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Ars Technica Review Slams Duke Nukem Forever
Kethinov writes "Ars Technica writes one of their most negative reviews of a game in a long time, referring to Duke Nukem Forever as 'barely playable' and 'one of the worst games from a major studio in quite some time. The jokes border on hateful. The graphics are a blurry mess. The shooting is unsatisfying.' Their verdict? Skip this one."
Really? Was there any doubt?
I could tell they were appealing to the lowest common denominator when they released a trailer showing Duke throwing his own feces. One of the dumbest things I ever heard of in a game, automatically made me lose all interest. I figured if they wasted time implementing something like that, the rest of the game would probably be just as dumb.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
are pretty hard to overcome...
Forget your pre-conceived notions of what Duke Nukem "should" be and just play it.
That's my plan, anyway.
If I find I don't like it, then I'll move on to another game.
Afterall, it isn't like it's the first game that didn't live up to the hype...
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
In some sort of bizzaro world fashion the movie would probably turn out awesome.
Because it's just not that funny. It's the kind of pun that you'd think was hilarious when you were 12, and then you'd either grow up, or you'd go on to make Duke Nukem Forever. Compare the humour in DNF with Duke3D or DN:MP, which had lines like 'guns don't kill mutants, I kill mutants.' Manhattan Project managed the same sort of cliche'd over-the-top macho action figure satire, but was actually fun and made you laugh (and I'm not saying that from the perspective of nostalgia: I played it for the first time over Christmas). It sounds like DNF doesn't, it just makes Duke Nukem sound like a dick.
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I see comments below a lot of the reviews on the major sites defending the game, claiming that the reviewers are holding it up to unfair standards due to its development time.
PCGAMER gave it an 80%, giving it leniency for the years of development. If a car was 14 years in a development and came out at full price and didnt have an engine then I cant give it leniency when it cant compete with anything else on the market.
I hadn't spotted the PCGAMER review. That was a good, decent thing they did there, giving DNF 80%. They've sent out a nice clear signal that I should absolutely never let any of their reviews factor into a purchasing decision. Good of them to give me a warning like that, wasn't it? Refreshingly honest, in a curious way.
This is not an 80% game. Five years ago, it might just about have been a 50% game. In fact, even that's generous. Resistance: Fall of Man is a vaguely similar fps which launched with the PS3 around 5 years ago and it is infinitely superior to DNF in every conceivable way.
Divorce?
I'm the last person who should be defending this game as I've been taking the piss out of it for 5 years. I've never been a fanboy of the sequel, never did I have confidence it would ever deliver anything at all. I liked the original as a teenager but that's about it.
Regardless though, I've nearly finished the game (Australia, we got it 4 days early) and I can say if you liked the original game, this is a fantastic melding of the original and modern day gameplay. This game is getting slammed far far too excessively.
I guess it was to be expected - but I personally went in expecting garbage and got a half decent game. It's certainly better than diluted trash like Crysis 2.
The game is a little obnoxious for the PC types but you know that going in to it, you wouldn't go to see Fast and the Furious 5 to expect high quality cinema. This game is trashy, dumb - yet quite fun, it's a guilty pleasure for my childish side and honestly the core gameplay itself? It's really fairly decent.
The graphics while not top of the line (quite bad in spots) are also quite GOOD in other places, several scenes I've been outright surprised at how good they are.
If you played the original game and you're in the 27 -> 45 age group with any sense of nostalgia, try it out with an open mind. Don't expect some thick storyline, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I know I was.
P.S no it's not perfect, some scenes are frustrating in difficulty or not funny - but all games have low spots, overall, it's not even 1/3 as bad as some of these people are saying.
They were mainly bitching because the jokes weren't funny and it's true. Just because a joke is offensive does not automatically make it funny nor when someone finds that offensive joke to be unfunny it means they are hypersensitive. It can truly be possible for offensive jokes to just purely be unfunny and that's unfortunately how the jokes are in DNF.
Your argument(and SMBC's) on offensiveness is correct in a narrowly specific way; but much less so in a contextually useful one:
Obviously, what different people take offense at varies; but, at a population level, you can categorize and quantify to a reasonably useful extent. At that point, you can, in fact, come up with an "offensiveness" metric relative to a given assumed audience for something. If your assumed audience is sufficiently broad, you can omit specific mention of the assumed audience and let context carry the load for you. There is certainly room for rhetorical chicanery, as with many ambiguous areas of natural language; but that doesn't equate to meaninglessness.
Saying "thing X is offensive" is somewhat analogous to saying "humans are bipedal". In strict point of fact, there are counterexamples. People exist with zero, one, very occasionally more than two, legs and there are a few specimens who walk on all fours. Implicitly, we are treating those as anomalies outside the universe of discourse when we say that. Similarly, there are almost certainly who find gunning down alien-rape victims as they plead inoffensive. However, the reviewer(correctly or not) is implicitly arguing that they are an anomaly among the audience of the review. Now, as noted, "offensiveness" leaves room for chicanery, and you can also make "thing X is offensive" statements that implicitly argue for a highly unrealistic audience sample; but that just makes you wrong or dishonest, rather than "offensiveness" as a metric meaningless.
This is what happens when you get big corporations running the show. and of course, Hollywoodizing crap. Let's make it shiny and expensive, but not give any value. (it's like going from the great black & white movies, to the trashy color movies that came out).
You do realize that those "great" black & white movies were made by Hollywood, right? And there were many terrible black and white films. This sounds like the same nonsense when people were whining about how "talkies" were ruining the film industry.
There is ONE huge problem with Duke Nukem Forever and nobody seems to get it.
What is a PC game done being reviewed on a console?
Lots of weapons? Do you remember how you selected them? That is right with the row of number keys. Easy and fast to select a weapon. Can't do that on the console. THAT is why Halo has a two gun limit, because the x-box controller lacks a means to very quickly switch weapons.
Same with the inventory items, you can't use half a dozen inventory items on a console, so they limit it.
Duke Nukem Forever just shows just what consoles have removed from games. Checkpoints? For the Duke? That nobody evens cries out about this horrow shows how much we have lost.
Is it any wonder they added poop slinging? It is the level a console player would enjoy.
The Duke is dead, the consoles killed him.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.