As you are undoubtedly aware by now, Duke Nukem 3D is often hailed as one of the greatest, if not infamous, first person shooters ever made, right up there with the insanely popular Doom and Quake franchises of it's time. It came out in the early nineties, 1993, I believe, and marked significant advancements in the world of computer gaming: the main character not only now had a name and a title role, but also a voice and even (gasp!) character development, something completely unseen in earlier first person shooters.
And just who was this character, you ask?
(The) Duke.
You see, (the) Duke Nukem was the quintessential, hyper-masculine, wise-cracking nineties hero who was basically an amalgamation of every Arnold Swharzenegger, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude Van Damme action hero ever conceived. He had everything a hero of the era required back then: awesome guns, gratuitous violence, chicks, chicks, and chicks, as well as enough one-liners to win him an Oscar in the machismo category. And the thing is, despite being such a massive rip-off and shameless love-child of pop culture, no one even cared. The game was just too much of a success. (An infamous success, but more on that in a minute.)
There was also a previously unrealized interactivity to the world of (the) Duke Nukem, including full-scale bathroom mirrors that could reflect the character from any angle, and reflections that changed depending on what weapon (the) Duke was currently holding. Bathroom sinks, toilets, and urinals were all operational, glass was breakable, and the Jet Pack allowed players to explore the game world in a whole new way, allowing for developers to hide quite an assortment of Easter eggs for more enthusiastic players. I know these kinds of features all sound like child's play to today's audiences, but back in the early nineties having photo-realistic renderings of a character's reflection in a bathroom mirror took up A TON of memory for computers in those days, and writing the code for 3D combat, i.e, combat that took place in the air with (the) Duke's Jet Pack, took a GREAT deal of experimentation and debugging. For it's time, Duke Nukem 3D was definitely a programming achievement. It had just the right amount of realism in it's gameplay mechanics, and never too much to bog it down and make it unplayable.
The thing is though, (the) Duke Nukem was also known for something else: rampant misogyny and a still unmatched sense of tastelessness.
In the old game, the one from the nineties, it had an option under the gameplay settings that could turn off the adult content, set even with a password. This way, kids (namely little boys like the author) could play the same game their dad did, but without the blood splatter, the profanity, or the nudity at the strip club and misogynistic jokes placed throughout the game. So surely, as would make practical sense, there would be such a setting in Duke Nukem Forever.
Right?
Not so much.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'll go ahead and tell you right now that Duke Nukem Forever has to be the most offensive game I've ever played, and truth be told, it takes a great deal of crazy shit to offend me.
Right now I'm sure you're thinking of all the standard misogynistic tropes in video-games these days, you know, the female characters with gigantic, overly bouncy boobs, the hyper-masculine warrior characters you see in fantasy games with completely ripped, overly-vasculated physiques, the invalid damsels-in-distress, the rampant, unnecessary nudity, all the creative ways you can kill prostitutes in the Grand Theft Auto series, etc., etc., but no. Duke Nukem Forever isn't ANYTHING like that.
Duke Nukem Forever is instead so blatantly god-awful I can't believe it even got past the development stage, which, might I add, it almost didn't. (Hardy har har.)
Duke Nukem Forever is instead so egregiously sexist and offensive to women, so vile and obscene, so utterly tasteless and despicable, so relentlessly irredeemable, that I am absolutely astounded that it didn't receive an Adults Only rating, the highest rating available to the ESRB.
The game starts with you, (the) Duke Nukem, pissing at a urinal, the stream flowing freely from what has to be your massive phallus, grunting as you shake, just like any other God-fearing, red-blooded American male. You then travel to a massive stadium and fight a towering alien monstrosity with this double-barreled rocket launcher called "The Devistator," a weapon returning from earlier installments and easily the most powerful weapon in the game.
Oh, it's ammo count?
You wanted to know its ammo count?
69.
(AWWWWW YEAAAHHHHHHHHH.)
Anyway, after killing this gigantic, bidepal, cycloptic and cyborg alien of ultimate ass-kickery, you tear out his eye, shit down his neck, and kick it for a field goal in what you can see during the pan-out is called "The Duke Dome." The scene ends with the camera, like I said before, panning out from the victorious field-goal shot and reveals that you were actually playing a game within a game, shown by pulling away from a TV screen and into an ostentatiously elaborate bathroom where (the) Duke has been receiving a fellatio from two schoolgirl-outfit-clad twins, the Holsom twins.
Yes.
They went there.
The twins then giggle and ask (the) Duke if his game was any good, to which (the) Duke responds sarcastically, "After twelve fucking years, it should be."
And that, my friends, is how Duke Nukem Forever begins.
