The Good: humour, gore, lots of action, awesome level design, a very likable main hero, the awesome interactivity
The Bad: controls take time to accustom with (today), graphics and sound suck (again, from a today's technical quality standpoint, not by design)
Duke 3D is one of the best satires of our times.
I don't know about you, but I certainly find a lot of things that make fun of... well, of America. Pig Cops, looking like the buffed, donut-eating good ol' LA cops you see in the movies. Strippers. A clicheed LA. Many corny lines straight out of corny movies. And a lot of stereotypes.
Our hero, Duke, is the stereotype of the American Hero. He's big, bulky, with perfect teeth, he has a deep voice, blond hair, he smokes, he blows the crap out of the enemy with a smile, saying funny and cheesy one-liners, and women love him. Oh and he has sunglasses too.
The plot is like this: aliens attack earth, ruining Duke's vacation. So he drops by in LA to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And he's all out of gum.
The aliens come in more flavours, some ripped from movies like Alien (the game is some kind of parody, so don't get nuts about this). They're all fun to play against, and that's a big thing for a game! They look nice even today (I mean the design), they still sound nice... It's fun to play against them.
The thing is, for a gamer in the year of 2008 is HARD to accustom to 1996's controls. So for who starts playing now, it kinda sucks.
But learn the controls (yes, you can modify them, but I'll be damned, it becomes even harder because the engine is not true 3D, despite the name, so you screw up the view!), and you'll have a lot of fun. That is, if you do not moan about the graphics and sound. Funny fact: people always ask wtf is wrong with Duke's voice in the new teaser; the answer: in 1996 it was badly compressed. Now it's HD.
Duke 3D is a shooter with easy puzzle elements. Many require finding keys (yes, blue, red and yellow keys) and/or finding the correct button combination. The puzzles are a welcome break from the action, which is badass, fast and furious.
You have a set of really fun to use weapons - even the pistol is fun! Some weapons are instant clas.sics, like the shrink-gun, which can shrink you too if you are not careful, or the three-barreled machine gun. My favourite: the Devastator. The name says it all. An awesome weapon is the mighty foot - Duke's foot, that is - , which is best used for crushing the shrunken enemies, but it's just as useful as the foot in Dark Messiah. Seems that people lost their old-school-fun sense, since they are bashing Dark Messiah for having the foot as a weapon... So, you have a big arsenal to provoke...
Yeah, ummm... gore. Holy hell, there's a lot of gore. It's old-school, which automatically means NO PREJUDICES. You kick ass, and you leave trails. Enemies explode, they literally got blown to bits, they have awesome death animations (nothing like an alien holding his neck with the blood gurgling from it... yeah...).
It's mainly a straight-forward shooter with no AI, but, just like Quake, Blood and other awesome shooters of the time, it's pretty much a level-design manifesto. All the levels are creatively designed and well balanced, from a gameplay standpoint. Visually, they are equaly nice (if you don't mind 16-bit colour). You fight on the streets of LA, inside a cinema, a sex-shop, in a flooded city, in office buildings, and in space.
Many times you feel just like in an action movie (some levels are reminiscent of Escape from LA, for example, and there's even an in-game joke about that), and there are lots of cinematic moments - like those in Prey or even Call of Duty - , such as a ship suddenly crashing in the space station you're in. Everything is nicely detailed, and more interactive than some modern games! That's just a proof of the attention and care the designers had. You can play pool, you can destroy many objects (it's one of the first games with destructible environments, the main architecture isn't destructible apart from scripted events, but many things are), you give money to strippers to see their breasts:P, you use the toilet, you sing on the microphone ("Born To Be Wiiillllddd!")... damn, it's awesome!
And there are many, many, MANY jokes. Some are visual: the aliens use the crapper, or naked women „stickified" in alien cocoons ask you to kill them in a manner ripped off straight from Aliens. And the alien eggs with their larvae are epic rip-offs. It's fun:) Most jokes are spoken by Duke himself: „And I thought 10 guns was hard to carry!"
So, if you ain't no graphics whore and don't mind the awkward controls (I played this when it was still hot, so my opinion on the awesomeness is... one could say biased), you'll have fun. I've tried it recently and I still liked it a lot, although I had problems with the controls for an hour or so.
Anyway, it's still worth trying just to check out what exactly is a video game legend.
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