Review – Duke Nukem Forever
Duke Nukem Forever makes me very very sad. I almost decided to stop this review right there. I don’t want to sound like a mean guy, or someone that’s negative about everything or anything like that. Well, I may not have much of a choice on this one. Like the rest of you, I waited for the game for twelve long years. I saw the screen shots teasing its existence ten years ago, I saw the fake videos, I got hopes up and dashed over and over as the company behind the game squandered their money. I had high hopes for a game that would let me escape my geeky life for a few hours to be a crass, womanizing, muscle head.
Well, let’s just say my experience hasn’t been quite up to my expectations. I paid big money for the uber version of the game that came with man cave accessories. I installed it the day it finally showed up on my door step. I let Steam do its little patch, and I fired it up like an excited school kid popping Super Mario Bros. into his 8-bit Nintendo… And it locked up.
So I rebooted my computer, double checked my video driver version was up to date, fired it up again… And it locked up. This was starting to make me feel as though I had just dropped $90 on a game I couldn’t even play. I decided perhaps there was another patch to come in from Steam and I wandered off for a couple hours to see if anything else would come in, but nothing did. I started the game and somehow it didn’t lock up. I even managed to get my character out of the bathroom where you start. I watched my computer show me frame rate drops that would make you blush considering the hardware I have. Then it locked up, again.
By now I had figured out a theory. I went into a special driver program and forced the GPU fan to 100% full-time. This time when I started it, it kept on running. Why it overheated my GPU is beyond me considering nothing else I’ve ever thrown at it had any problems. I played it for about three hours straight. During that time, I got about ten cut scenes, I saw the same three sections of the same area twice, I died over and over again as I found my weapons to have almost no power against aliens or pig cops, and I eventually got bored and stopped playing it.
I haven’t played it again since. I’d love to claim this review is based on having experienced the whole game, or at least most of it, but I can’t claim that. The game was hard to play, had no nudity in the portion I played, and the manliest thing that happened was peeing in a urinal. Overall, I really just didn’t have a lot of fun with it and I’d be a bit surprised if I played it again.