Thanksgiving And Craft Ideas

Feature: Duke Nukem Forever: barely playable, not funny, rampantly offensive

, Your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It's not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.

There's a feeling among some fans of Duke Nukem that anyone who dares to give a bad review to a Duke title simply doesn't understand what the game is trying to do. We need to relax, goes the argument, relax enough to laugh at the rampant misogyny and hateful stereotypes on display throughout the game. If a review suggests that it's not funny simply to hear someone use dirty words, that's the reviewer's failing, not an issue with the game. Any hint that constant jokes about penis size aren't the height of comedy? The reviewer must not have a sense of humor.

The fans are wrong. One can laugh at jokes about men and women, and there's nothing wrong with being risque, but Duke is thoughtless, backwards, and belligerent. Duke Nukem Forever was iconic. Within seconds of launching the game, you found yourself in exciting combat within an impressively interactive world. You could show a film on the screen inside a movie theater and find hidden rooms and weapons. The game rewarded you for exploring, and the shooting itself was satisfying. The whole experience had little padding to it, and the "mature" elements of the game added flavor to what was already a wonderful game. If impressive level design was the cake, paying strippers was the icing.

But in the Duke Nukem Forever threw us into the action within seconds, the new game spends an interminable amount of time asking us to run through the bland environment, learning how to use "Duke Vision" to see in the dark and do everything but fire a gun at a bad guy. What happened to the action-packed game with the ribald humor? This is a title that thinks you're going to be so impressed by seeing the hint of a breast, you'll forget that nothing else is happening.

The first 30 minutes of the game consist of moments where people idolize you—oh, and you can turn the lights on and off. You walk through a museum where relics from the first game are stored, which gives you a hint at how this title was put together. While Gearbox obviously remembered all the neat little details that made Duke .

And that's before you come to the really offensive bits. Just in case you didn't feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.