, anyone?)

The original version of Shadow Warrior is also free on Steam, although they have a cleaned up source port for, like, $10, and there's also a ground up remake from the same people who made the Rise of the Triad remake.

 

[nyysjan]

This game really belongs in the museum. In particular the level design is atrocious.

In what way?

 

[NortherWolf]

I'm not sure, but I sometimes get the feeling that this game is a very American thing. I remember me and my friends trying it out back when it was new, laughing at the juvenile shit and then promptly uninstalling it and playing Doom 2 instead. Even back then it felt like a really stupid and silly joke, and one that didn't really work. So, good review. (and very much boringly predictable responses.)

 

[Amir Kondori]

Of all the classic shooters, I enjoy Duke 3D the most. The weapons are unique, and the levels have this "real" feeling, unlike the abstract layouts in Doom. That said, the sexualized pod women begging to be killed? Yeah, that's a huge dose of creepy dark that totally clashes with the general badass tone.

No its not. It was an homage to Aliens, where the colonist woman in the film asks Ripley to "kill me". It didn't clash with the tone, it fit right in. The original Duke3d was all about crass 80's scifi action, including the "R" moments like strippers and adult film posters.

Duke3d was an awesome shooter that was pretty revolutionary when it launched, not because of its gameplay, which was on par with Doom certainly, but because it had a fun vibe with lots of in game jokes and unique and sometimes funny weapons that was fun in a way Doom wasn't.

With mouse look the standard now it is hard to get back into, but this review really downplays a game that was kind of ground breaking for what it did to set a fun, humorous tone.

 

[Nurb]

The sexualization was part of the satire of 80's sci-fi schlock, which always included hot women, it's very much a callback to the Heavy Metal stories of both the movie and magazine (and aliens of cours).

This "wrong regardless of context" stuff has really screwed with people lately, it's obvious people are playing while worrying some angry tumblr activist is peeking over thier shoulder

 

[Fordo]

Really wished we could have touched more on multiplayer.

My friends and I found this game installed on all the comp-sci computers at my high school in 2003. Instead of learning about loops, classes, instantiation, we spent class blowing up each other on huge multiplayer bouts. I am now a programmer. This game is like mario teaches typing but for programming.

 

[antidonkey]

This game makes me feel old. I was 20 when it was released. Never did play it myself but saw a lot of the game thanks to a friend having it. It look fun but something about it never appealed to me enough to purchase it. Perhaps GoG will rescue me from that but it won't be anytime soon. Not as long as steam keeps taking my money.

 

[Baralak]

This game makes me feel old. I was 20 when it was released. Never did play it myself but saw a lot of the game thanks to a friend having it. It look fun but something about it never appealed to me enough to purchase it. Perhaps GoG will rescue me from that but it won't be anytime soon. Not as long as steam keeps taking my money.

Steam has it, too. Look up Duke Nukem 3d: Megaton Edition

 

[Trikeen]

Hey guys, you know who's in the news again? 3D Realms! Yeah, I know right?? Hey- everybody like Duke Nukem 3D, right? Well what if i write a review about it where i say it 'was' good but go on about how sexist and crude it is! That way, we acknowledge it's quality so we can safely debunk any accusations of bias, we seem hip to the 'political correctness' types, AND we cash in on the buzz?!


CA-CHING!






Seriously, cut me a break. I don't know when it became so goddamn trendy to rip on something old that people like, but this is nothing if not an attempt to grab traffic due to Duke being in the news again. I expect better from the Escapist.

 

[Darxide]

I know it's an older post, but hey, I missed it the first time around. I just installed DN3D after getting it from GOG back during the "Luck of the Irish" sale around St. Patrick's day. I have to say, it's almost every bit as awesome as I remember it being. Maybe it's because I was 16 when it first released, but this game has not lost much of it's charm.

I had to install eduke32 just because my muscle memory is firmly set with today's FPS controls and I just could not adapt to the classic controls, but beyond that it's still a great experience. Duke's ultra cheesy one-liners still make me grin and his (very clearly) self-parody chauvinism is equally humorous as well.

Honestly, I can't believe just how well this game held up. After I finished the first episode I installed one of the HD resource packs. You know, the one with real enemy models and not the 2D cardboard cutout sprites and it was glorious. If the game were released today on a modern FPS engine I think it would be just as successful as it was almost 20 years ago.