What follows is one face-palm after another through the minds of the sickest developers ever to be given the budget of a normal Hollywood level production. That's right, feminists, it cost over 150 million dollars to make this game. Probably more, in fact. I just guessed at that number. You know why? That's the industry average. The average video game costs over 150 million dollars to make.
So House, what exactly did we get out of that 150 million dollars?
Well let me sit down and tell you.
(You should probably sit down, too. And order a scotch. What do feminists drink these days, anyway? Scotch, right? You know what, just make it a double whatever you get.)
You see, the whole plot of Duke Nukem Forever (what plot there is, that is) is centered around the events of the last game, Duke Nukem 3D, and its aftermath. In the last game, and in this one, you battle aliens who have come to Earth to essentially steal all of Earth's beautiful women.
Yep. That's it.
Anyway, this development understandably pisses the hell out of (the) Duke, so he goes on a murderous rampage to get them all back. I would go on to note how this is in some ways noble, similar to the chivalric tales of yore, you know, the ones involving knights and damsels-in-distress, and this is in fact just the modern continuation of such a story arc, but I believe it is the motive of the would-be rescuer that differentiates the noble hero from the ignoble one.
Knights, for example, were virtuous, and in many ways worshiped women. They were chaste, after all, and saved women because they felt it was the right thing to do, to save the innocent.
(The) Duke, on the other hand, only wanted to save the human women because he felt they were his property, and not because he believed their deaths, the death of innocents, would be morally reprehensible. Not to mention, the women he was "saving" weren't innocent by today's standards anyway. All of them fit the "whore" and "slut" paradigm perfectly (arguably a paradigm imposed by the patriarchy to suppress female sexual freedom, i.e. "slut-shaming," but that's a different article entirely) and were basically (the) Duke's personal property. He didn't care if they lived or died, but rather whether he had them or not.
I may be paraphrasing him here, but I believe Samuel L. Jackson has a saying for stuff like this:
"That shit's fucking fucked."
Anyway, the game continues on, and you eventually return to the "The Duke Dome," albeit this time for real. This time though, the aliens have infested the stadium and enveloped it in an alien secretion, reminiscent of the hive from James Cameron's Aliens, and have human women strung up into the walls of the alien sludge, all of them completely naked with their massive double-D breasts flopping around for all the world to see.
This part of the game, to me at least, is almost where I threw up my hands and never played again. There's this one scene during the hive where (the) Duke's path is blocked by two human women stuck in the alien goo, both of them screaming about how the aliens have raped them, impregnated them, and about how they'll lose the pregnancy weight so (the) Duke will love them again.
Excuse me while I type that again.
They're screaming about how they'll lose the pregnancy weight so (the) Duke will love them again.
You should have seen my face.
I was flabbergasted.
Dumbfounded.
In shock.
In disbelief.
Outraged.
Ashamed.
I have never been so offended by anything, ever, in my entire life.
Their stomachs then explode in a burst of gore, unleashing a swarm of tiny, octopus like babies that you have to destroy to move on.
And what did (the) Duke say?
"Get back to Japan, you eight-legged freaks."
I was fucking disgusted.
I quit the game right then and there, and didn't pick it up again for two straight weeks. Even then, I was cautious about playing it again, because think about it: that scene occurred not even two hours into the game. Who knew what the rest of the game had in store for its audience? What other outrageously sick shit had the developers come up with? I couldn't even imagine what else I would see, and let me tell you, you couldn't either.
Over the rest of the game, I encountered:
- A giant boss-battle alien with three gigantic, sagging breasts called "She-Bitch." She was also morbidly obese.
- Spider-like aliens called "pregnators" that spat cum on the screen in gooey blobs. (Yet another knock-off from the Alien franchise.)
- "Pig Cops," another returning enemy from DN3D, which are bipedal warthogs in police uniforms wielding shotguns. (The symbolism should be obvious here.)
- A senseless strip club dream sequence at a place called "Duke Nukem's Titty City" that involved a dildo, popcorn, and condom hunting mission.
- Duke could reach into used toilets and pull out feces to throw at enemies.
- You never actually find the Holsom twins again, despite their being stolen literally being the only thing driving the plot. (I just realized that "Holsom" might be a play on the word "wholesome," which they are clearly not.)
Yeah.
Let's see how long it takes for the NAACP to catch on to that one.
Although, despite all of this damning evidence to suggest that Duke Nukem Forever is the most horrendously offensive game of the 20th and 21st centuries, there is hope. Yes, feminists of the world, there is hope.
And that hope is that the game really wasn't very good.
Sure, there is somewhat of a "well if you've played one, you've played them all" mentality to first person shooters, but still, Duke Nukem Forever really didn't live up to the original. The developers implemented more than several mechanical changes to the game's core mechanics, you know, the rules that actually make the game fun, and so most of the action sequences, even the best ones of the game, fell terribly flat.
Unlike the original, (the) Duke can only carry two guns at a time, as well as only four pipe bombs and trip mines at a time, along with one Steroids pack, one Beer, and one Holoduke, a holographic projector that can distract a horde of enemies.
If you've played the first one, you know this to be complete and utter bullshit.
Because back in the day, you could carry one of every weapon in the game, up to the full ammo of all those weapons, and up to ten of each explosive ordinance. I'm not sure about how many of the Holoduke you could carry, but I want to say that it was either just one like in Duke Nukem Forever, or up to three.
I mean, what happened?
I'm sure, no, I'm certain, that that Blu-ray game disk could handle all of that memory. So what was it? Why would the developers take away such an awesome aspect of the original game?
Ah.
That's right.
Today's first person shooters don't permit resource allocation, otherwise known as the COOLEST FUCKING PART OF A FIRST PERSON SHOOTER.
Remember back in the day when you had to wander around the levels of an FPS, armed with nothing more than three bullets in your awesome space-marine rifle and one frag-grenade that would probably end up blowing you up right along with it? Huh? Remember the glory days?
Remember those days where you were walking down that alien-infested corridor with nothing but your fists because you wasted all your ammo on some environmental effect you were convinced was some demon-lord from some unspeakable realm of the Abyss because you were playing on your Dad's piece-of-shit, Windows 95 PC at three in the morning on a school night in the dark because you thought you were a total fucking badass given orders by the fucking PRESIDENT to slay a nigh-invincible, inter-dimensional threat?
Yeah.
You remember them.
You remember them because you are fucking awesome.
But Duke Nukem Forever doesn't have any of that. The developers didn't even include his signature piece of equipment, the Jet Pack.
That's like making a Legend of Zelda title without including the Master Sword.
I mean, what the fuck?
(The) Duke spends the whole game making fun of other shooters. He spends the whole game mocking the use of power armor and calling Master Chief a pussy. He spends the whole game making fun of engineers like Isaac Clarke from Dead Space and calling them limp-dick science majors. And yet, he himself depends on the once revolutionary mechanics set forth in those games for his own gameplay experience.
Turret sequences?
Has 'em.
Regenerating health bar?
Has it.
Carries only two weapons?
Does it.
Ammo replenishment crates?
Uses 'em.
I mean, what happened to the sprawling maps we used to see in Duke Nukem 3D? Now the game is just a linear adventure from one cutscene to the next, except Duke Nukem Forever has no cutscenes. Hell, it barely has supporting characters. All of them are stock. There was so much potential with this title it's retarded. Instead they just filled in all the gaps with dick and fart jokes and making god-awful jabs at women.
You know what they should have done?
I got the idea after beating the game and looking through the extra-content I had unlocked. Some of it was all right, while some of it was, as you guessed it, pretty stupid.
You see, after I got done screwing around the Duke Nukem soundboard and looking through the Unlockable Cheats menu, I skimmed through the concept art, a compilation of concept art throughout the years Duke Nukem Forever had been in development, and on frame thirty-six, I think it was, I found a little nugget that practically blew my hair back.
Her name was Bombshell, and as I looked down the barrel of her gigantic fucking gun, I found (the) Duke's salvation.
She wasn't clothed in a stripper bikini or covered in alien sludge, she was wearing army fatigues. She didn't have long, bleach blonde hair like a pornstar, she was a shoulder length brunette. She had on combat boots, gloves emblazoned with Duke's yellow, radioactive seal, and was barely showing any skin at all.
So why didn't she make it into the game?
I don't have a clue.
But just imagine, dear reader, Duke Nukem having some kind of equal, or better yet, an ideological opposite. Bombshell could have been a badass, wise-cracking, action hero just like Duke, except a feminist, perhaps even overtly so. The writers (if there ever were any) could then have them work together, despite their differences, and join forces to defeat the alien threat. This would allow for some character development, and perhaps even result in (the) Duke seeing the errors of his misogynistic ways. Then, in later installments, you could write in more of (the) Duke's backstory, as well as Bombshell's, resulting in a franchise that everyone could play, including women. Sure, the original character would change, but people live for dynamic characters, not to mention the potential spin-off games marketed toward the female audience.
Because let's face it guys, gaming isn't a boys only club anymore, and the universal rejection of Duke Nukem Forever is proof of that.
So overall, taking into account the rampant misogyny and the rather flat gameplay, I'll have to say that Duke Nukem Forever deserves three natural twenties out of ten. And before you blow up on me for a seemingly high rating, let me assure you that those Nat 20's are all purely from nostalgia. Not to mention, M. Night Shyamalamadingdong's The Last Airbender already got a one out of ten, and I'll tell you right now that even with all of its flaws, Duke Nukem Forever is still a hell of a lot more enjoyable than that piece of trash.
And Duke Nukem practically invented trash.
