Duke Nukem 3D (PC)

Released in 1996, 'Duke Nukem' is an early first person shooter that relies on the Blood engine, a fairly basic pseudo-3D engine that allows for limited looking up and down and employs sprites as enemies rather than the 3D models that were to follow.The plot, if it can be called that, is that aliens have invaded the earth and stolen all the world's women, and its up to The Duke to get them back! This sets the scene for more ludicrous violence and cheesy off-the-cuff one-liners than you'd find in every 80s action film put together. Whilst quite dated looking, 'Duke Nukem' is still a joy to play. The weapons are varied and great fun to use, including a rapid ...  Read the complete review

Duke Nukem 3D is a first person shooting title released for the personal computer in late January 1996. It follows on from the series of the same title, but features a somewhat revolutionary pseudo three dimensional gaming experience which was not typical of titles at the time. It was met with a slew of controversy due to its explicit violent and sexual content and was even banned or restricted from sale in certain countries. In the United Kingdom, it received an "18" age rating from the BBFC. The recommended system requirements at the time were to play using a Pentium I with 16 MB RAM and a sound card (Duke Nukem 3D did not support the "PC Speaker"). ...  Read the complete review

6 time. 6 whole times. 6 WHOLE BLOODY TIMES my PC crashed while I tried to run Duke Nukem. My old 486 played it fine, so it's least you could expect from a recently new Pentium 3? Isn't it? First of all it's the sound. Every other old DOS game has an auto sound card detect program. Not this one. Oh, and should you choose the wrong one, it crashes. Not just crashes the window its running, the whole PC. My Soundblaster 64 isn't exactly state of the art, but the closest thing I find in the Duke Nukem options menu is the AWE 32. So I choose that. And it crashes. Fiddling with settings gets me sound effects working, but no music. Eventually after much ...  Read the complete review

Wow, this takes me back a long way. Released around the same time as Quake, these two games divided the gaming community for quite some time. Which was better? Duke or Quake? Personally, I felt that Quake was far superior, but each to their own. Anyway, to the game itself. Nukem was the last bog name game to use this style of engine. You could look up and down, but as this wasn’t true 3D, things became slightly distorted. The items and characters in the game were also old school in that they were bitmaps and not polygons. At the time this wasn’t really an issue, but Quake soon showed us how wrong we’d been. The weapons were generally ...  Read the complete review

This game has become something of a classic since its release and various updates and add-ons have followed. But really what we have here is a game which is far inferior to such titles as Quake and Unreal which does little to justify the cover price. For those who do not know this game, DN3D is a first person shoot-em-up in the style of doom, where you play Duke who goes around various location shooting, shrinking, stomping etc aliens with a variety of big guns or a heavy boot. 'Come Get Some' says the man as you begin your mission and stagger off using a control system which seems somewhat unfriendly to me. The graphics to this game are ok ...  Read the complete review