LAS VEGAS — Most first-person shooters start with a massive battle to get the player’s heart racing, something that sets the tone for what’s to come. Duke Nukem Forever opens with the main character relieving himself in a urinal.
“This is taking forever,” he grumbles midstream. You can say that again, Duke.
Duke Nukem Forever is the story of a steroid-popping, booze-guzzling misogynist jackass who saves the world from an alien invasion. It is also the most infamous unreleased videogame in the history of the medium.
Announced in 1997, Duke Nukem Forever went through more than a decade of development hell as creator 3D Realms constantly scrapped and rebuilt the game. In 2010, following the shutdown of 3D Realms’ internal studio, Gearbox Studios bought the rights to Duke and said it would finish the game by the middle of 2011.
This time, it looks like only an actual alien invasion could keep Duke Nukem Forever from its May 3 release date for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.
2K Games invited journalists to play the first 90 minutes of the game Tuesday at the Deja Vu Erotic Ultra Lounge in Las Vegas. For any other game preview, a strip club would have been a ludicrous choice of venue. But for Duke Nukem Forever — an unapologetic celebration of raunch, classlessness and poor life decisions — there could be no better setting. Custom-made neon signs over the entrance rechristened the club “Duke Nukem’s Titty City” for the day.
Standing atop a pole-dancing platform, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford prepped us for “a real, honest look” at the game that would go deeper than the brief Duke demo at Penny Arcade Expo last year. After my first legitimate hands-on experience with the title, it’s clear that — for better or worse — Duke Nukem Forever plays like a videogame conceived in 1997.
Duke Nukem Forever bucks this conventional wisdom. 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.
In fact, for the first hour of the game, it seems like Duke Nukem Forever wants you to do anything but shoot aliens. 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.
Duke is not the sort of personality-free camera-on-a-stick that serves as the protagonist of many first-person shooters. And Duke’s not a stand-in for you.
He’s Duke. You’re just along for the ride.
So before you start blowing things up, you live the life, wandering as Duke through the 69th-floor penthouse of his Vegas complex. You can play his pool table and pinball machine. You can bench-press 600 pounds. You can sign an autograph for a young fan. You can fire one off in the men’s room, then admire yourself in the mirror.
To get you into the role, the game rewards you for accomplishing what it calls “Duke-like actions” in the game world. Each of these little comedy bits gives a permanent boost to Duke’s “ego,” or health meter.
Even after all this, the shooting doesn’t really begin in earnest until you’ve played through more wacky segments. At one point, an alien poison shrinks Duke down to action-figure size. (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. This goes on for at least 15 minutes.
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. Pitchford says Duke will take 16 to 17 hours to play, about twice the length of modern shooters.
While Duke Nukem Forever righteously recalls the old days of fun shooters that didn’t take themselves too seriously, it also looks pretty dated.
Outside the Vegas club where I played the Duke demo, I ran into Andy Eddy, an editor at Best Buy’s @Gamer magazine who has been writing about games since the 1980s. 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.
“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. “Whereas at that time, everybody else was using sprites, so if you walked around something, it still looked like it was facing you the whole time.”
Those graphics, ahead of their time more than a decade ago, will not turn heads in 2011. Duke does love to admire himself in the mirror, but he doesn’t look nearly as good as he thinks he does. A combination of so-so reflection effects and harsh, jagged edges on all the in-game objects make the wisecracking tough guy look something like a Lego sculpture. (We tried the Xbox 360 version of the game, which does not look nearly as good as the high-resolution screenshots, provided by 2K Games, in the gallery at the top of this page.)
As a throwback to the carefree, experimental days of yore, Duke Nukem Forever will stand apart from the super-serious, trimmed-down shooters of today. But had it shipped anything close to on time, it would have been significantly more impressive. Instead, playing Duke feels like unearthing an unreleased relic from the past.
To Duke’s credit, he makes no bones about it: He’s late to his own party and doesn’t give a damn.
Screenshots courtesy 2K Games.
