Left behind years ago... (Duke Nukem 3D (PC))

Member Name: B0nfire

Product:	Duke Nukem 3D (PC)
Date:	01/07/00 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good in it's day...

Disadvantages: ...but not any more

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 good, although it tried to be interesting with things like the Freeze gun (freeze somebody solid then smash them) and the shrinking ray (shrink the guy them stamp on them), and I’m not sure how useful these actually were.
The levels were split into three episodes. Number one saw you start in a city and move out into the desert, two was set in a spacecraft, and three took you back into town via a flooded section. The game was excellent during the city parts, as for once you could fight amongst recognisable surroundings (a fact that made Half-Life stand out so much), but the spaceship level was poor.
This was also the first game I played against my mates via a serial cable, and I have some great memories of it (such as duping a mate with he HoloDuke, then shooting him in the back as he charged it), but to be fair I don’t think I’d want to play this again. It’d seem like a massive backwards step after the likes of Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, so I really don’t want to try it. Also, it’d probably end up like Ulysses (the old cartoon), which I really loved as a kid, but was shocked to discover just how dire it was when I saw it again a couple of years ago. Oh well.

Summary: