The First (and Last) Hour: Duke Nukem Forever

Posted on by Nimgimli

Redbox debuted their game rental service last night (today is the official debut but some games showed up yesterday) and I wanted to do a post about it for ITworld, so I needed to test the service.

Problem is, I’m in the middle of Infamous 2 and just received Crysis 2 from Gamefly, so I didn’t really feel the need to rent a game. Then I saw they had Duke Nukem Forever.

Between the infamously long quasi-development time and the fact that the game has been getting such bad reviews, I was curious about it, but there was no way I was going to pay $60 to sate that curiosity. $2 though? Sure why not.

And guess what? The reviews are right. The game is offensive in all kinds of ways. Some of it you can skip. The much-talked about first scene where you start by first-person pissing into a urinal, for instance, can be skipped. I’ve heard of some other vile things you can do in that bathroom, but I stayed away from the toilets. Other parts you have no control of, such as the implied oral sex being performed on Duke (complete with slurping sounds) as he plays a video game. What makes this section of the game even worse (if that’s even possible) is that the “Holsom Twins” who are performing this service are animated like something dead and brought back from beyond. While you’re hearing bad voice-acting that’s trying to sound titillating, what you’re seeing are a pair of wooden-faced character models staring over your shoulder. It’s like Duke is getting head from a couple of zombies. So even if you’re into 3D animated porn, this isn’t good 3D animated porn.

Anyway, plenty of other reviews have talked about how offensive and misogynistic the game is and I’ll just say I agree with that. Heck, even some of the ‘tips’ that appear during loading screens are offensive. Let’s move on to technical and gameplay issues.

On the 360, loading times are stupidly long and ‘levels’ are stupidly short. There are sections of the game where you spend more time waiting for things to load than you do playing the game. The graphics are sub-par, the jokes are ancient, some of them riffing on stuff like old Schwarzenegger movies such as Commando, and the combat feels really stupid. Generally speaking Duke’s most potent weapon, in the early parts of the game at least, are his fists. While enemies can soak up bullets, 1 punch or melee hit does them in (I’ll admit I was playing on Easy so maybe that skewed things). In too many cases there’s a scripted failure at the end of a sequence.

The shame of it all is that there’s some good stuff here, too. Even in the 90 minutes or so I played, I was exposed to a number of different gameplay styles and mini-games. I found a playable pinball table, for instance. One light puzzle section had me driving a remote-controlled RC Truck in order to push an item out of an inexplicably sealed room. The sequence was illogical as hell, but it was kind of fun. There’s a turret segment early on, and even a section where Duke is shrunk to the size of an action figure and has to drive an RC car around a hotel lobby. None of these aspects are earth-shattering, but they were unexpected and kind of fun. But every time I’d start to enjoy myself, the game would throw another cringe-inducing dick joke at me.

There were even some legitimately funny parts to the game. One section has Duke coming upon a woman stuck in an elevator, and the brakes fail. Duke has to yank on a lever to slow the descent, and all the time the woman is freaking out and shouting at him to pull the damned lever and in this case, at least, the voice talent does a great job of turning this potentially horrific event into something pretty funny (and of course in the end Duke saves the day). Even Angela, who was frowning every time she walked through the room and heard/saw what was going on, chuckled at the elevator scene.

I almost wish Duke Nuken Forever was just relentlessly bad; but seeing these little bits and pieces of what could’ve been a fun and interesting game just makes the vile coating of “twisted 13 year-old-boy fantasy crap” seem even more tragic.

Was it worth $2 to get a glimpse at the train wreck that is Duke Nukem Forever? Well, my curiosity is sated, so I guess it was. But it wasn’t worth much more than that, to me.

* * *

Footnote: “Offensive” is a very subjective term. This game was offensive to me; it might not be to you. I’m not a fan of dick jokes or scatological humor. I’m not a fan of ‘bro’ culture, which Duke seems to be embracing in a twisted way. I am not offended by nudity but am offended by such pure objectification of women. When a female character shows up in a skimpy outfit but is more than just a sexbot (see my post on Hunted, though Duke has me re-thinking it) I’m ok with it, but in Duke the female characters are just sex toys with no other personalities, at least during the parts of the game I saw. When the Holsom Twins aren’t servicing Duke, they’re engaging in a bit of sisterly lesbian foreplay. It all gets tired really, really fast.

Going it alone

Posted on by Nimgimli

Once again I’m riffing off other blogger’s titles. This time Moxie’s.

So I’ve kind of organically slid into a break from MMOs. I’m down to logging into Rift about once every two weeks at this point, generally with Angela who is still dabbling. Otherwise I’ve been playing single-player games.

I wasn’t sure why I’ve stopped being excited by MMOs, really, which lead to some introspection. What is it I’m looking for from my games? I think the answer to that question changes constantly, but here’s what I came up with right now.

Progress. There’re two levels of progress that I enjoy. The first is in-game. Advancing to a new zone, reaching a new level, learning a new skill. Basically ticking off a checkbox from a list. I think that’s a basic ‘itch’ in a lot of people; I’ve known folks who’ll go back and add ‘interrupt-driven tasks’ to their To-Do list after they’ve been completed, just so that they could then check them off.

I’ve had this itch since I was a kid, really. Before there were video games or personal computers, I’d undergo weird projects like re-typing a dictionary or a volume of an encyclopedia. Why? Well, clearly I was a crazy child, and loved the satisfaction of finishing a letter or whatever (in theory…I never got very far on these projects). Plus any excuse to use such a cool gadget as a typewriter…

The bigger Progress is finishing stuff. I love the feeling of satisfaction I get from finishing a game (or a book). I don’t (in the case of games) do this very often. I’m very ADD when it comes to games; my interests are extremely broad and my time is fairly limited. I literally don’t have time to play even a fraction of the games I’m interested in. But in a single player game, the possibility, at least, exists. You can certainly be ‘done with’ an MMO but you’re never going to see those closing credits, right?

The second thing I’m looking for is Narrative, or story. As has been pointed out by many people, a mediocre single player storyline is generally better than the best MMO stories, just because the world can morph and change to support the story and that one character who the story revolves around. MMOs have lore, but not a lot of story. This, at least, is true until you get to higher levels; I’ve heard about some pretty interesting storylines that happen in dungeons in some MMOs.

But I never get to dungeons since I play solo, so all the content in the dungeons of MMOs, which is often the best content (from what I read, anyway), may as well not exist as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s another issue. I’m a single-player gamer. I always have been. Again, going back to the days before video games, I used paper & cardboard chit wargames as a place to escape to in the way a lot of unhappy kids escape into books (I did some of that, too). I always preferred tactical games because I’d have stories in my head about the various units. Essentially I translated the make-believe games little kids perform with plastic army men into more elaborate make-believes stories about soldiers involved in house-to-house fighting in WWII, or the captains of tall ships sailing under Nelson’s flag. I was role-playing before there were role-playing games, I guess.

Here at the other end of my life, I’m reverting to the same kind of thing, in a more adult manner. After a long day of work and chores and work, I’m really enjoying slipping into someone else’s skin via playing a single player game. I *can* do that, to a certain extent, in an MMO, but it isn’t as peaceful. I always have people jarring me out of my reverie via just being people, y’know? (This is also one of the great strengths of MMOs; it’s all about context and what you need.) For the same reason, I have zero interest in playing non-MMO multiplayer games, even though when I hear twitter friends talking about their gaming sessions I feel a bit envious because it does sound like they’re having fun.

I generally get around to gaming time about 10 pm, though, and by then I’m feeling pressed for time so don’t want to have to fiddle about, and I’m sick and tired of dealing with people, even people who I love, so really need that alone time to recharge.

I’m also, honestly, tired of the MMO community as a community. There are a lot of MMO players out there who I am very legitimately fond of, but the ‘chorus’ of the community is starting to grate on me a bit. We just seem to recycle the same old arguments and debates and, when playing, I can’t help but be drawn in, almost against my will. Now that I’m not playing MMOs, a lot of the discussions (Is SW:TOR just WoW reskinned!!?!) just wash over me. I hear them, but I don’t really care about them enough to get into it.

Like Scopique, I’m just kind of tired of the bitching. Single player gamers bitch too, but I don’t know many of them so I don’t hear it very often. 🙂

Of course, the downside to all of this is that I no longer have a lot to say to my friends, which makes me worry that I’ll lose them as friends.

I also know that my gaming habits are like a huge pendulum, and eventually what I want from a game is going to be a vibrant, living world to explore, and those can only be found in MMOs, so eventually I know I’ll go back and I’ll be posting here about how lifeless and dull single player games are!

Giving Gamefly another shot

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Honestly I’m not a fan of Gamefly. It feels too expensive and in the past the service has been really slow for me. But I had a ‘secret code’ to get two months for the price of one (click the joystick at the top right corner and enter code “Confirmed” to get the deal – that code comes from the Weekend Confirmed podcast) so I figured I’d give it another shot, given the thoughts fluttering around in my head.

After watching E3 I got a hankering to go back and play some games that have sequels coming out this year. I loved Resistance: Fall of Man back when the PS3 launched, but I never played Resistance 2 (and never heard much good about it) but with Resistance 3 coming soon, I had the urge to get a copy of R2, put it on Easy Difficulty and blow through it in order to catch up with the story.

Ditto Gears of War 3. I played about half of Gears 1 but Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski was lamenting the fact that no one ever talks about the Gears storyline, which he thinks is quite good. I was willing to give it another go, but no longer own Gears 1 and never tried Gears 2.

And etc, etc. But the point was, I was in the mood to get copies of these games and blast through them on easy mode and as quickly as possible. That sounded like a good match for Gamefly.

We’ll see. I signed up yesterday and today they’re sending out my first game, Crysis 2 (PS3) which was somewhere around #5 on my queue. I do want to play Crysis 2 so I’m not complaining but it was odd that a relatively new game that far down my queue is what’s getting sent, when old and unloved Resistance 2 is sitting in position 1. I guess it’s a matter of inventory, though.

I’m expecting to be disappointed with the service, but we’ll see. If the game arrives before the weekend I’ll be pleasantly surprised, and honestly I’m already feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse from having signed up.

Infamous 2 weekend report (11%)

Posted on by Nimgimli

The downside of E3 is that trying to keep up with all the news can really cut into your gaming time, so between that (and a random sidetrack into Farcry 2 on the Xbox) I’m only 11% of the way through Infamous 2 after my first weekend with the game.

To put that in perspective, I’m still in the first “chunk” of the game, but have gotten past the tutorial sections and into the ‘open world’ parts. I’ve also unlocked the User Generated Content stuff. I’m not sure how the game determines % of completion but I have spent a lot of time chasing down blast cores (you collect these to increase your energy storage capacity…or in other words they give you more ammo between re-supplies) and Dead Drops (audio logs on USB thumbdrives strapped to the legs of pidgins flying around). Plus doing my hero thing of stopping crimes in progress and fighting the evil Militia.

Point is, I’m not rushing through the missions by any stretch of the imagination.

In my first post I worried about the twitchiness of the controls, but as anticipated I’ve become much more comfortable with them now. I do still shove innocent people over now and then, but most of New Marais seems to be in party mode so they’re all pretty laid back about this kind of thing. Hell, I’ve hit a few with electric bolts and once they’ve picked themselves up, they’ll still run over to me and thank me for saving them from the bad guys. They understand collateral damage, I guess (plus I have that Hero Boost that means I don’t do much damage to civilians).

Side missions have started to repeat, but so far I haven’t found anything as tedious as those “Remove the surveillance devices from an apartment building.” missions the first game had. Disrupting the off-loading of supplies from docking ships is the one I’ve had twice, but they’re fun missions. Fighting on boats when water means instant death is always interesting. Though I did get a Trophy for killing a baddie by stepping in the same body of water he was standing in. Electricity charged the whole area and down he went. Evil Karma for that, though..even if it was an accident.

The story hasn’t really taken off yet, but the Dead Drops are really cool if you played the first game, since they fill in a lot of what was going on ‘behind the scenes’ while you were running around chasing Kessler. I’m not sure they’ll be as interesting to folks who hit the series at game #2.

So the most important question: Am I having fun? Well hell yes I am! I’ve gotten back into the grove of grinding power lines, leaping and then hovering over baddies and finally doing a slam into the ground, throwing goons every which way (for example). The people are starting to love me (I’m headed for that full Hero Trophy) and it’s always gratifying to heal a crowd and have them all cheer me afterwards. I’m doing good in New Marais…. but the Militia aren’t the only evil lurking in the streets and I think things are just getting started.

My biggest problem is that I focus so hard on the game and get so into it that I tend to be in a kind of daze for a while after playing it! While that’s bad, it’s also high praise when a game sucks me in like that.

Fable: The Journey isn’t Fable IV

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During a “hand’s on” demo of Fable: The Journey for G4 TV, Peter Molyneux made a point of saying that Fable: The Journey isn’t Fable IV. I’m going to paraphrase, but essentially he said The Journey is a kind of side-story, and was created because Microsoft asked Lionhead to come up with a ‘core game’ for Kinect. The Journey is about a Wanderer, but, Molyneux said, Fable 1, 2, 3 & 4 are about the Hero. Yes, he absolutely mentioned Fable 4 when he was saying this (though he may have not used “hero” to describe the main character..I’m doing this from memory).

No other details in Fable 4 yet, though.

He also assured the G4 audience that The Journey isn’t on rails but they restricted the press conference demo just to reduce the possibility of something going wrong. We’ll see. The magic system looked more interesting when we got a longer look at it with Molyneux explaining what was going on. My favorite part was when the player “extruded” a spear from mana and then hurled it at an enemy.

It was enough to at least put Fable: The Journey on my personal watch list, assuming the Nyko Zoom actually makes Kinect able to work in our living room.

Overlooked at E3: IndiePub’s Storm

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There were a hell of a lot of games at E3, and the big names got plenty of coverage. I like to poke around the virtual corners of game coverage and uncover interesting looking titles that didn’t get a huge amount of coverage. Storm is one of those titles. All I found is this trailer, which makes the game look like the love child of ThatGameCompany’s Flower and Q Games’ Pixel Junk Shooter. Hey, a game could have uglier parents!

Storm will be released on PSN in the not-too-distant future.

E3: Where’s the joy?

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Even though I’m a million years old, I can still remember being a little kid at Christmas when the world was full of possibilities. Back then we’d get the Sears Wish Book which was full of toys and games, and leaf through it and daydream. I knew a lot of the stuff in there I’d never get, and even at that young age I knew some of the stuff that looked cool (X-Ray Glasses!) was really junk, but it was still fun just to look and daydream.

These days Christmas is more or less a non-event, but on the opposite side of the calendar is E3. I *love* E3. I’ve only actually been to the show a couple times, but I ‘attend’ it remotely via TV and internet. And I just love looking at the reveals and trailers and daydreaming about what’s possible in the world of gaming. Some very few games go on the ‘Day 1 Buy’ list, a good number more go on the ‘Keep an eye on this’ list, but the vast majority I just let kind of wash over me.

I doubt that I’m alone in enjoying the spectacle of E3, but sometimes it feels that way. As I surf around the blogosphere, it seems that every year more and more words are devoted to aggressive apathy towards the show. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s fine not to care about the show, but what I don’t understand is why people need to make a big deal about not caring about the show, or about the games that are shown there.

