Duke Nukem Forever

After 14 years, what's another couple of weeks to wait for my review of Duke Nukem Forever at thephoenix.com? I tried something a little different this time, writing as a credulous fanboy in an alternate universe in which DNF was released more or less on time. I think it's pretty funny, but I'm never the best judge of my own jokes.

As it turns out, I may not be the best judge of a game's quality, either, because I honestly thought Duke Nukem Forever was all right. It's not spectacular, it's definitely dated, and it displays some major lapses in judgment -- but, so help me, it's a lot of fun in places, too. Yet I've rarely seen such negative reviews for a major release. Maybe seeing the Metacritic scores before I played the game put me in a forgiving mood. But I'd definitely take this over a more technically competent but entirely soulless shooter like Killzone 3. Despite all its problems, it's got a spark.

Not that things started off all that well. I was prepared to hate it as much as anybody when, in the first few minutes of the game, I fumbled around with a white board, first scrawling a bunch of nonsense and then erasing the whole board, while all the while the soldiers around me talked about what a genius I was. Even though that was part of a quasi-dream sequence, in the game's reality, it still seemed clear that Duke was as exalted by others as he was in his own mind.

A little bit later, I managed to scratch out the word "Duke" in a book for a breathless fan, who didn't seem to notice that my handwriting looked like that of an illiterate child with palsy. Then, as I walked away from the fan and his father, I heard the dad remark, "I thought he'd be taller."

Finally, I thought. The biggest problem with the textual reality of Duke Nukem Forever is that everyone else seems to think Duke is as great as he does. That makes it hard to buy any claims that the character or the game is satirical. To see his bravado punctured, even a bit, was welcome. Then it rarely happened again. But my favorite parts of the game tended to be those which seemed aware that Duke was not an admirable character.

At a few separate points, Duke is shrunken to a tiny size, and still spouts tough-guy bullshit with a voice that sounds like he's been inhaling helium. This is legtimately funny, and also makes for some of the most fun parts to play. One standout scene was a platforming sequence through a kitchen, which worked as a spatial puzzle and also included some inspired twists, such as when Duke had to hop from one hamburger bun to the next in order to avoid being burned on a griddle. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but this struck me as inspired.

Actually, I know I'm easily impressed, because much of Duke's dudebro humor worked for me, too. Not all of it, but it turns out that I am the sort of cro-magnon who is legitimately entertained by seeing a button prompt labeled HUMILIATE. I laughed several times during Duke Nukem Forever. I laughed when it made reference to other games. (My favorites quips, in ascending order: "Power armor is for pussies!" while looking at Spartan gear; "I hate Valve puzzles!" while futzing around with steam pipes; "I was expecting a monkey!" after climbing a staircase and killing the pig that was throwing barrels at me the whole way up.) Most jokes miss the mark, but that's not a problem unique to this game.

(For what it's worth, though, I laughed more during the second chapter of Transformers: Dark of the Moon than during the entirety of Duke Nukem Forever.)

Duke Nukem Forever makes more sense, as a game and as a cautionary tale, when you realize that the whole thing is 3D Realms' attempt to make Half-Life. The point of Duke 3D was to take what worked about Doom and give it an attitude, and the point of Duke Forever is to do the same for Half-Life. Yes, it is more than a decade too late, and this isn't the only game that has failed to emulate Half-Life's potent blend of storytelling and encounter design. Playing Duke Nukem Forever, you can start to understand why Broussard and company were never able to finish. Their standards are evident in certain scenes, which makes their failure to meet those standards elsewhere even more glaring.

Oh well. I am still glad that this chapter of gaming history has been closed. If nothing else, maybe Duke Nukem Forever clears the decks for a better Duke in the future.

Why I'll play Duke Nukem Forever

On Twitter, Rich Clark linked to a Eurogamer interview with Randy Pitchford that is like catnip for people who enjoy reading between the lines. Pitchford makes several pronouncements, one of which is that the launch of Duke Nukem Forever is the most important event in the history of games, and another of which is that reviewers are going to give it unfairly low scores, because reviewers are petty. Beneath his bluster, which includes comparing DNF to Half-Life 2, he sounds like a man who knows that his game is in for a drubbing. If you watch the launch trailer, you can see why. It looks pretty bad.

Maybe DNF isn't bad. Maybe it's as great as Pitchford says it is. I haven't played it, so I have no idea. But I have heard a lot of people say they refuse to play the game. Mostly, they don't want to play a game that perpetuates a culture of misogyny, or to financially support a company that profits from that culture. This is valid. I would not try to talk anybody out of such an opinion. In my own mind, there could be a distinction between how good the game is, and how offensive its content might be, but that is likely thanks to my privileged position: even if I don't find the joke funny, I'm not the butt of it.

Still, I feel as though I am making an exception in this case. Were this a completely new IP, I probably would not play it based on what I know about it -- at least, I would not seek it out -- but I can't imagine not playing Duke Nukem Forever. Why?

