Hail to the King Baby!

Oh finally and I mean finally as in we’ve only had to wait 15 years for this – that is the 4th instalment in the Duke Nukem Saga! I recently found out that this game is scheduled to be released for PC, XBOX 360 and PS3 in the May of this year. So that’ll be another week that disappears from my life – the last time being the release of Fallout: New Vegas. This series of games is now old and I mean old – the first Duke Nukem game was released in 1991 for DOS and will no doubt get its own article at some point as a true piece of computer gaming antiquity. The first two were good old platform games – another awesome genre that has since died a death. The last instalment – Duke Nukem 3D released in 1996 was an instant classic that featured cutting edge graphics and gameplay for its time. Around the time of its release we were promised the fourth instalment was in development and would be released in 1998 and like all good game development projects it never fell behind schedule even slightly.

Over the years this game has been dismissed as vaporware and was even given the lifetime achievement award by Wired News Vaporware awards just so they could get it off the list. It has also earned a fair amount of mockery from fans who have given it various nicknames which are invariably a play on ‘forever’ such as Duke Nukem “Never”, “Taking Forever”, “Whenever”, “ForNever” and “ If Ever”. But the trailer finally hit in 2010 and the game humorously mocked itself for the ridiculous development time – as in DN3D the eponymous Duke is seen taking a piss for ages and is heard saying “This is taking forever!”. When asked if the game is any good, Duke replies “Yeah, but after twelve fucking years it should be.”

The plot of the game is classic Duke – aliens invade Earth (again) and cut into Duke’s leisure time of loose women and cold beer. So the whole game is basically an excuse to run round killing aliens – and Hollywood directors wonder why computer games never make decent films. Duke is still the completely one dimensional misogynistic antihero he always was – a formula that doesn’t need to change to make this a great game. Apparently it will use the Unreal Engine 2.5 so the graphics should be fairly decent – think Bioshock. But ultimately games that spend ages in development hell usually turn out to be pretty good – we waited 10 years for Fallout 3 including the cancelled Van Buuren project and Fallout 3 IMO is the best game of the last decade.

And as if this wasn’t enough for us – a reimagining of Duke Nukem 3D is on its way as well. I’ll post an article about the HRP pack and compatibility with newer versions of Windows for LAN play and include an update on the progress of that project because it looks just as amazing as the new Duke. Epic Win I guess.