It may be hard to believe, but there was once a time when the phrase "Duke Nukem" didn't conjure up hoary old jokes by would-be Internet comedians who were known to say, "More like Duke Nukem ForNEVER, am I right!?" Well over a decade ago, Duke Nukem was actually relevant, and Duke Nukem 3D was a creative, tongue-in-cheek alternative to id's Doom series, the aesthetic of which could only come from people who read Spawn unironically. I might have been a 14 year-old boy back when 3D came out in 1996, but I was savvy enough to recognize that Duke's over-the-top masculinity was an insincere, tongue-in-cheek take on action heroes, a la The Simpsons' McBain. The question here is, will today's 14 year-olds--who weren't even multi-celled organisms during the original release of Duke Nukem 3D--get the joke? And will anyone else care?
All of this Nukem news is relevant because tomorrow the game will be available on the XBox Live Marketplace for the pauperly sum of 800 Microsoft Points. That's a tiny price for what amounts to a lot of game, but I'm not here to tell you about the 360's faaabulous deals. In fact, I'm not even going to buy the game; my old CD still works fine, and programs like EDuke ensure that the original files I once played on my Pentium 133 will work long into the future. The important thing to think about here is how Duke Nukem 3D was once innovative and unique; this is very hard to imagine after the franchise was left to fester with increasingly awful console ports and reimaginings, but it's true.
Though it would soon be beaten mercilessly by Quake six short months later, Duke Nukem 3D was the closest you could get to 3D without actually being 3D; yep, the game--made with the flexible, yet crashy, BUILD engine--was in that creepy, psuedo-3D world, but Duke's levels actually took advantage of the Y axis by forcing you to explore high and low on foot or jetpack (and hopefully you wouldn't vomit by looking at what was then known as a "skybox"). And with each set of levels taking place in a completely different environment, 3D was much more varied than its counterparts; it can be said that all of the best stuff in Duke was completely front-loaded, but even so, it still existed. Shooting pool balls, flushing toilets, running film projectors, tipping strippers, breaking fire hydrants and looking at surveillance camera footage might have all been irrelevant to the actual game, but 3d Realms succeeded in making a world much more detailed and fun than the dreary Doom series.
Of course, we also have Duke's variety of goofy weapons, and the equally-goofy enemies, which may or may not come with attached social commentary (the alien cops are pig-people). There's really too much to talk about, so at the risk of running this into another blog post, I'll stop. But reflecting upon Duke Nukem 3D, I can't stop thinking about how tragic it is that 3D Realms has never been able to get their shit together for a real sequel. Looking at how much Duke added to the FPS genre, you have to wonder if Duke Nukem Forever would have had the same innovative impact had it hit store shelves back in 2001 or whenever the hell it was first meant to be released. Whatever the case, it could be a good thing that a new generation is being introduced to Duke; but they'll have to come to old grandpa Bob to find out why the game once blew our minds as I tell them about sitting in freshman study hall reading my own printed-out copy of the BUILD engine user's guide. High school was very fun for me.
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