The simple answer is legacy. Duke Nukem 3D was a seminal game. It's a part of my DNA, just as much as Contra, Mega Man 2, and Super Mario Bros. I suspect I am not alone in this.

Fifteen years on, it's easy to focus on what was crude about Duke 3D. Scat humor, gyrating strippers, dick jokes -- Duke 3D was as lowbrow as it gets. I was 14 when it came out, which put me smack in the middle of the target audience. I'd like to say that I enjoyed the game in spite of its excesses, but if I'm to be honest, I really did spend a disproportionate amount of my playtime giving dollar bills to strippers and peeing in urinals.

But adolescent content isn't the totality of Duke's legacy. You cannot minimize what Duke Nukem 3D accomplished for video games. Not only was it technologically advanced for its time, its gameplay philosophy was one that that some games still struggle with -- that the world should feel real. Light switches should work. Toilets should flush. Glass should break when you shoot it. Fifteen years later, we're still playing games where a rocket launcher doesn't even make a dent in the side of a building. Duke 3D had higher ambitions.

In a time when online play still meant connecting directly between two modems*, Duke 3D brought unprecedented depth to the multiplayer experience. When we played Duke, we leaped out of windows on jetpacks. We circled around each other through shortcuts. We shrank one another and set traps. This was far beyond the experience of Doom, in which we ran around some rooms real fast and shot at each other. As simple-minded as the story and the characters were, they inhabited a sophisticated game.

Duke 3D was a great game, and an important one. It also exemplified the culture that produced it. Similar to how a modern filmgoer can appreciate the craft and artistry of Birth of a Nation while cringing at its naked racism, a modern gamer should be able to accept Duke 3D on its own terms. When most gamers really were teenaged boys and 20-something men, and "extreme" was the buzzword, Duke Nukem captured the zeitgeist. More to the point: if you had skipped out on Duke 3D in its time, your reasoning may have been sound, but you would have missed out on some incredible new things.

Of course, we're not talking about a relic anymore. We're talking about a new game (albeit one that seems to have slipped through a wormhole from another place and time, like the Romulan ship appearing at the beginning of the Star Trek reboot), and it should be judged by 2011 standards. If Birth of a Nation were made today, nobody would give a shit about how great its cross-cutting is, and when Duke Nukem Forever comes out in a week and a half, nobody will care if it is competent in ways that every other contemporary FPS is competent. It has to be good for 2011, not for 1997 or 2001 or whenever else it was supposed to come out.

So I guess Pitchford does have a point. It is impossible for anyone steeped in gaming culture to ignore DNF's protracted development. When Chuck Klosterman reviewed the Guns 'n' Roses album Chinese Democracy, which followed a similar trajectory, he started it by saying:

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom?

Swap out three words in the first sentence and you could just as easily be talking about DNF. So what is the answer to Klosterman's last question? If Duke Nukem Forever is half as revolutionary for its time as Duke 3D was, then it will get terrific reviews regardless of content. If it is the perfected version of George Broussard's vision circa 1997, ignoring the intervening decade and a half of progress, then, sure, it probably won't get very good scores. Why should it be any other way?

Duke Nukem Forever may be an embarrassment. It may be the unlikeliest comeback story ever told in gaming. It probably is a bit of both. I won't know until I play it. And I have to know.

*Unless you were subscribed to the Total Entertainment Network!

Friday afternoon tidbits

I've had a two-week layoff from reviewing games, and in that time I have played... nothing. Didn't pick up an old favorite, or finish off something that had been lingering. Haven't even turned on a console. Weird. But I've still been reading lots of blogs!

-There were a couple of good editorials at Game|Life this week. Earnest Cavalli said good riddance to Duke Nukem, calling him a relic with no place in 2009. It's true that Duke is an anachronism today, but it's possible that a solidly executed Duke Nukem Forever would have made that seem like a good thing. After all, who doesn't get sucked into watching Commando on AMC every time it's on? Even though the character might still have his place, it's probably for the best that we close the book on Duke Nukem, forever. This game would have had too much baggage, regardless of how it turned out.

(As an aside: Remember when Daikatana was an oft-delayed, much-maligned punchline? It's still got nothing on DNF, right?)

-Also at Game|Life, Chris Kohler decried the looming possibility of an English-only audio track for Final Fantasy XIII. Although I think it would be nice for players to have the option of Japanese audio, I disagree with his premise. Movies and games are not a fair comparison when discussing the merits of dubbing and subtitles. The reason for this is simple: all video games are dubbed.

Sure, I'd rather watch a live-action movie in the original language, with the voices belonging to the actors onscreen. It's jarring when the movement of someone's lips don't match the words coming out of their mouth. And, quite often, inferior actors are used for the voiceover. In a film, the dialogue, the actor's voice, and his movements are equal parts of the performance. You can't reconstitute it from its many parts and make it work. I doubt anyone would argue that.

But in the majority of animated films and video games, the voice actor in the studio is providing only one element of the performance, whether he's the "original" performer or not. He's not doing motion-capture in most cases, nor is the movement of the characters' mouths so precise that you can tell when the lip-synching fails. There is no inherent drawback to dubbing animated characters. The process for giving them voice is exactly the same. (It may be the case that the Japanese voice actors are better than their American counterparts, but that's confusing the issue. The solution to that problem would be to hire better American actors.)

Kohler's larger point about not scrubbing the "cultural odor" from the Japanese-made game is one that I sympathize with a little more, but that's not the reality of the market. If Square Enix wants to sell millions of copies of Final Fantasy XIII to Western audiences, they have no choice. Maybe it's a shame, but you may as well complain about the sun always coming up in the East.

-Michael Abbott makes a great point about what video games are really sending the wrong messages to kids. Certain culture warriors get hung up on depictions of violence, sex, and profanity in games, but one thing they never seem to do is consider the context. Often, violent games make an effort not to reward indiscriminate bloodshed. Even the notorious Grand Theft Auto series sends the cops after you when you break the law. Believe me, I'm not giving a pass to GTA or anybody else, but at least they implement some kind of recognizable morality system in their games (usually too simplistic a one, in fact).

Marketing games specifically to kids that emphasize rabid consumerism, materialism, and social climbing -- that's just as bad. Now, I don't think playing a first-person shooter will make a kid shoot up his school, and I don't think playing Style Up for Prom will make a kid max out her parents' credit cards. But I've called for everyone, from publishers to players, to take the messages of their games more seriously, and what's bad about the games Michael mentions is how innocuous they seem to be. Lots of parents look at Grand Theft Auto and say, "Not appropriate for my kid." What parent would say the same about these?

-Finally, Gary Hodges bids farewell to Joystick Division, and, apparently, to freelance game reviews. Can't say I blame him. It's very hard to do this for the love of the game, especially when there's so much about the game that makes it hard to love. In his reviews for Village Voice Media, and his posts on JD, Gary's always shown thoughtfulness, integrity, and a real ability to get to the core of a game in just a few words. We'll miss him.

Friday afternoon tidbits

Let's hit the links before the weekend.

-At Gamasutra, Ian Fisch details 10 game design pitfalls. It seems to me that almost everything he lists comes down to the same lesson: playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. I was also interested in pitfall number 8, "Entering production without something fun." Consider how much fun it is to jump from building to building in Crackdown, or how Horde mode was the way to play Gears 2. If a game doesn't absolutely nail one core mechanic, it doesn't matter what else the developers add to it.

-So, not a day after I do a faceplant trying to tell the world that PC gaming is broken, I see that Electronic Arts thinks the PC is the biggest platform of all, thanks to digital distribution. The lesson, as always: I'm an idiot. Let's just move on.

-Speaking of which, if you want to read somebody who knows what he's talking about, Ed Borden explains why digital convergence is a myth. His core observation: we thought that PCs would take on the functionality of the rest of our consumer electronics, but instead, the rest of our consumer electronics have taken on the functionality of our PCs. And that might be the worst possible news for Microsoft.

-I don't have anything to add to reports of 3D Realms' closure, but it strikes me as huge news all the same. Somehow, that this would be the final word written on Duke Nukem Forever -- that it would go out not with a bang, but a whimper -- is more tragic and more appropriate than any ending I could have imagined. I'd been prepared for anything from a monumental success to a Daikatana-level catastrophe. But I still thought they'd eventually release something. As is usually the case, if you want the smartest take on an important story, read what Jeremy Parish has to say.

-Ben Fritz leaves the Cut Scene for the Los Angeles Times. He'll continue to do great work no matter what he covers, but I hope they're planning to put him on the games beat at least part time.

-Still trying to summon outrage about major league baseball players using performance enhancing drugs. Frankly, there's no one who would surprise me at this point. And if everyone's doing it, then it's a level playing field. This is the world we live in.

He's totally in my face!

I've gone back and forth about whether I should opine about that Duke Nukem Forever teaser. On one hand, what is there to say about it? DNF the biggest joke in videogame history, and the release of a minute-long video that doesn't seem to show any gameplay hardly inspires confidence. But there was one major difference between my reaction to this teaser and to previous Duke news: I've completely lost interest.

I don't mean I've lost interest in the game itself, because that ship sailed long ago. I mean the character himself is dead to me. Time has clearly passed Duke Nukem by. It's a little hard to watch. This video is a reminder that Duke is a relic from an era in which "attitude" was everything, and games really were nothing more than masturbatory macho fantasies. (Okay, I'm generalizing a bit.) Bruce Willis makeover or no, Duke Nukem is basically Poochie the Dog at this point.

Really, what response was 3D Realms expecting from this video? "Whoa, Duke is working out and smoking a cigar at the same time? He just doesn't give a fuck!" It's embarrassing. The line at the end about dropping bricks in an alien toilet only seals the deal. Poop jokes? Really? We're on poop jokes in the year 2007?

This guy doesn't care whose toes he steps on!