We can’t make ourselves like stuff we don’t like, of course, and our blogs are our blogs. I’m not saying folks shouldn’t vocalize their “Meh” reactions to E3. I’m just saying I find that it’s a little sad. After all these are games; we don’t need them to survive or even to be happy (I hope). A preview of a bad game, or a game that doesn’t interest you, doesn’t harm you in any way.

I just think a lot of us are becoming rather cynical these days. I’d love to remove all video and computer games from the world for a year or two, and then re-announce them via E3 and see if that could re-kindle the joy. Maybe if we weren’t exposed to games 365 days/year we’d feel less apathetic about them.

The First Hour: Infamous 2

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I have to admit, I don’t finish a lot of games, but Infamous was one that I did, so I was psyched to, for once, start a sequel and be able to import something from the original! When you start up Infamous 2 you can import your Good Karma, your Bad Karma, or just start fresh. I went with Good Karma and it seems like rewards are based on trophies from the first game, rather than a save game file. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, since Infamous gave you a lot of trophies ‘organically.’ By the time I’d finished the game I had 50 or 60% of the trophies and had never chased any, if you know what I mean.

From the import I got a few little perks. A wad of experience to spend on skills, a passive ability that causes my attacks to do less damage to innocent people, and one other thing that obviously didn’t make an impression because I don’t recall what it was. 🙂

So the game starts with a quick overview of what happened in the first title. You, Zeke and a lady spy who is refreshingly not a huge-breasted babe in a leather bikini top, are on a ship getting ready to head to New Marais so you can pick up some new powers; powers you need to take on The Beast. (Of course Zeke insists New Marais is all about the 3 B’s: beer, boob and mechanical bulls.) You’re just about to shove off when the city is attacked! Oh noes! You rush off to fight this new opponent. I won’t spoil everything but by the end of the fight you’ve been drained (ie, lost most of your powers). So this is the big Reset button to start off the game. Time to level up Cole again!

The next section is a very linear transversal of a bunch of docks and small islanads, but it gives you a chance to start familiarizing yourself with the controls. Movement feels super twitchy to me; I almost wish I could tone down the sensitivity a bit. It’s great when running and fighting, but it makes it way too easy to accidentally run full-tilt into an innocent bystander. As I’m playing Cole as a hero, that feels wrong to me. I’m sure I’ll adjust, though.

It took me several attempts to get my grinding/flying/fighting chops back enough that I could pass through this first section. I don’t recall being able to speed up while grinding a wire in the first game, but you can here (by pushing the left stick forward) and you need to if you’re going to make some of the jumps in this section. I fell in the water quite a few times before making it through (since Cole’s powers are all electricity based, water means instant death to him).

I didn’t really mind, though, as replaying this section a few times gave my brain time to recall all the fun stuff you can do in Infamous. Pretty soon I was jumping while tossing electric grenades, grinding rails/wires and sucking the juice out of power consoles, just like old times. It was really fun.

And that’s as far as I got! I never made it to the open world section. So far it seems like a real sequel. Familiar but with some new options layered on (including a melee weapon). There’s still the comic-book cut scenes to set the tone, but there are also CGI cut scenes. That felt a little odd, since the cut-scene characters look so much more detailed than the in-game characters, but now I’m picking nits.

It’ll take me a few days to get used to the pace and the chaos of the game again, but I’m really looking forward to playing more Infamous 2

One hour rating: Buy if you enjoyed the first game. If you didn’t play the first game, get it for free via Welcome Back and play it first. If you didn’t like the first game, stay away from the sequel.

Skyrim demo from G4 shows interface

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The post title tells it all. Todd Howard visited G4 at E3 today, and showed off Skyrim. Now we’ve seen most of this footage before, but this time (if you’re patient) you’ll see some footage of the user interface. It’s all looking really good. 11/11/11, baby!

Xbox 360 Games – E3 2011 – The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

Note that the video may be a bit slow to load…I’m sure their servers are getting hammered today.