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First Impressions: Duke Nukem Forever
http://www.rarityguide.com/articles/articles/710/1/First-Impressions-Duke-Nukem-Forever/Page1.html
By Douglas Shepard (Editor in Chief, RarityGuide.com)
Published on 06/5/2011
 
After 14 years of development Duke Nukem Forever comes to grace us mere mortals. Here is a quick summary of the history and some insight into the demo that was recently released.

First Impressions – Duke Nukem Forever

For something like that, it is important to start with the history of the matter. When I was a kid there were a number of new games that showed up on the market: Doom, Quake, Wolfenstien, and Duke Nukem 3D. Now, there were many different things about Duke Nukem from any other shooter. It wasn't the prettiest but the weapons, the jet pack, the women, the one-liners, crass and tasteless humor, the multiplayer and the maps made that game rock. It broke away from a number of conventions still found in first person shooters today that can be traced to the earliest of them. Now over a decade ago, a sequel beyond all sequels was promised to us in the form of Duke Nukem Forever back in 1997. Then, in May of 2009, the game was pronounced dead. Many fans simply breathed a sigh of relief that their beloved gaming icon had finally been laid to rest. Some were angry, some were sad and others just accepted their lot and went onto to another FPS. Come September 2010, 2K games announces that it has acquired the game Duke Nukem Forever and put it into development with Gearbox Software. The game was originally announced for May 6th, 2011 but suffered one bump to June 14th in the US and June 10th internationally. No one was happy about that but a subsequent announcement it more tolerable, that the demo would be released on June 4th. With that date past and the demo out, it was time for the public to finally get their hands on Duke Nukem Forever, the most infamous vaporware game known.

The demo proved to be something different for sure. Starting you off in a bathroom stall, it's clear you can relieve yourself to get things started right for Duke Nukem. After leaving the bathroom you see three men plotting their attack on a big alien. Their plan, Operation ****block had them flanking the big bad monster. As Duke you can draw and add to this plan and receive praise for it. This time is well spent with you just learning about the controls as this game hasn't seen the light of day in over a decade. The game let's you find your feet then face off against a very big cyclops with rocket launchers. You find yourself strafing and circling this guy until he goes down. Still, at the end of the fight you find yourself with his eyeball that you can then kick a field goal with. If there's a better way to end a fight, we'll see it in this game. When that part was all over, it cut to Duke, a custom Duke Nukem controller and busty blonde twins. He comments on how long the game took to make himself but it was alright.

Following that, the scene changed you find Duke driving his monster truck with aliens dropping in on you. Nothing wrong with making ham and bacon strips with tire treads. Here you drive and jump a ravine before running out of game. After that, you need to square off against a number of pigs. I found climbing up the ladder onto the watchtower got me a handy weapon that could one shot kill those suckers and get some good one-liners from the Duke. While this part did not culminate in the same awesome ending, it gave everyone a chance to try a number of different weapons, including the infamous shrink ray gun. It did offer some great moments, like shooting down an alien ship with a little RPG or saving the nearby and extremely volatile buildings to shoot a missle at them. More running around had me riding in mine carts to find gas for the monster truck while fending off little jumpy alien heads. Between the shotgun for the annoying little guys and the ripper for everything else, nothing was standing in Duke's way.

After over a decade of waiting, it's so strange to say that Duke Nukem Forever is honestly coming out. There are times disbelief remains but then I see a poster for it on the bus, the boxes at GameStop and the marketing all over the place. Even the most skeptical of gamers must be feeling something of the anticipation here. This is something I did not think I would seriously be saying at any point in my life, Duke Nukem Forever is coming out.