In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It's not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.
There's a feeling among some fans of Duke Nukem that anyone who dares to give a bad review to a Duke title simply doesn't understand what the game is trying to do. We need to relax, goes the argument, relax enough to laugh at the rampant misogyny and hateful stereotypes on display throughout the game. If a review suggests that it's not funny simply to hear someone use dirty words, that's the reviewer's failing, not an issue with the game. Any hint that constant jokes about penis size aren't the height of comedy? The reviewer must not have a sense of humor.
The fans are wrong. One can laugh at jokes about men and women, and there's nothing wrong with being risque, but Duke is thoughtless, backwards, and belligerent. Duke Nukem Forever is the kind of game where you find a pack of cigarettes whose cover shows a mustached man wearing leather—and they're called "Faggs." At some point, matters of personal taste become simple questions of basic decency.
An uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner
The opening of Duke Nukem 3D was iconic. Within seconds of launching the game, you found yourself in exciting combat within an impressively interactive world. You could show a film on the screen inside a movie theater and find hidden rooms and weapons. The game rewarded you for exploring, and the shooting itself was satisfying. The whole experience had little padding to it, and the "mature" elements of the game added flavor to what was already a wonderful game. If impressive level design was the cake, paying strippers was the icing.
But in the Duke Nukem Forever universe, the situation is reversed. The game seems only to exist in order to do things like show a pair of twins performing fellatio on the main character.
And while Duke Nukem 3D threw us into the action within seconds, the new game spends an interminable amount of time asking us to run through the bland environment, learning how to use "Duke Vision" to see in the dark and do everything but fire a gun at a bad guy. What happened to the action-packed game with the ribald humor? This is a title that thinks you're going to be so impressed by seeing the hint of a breast, you'll forget that nothing else is happening.
The first 30 minutes of the game consist of moments where people idolize you—oh, and you can turn the lights on and off. You walk through a museum where relics from the first game are stored, which gives you a hint at how this title was put together. While Gearbox obviously remembered all the neat little details that made Dukesuch a classic, they didn't remember to put those details in a good game. The game is hollow.
And that's before you come to the really offensive bits. Just in case you didn't feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)
The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.
Update: I apologize for the confusion—as was pointed out in the comments, if you wait long enough, they'll explode due to the aliens growing inside them. You may now mock me for getting out my gun to try to escape the game just a little bit quicker.
In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.
This is what passes for humor in the game. It's not racy, it's not funny, and it makes you feel dirty. Every time I put the controller down, I felt the need to rub my hands on my jeans as if the game were making me physically dirty. It's like watching your uncle tell racist jokes at Thanksgiving and praying someone has the guts to tell him to cut it out, but this time it's interactive—and you're the uncle.
An impossible job?
"This is an execution of 3D Realms' design," said Steve Gibson, the VP of Marketing for Gearbox, when I first played the game. "We didn't redesign the game at all. We took their concept, their design, and their ideas, and we finished them. We polished them and executed on them."
(I still remember the moment when Gibson told me that he didn't like the term "toilet humor"; he referred to the jokes in Duke Nukem as "base humor." But when you deal with both urine and feces within seconds of the game's opening, no other term will do.)
Gearbox had an impossible job, and Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford may have been blinded by his love for the character and the classic game. His adoration of Duke has been plain, as has the team's devotion to the original vision for the game, even though the game features ideas and mechanics that feel a decade out of date. Duke Nukem Forever makes more sense if you think of it as something found in a time capsule, not as a new release that is being sold for $60 and is expected to compete with newer, better games.
As for the levels, remember when you could walk around in Duke Nukem 3D, exploring the environments, finding items, and locating the path needed to get ahead? That's over and done with. Duke Nukem Forever is one long corridor. You shoot your way through it, then there's a joke about a penis, then you shoot through another corridor—and then maybe you backtrack!—and then someone says something with curse words in it because that's edgy. With no exploration, no sense of joy at discovering something, there's no real way to forge your own path in the game. It's all point A to point B.
The joke in the image below may have been about Doom and shooters in 2010, but it still fits when talking about Duke Nukem Forever.
Credit to Kotaku, various other sources
It's also not fun to die, only to be faced with a too-long loading time to get back into the action. In fact, the loading times in general are horrendous. When you miss a save point, have to wait a minute or so, then have to play through the same un-fun firefight... you'll want to quit—regardless of how many construction workers are in the next scene discussing how it's okay to "just look" at their aunt's breasts.
During one scene, after you blow up one of the alien pigs, Duke says, "Pork chop sandwiches." Now, I'm a fan of the Internet, so I know what he's referencing, but that's all this is: a reference. There's no joke here. It's like trying to sit through one of those awful parodies like Disaster Movie, where instead of telling a joke, the characters simply re-enact a scene from another movie.
The constant pop culture references in the game don't serve any purpose, and they never made me laugh. The only feeling they stirred in me was that my DVD collection may be too large.
Duke Nukem Forever even features "topical" humor that includes the ability to punch a Christian Bale-like character who is ranting about someone walking through his set. These jokes were stale years ago.
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