I think that's a bit complicated. I've been hesitant to be too specific just because I don't like the idea of spoilering things. I realize that's sort of odd for a FPS, but I don't like knowing what I'm in for unless it's something I really have to avoid. Such as a significant bug that prevents completion.

I guess, what I was getting at is the fun, versus not fun parts, are less of an issue. That's going to be a matter of personal opinion, and I'm not sure that it's something that anybody elses opinion is going to be good for.

The things which tend to be more problematic are when people go beyond just saying that the game isn't funny, and then going on to insult the intelligence of anybody that did find it funny, by implying that they're suffering from some sort of mental retardation.

More than that, it's trolls like possessed_cow that are deliberately misreading posts in order to prop up their position that there aren't any legitimately good aspects of the game. I personally found the one liners to be very much in keeping with the ones from the original game. And that's beyond having the same voice.

The reviled hints system that people seem to hate, has been used in other games, I remember something similar in Operation Anchorage. (OK, not a game per se, but a DLC is probably close enough) At least with the one in Duke, you can turn it off if you like, but for the people bitching about the lack of shooting, bitching about that being available is non-sensical as it moves you quicker to the next combat sequence.

I know that people complained about Duke not being able to jump very high and that the animation still looks bad. But, Duke shouldn't have been able to jump as high previously, and when they decided to incorporate those jumping puzzles there were limited options. The animation style not being better is something they could have fixed and I don't think that was a matter of running out of time. That was a deliberate choice to keep the feel of duke.

Then there's the complaints about the noncombat periods of the game. The ones I've gotten to so far haven't been that bad at all, and have lent themselves surprisingly well to the narrative. (Admittedly, the Duke needs no narrative so there is a point to the complaints about that).

There's more, but I fear I'll run out of room.

I know I am grabbing this number out of the air, but I do believe that 90% of those people who wanted this game to be released wanted this game to feel just as Duke Nukem 3D did. It was fast paced, action packed, no weapon limits, no *must hide behind a wall to recover my health*, it was fun fun fun. DNF is what it is. And modern shooters do have a tendancy of being very --------> go this way, do not leave this path, dont even try to leave this path, you cannot even if you try to so haha. Duke Nukem 3D had secrets to find, multiple paths, much needed action that didnt seem to end, and was very quick paced. Duke Nukem Forever is slow, dragging on with no end in sight. The action you do face does not last long at all.

I think the fact that this game was given to gearbox as is, and they had to release it as is, is very painful to see. Let us hope that they do make there very own version of Duke, while still keeping to the fun filled game of yesteryear, keeping the linear aspect out of it, and giving us the fun we truly desire.

The game is stuck between eras because it's not like the 90's Duke of old and it's also not modern. It plays like a game for 2004 or so mostly, which was probably the last time it was massively overhauled.

I never expected it to be like DN3D. I think that was pretty naive of the people who did.

I think I discovered why I'm not liking what I see of Duke Nukem Forever; I think Duke Nukem is a stupid, unfunny character. I just find him unbelievably boring. All he does is say movie quotes and brag about how awesome he is.

They had a chance to turn that into something awesome. If everyone else acknowledged what a stupid fucking prick he is instead of blindly worshiping him, it would be hilarious. Have him say one of those dumb movie quotes, and the soldiers just stare at you like they want you to die. Have him come onto women, while they brutally rebuff his advances. Make him old, fat, and slow.

That's the feeling I've had, but I have no way of confirming or disproving it.

There's a part of me that hopes that it goes down in flames the sooner the better so that modders can get their shot at hacking at it, because I do think that what we've got has some pretty significant potential in the hands of the mod community.

But, there's also the issue I have that I think judging it as something other than a game, is a mistake. I've wondered lately whether the reason why I've had so much fun with it so far has been just that I didn't know what to expect, and that I actually remember the game and what came before it.

I really do think that somebody needs to make a sequel taking a lot of the ideas that they used in the game and reformulating it, probably with a new engine, because the only thing that bothers me about the game is the wasted potential. It's a fun game, a really fun game, but I do sort of wonder what might have been had they had a decent project manager and some dates for the game. Not necessarily for releasing it, but for adding new features.

Releasing when it's done is admirable, but only if you set a hard deadline for adding features. Then release it when the bugs are squashed.
Duke Nukem is not for everyone. You're definitely missing the point if you feel that way. It's cool and all, but the game isn't for you if that's how you look at it.

I had to adjust my view of Serious Sam in order to enjoy it, but once I did, the game is quite funny, it's just that my perspective wasn't appropriate to the game.

Reinforcement: Pitchford has asserted more than a few times that what Gearbox did was finish what was started. It's like how Brian Herbert carried on the the Dune series from Frank Herbert's post-Chapterhouse notes. The Brian Herbert books weren't pretty, but they offered closure. It's actually something we should be grateful for. There aren't a lot of Triple-A IP's, whose original owners have lost the rights to, that aren't either completely used and abused for all the cash the new owners can get, or are forgotten about entirely when set upon the proverbial shelf. Respective examples are (Any IP acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment after acquiring their respective former owners, such as Monolith or Midway) and SiN (Episodes).

Well guess what? Companies make games to make money, not to please everyone. Sad, but true.

And also the whole linear=bad line you keep spouting is a bunch of BS. Linear does not always equal crap, and D3D was also very linear btw.....DNF being moreso then D3D yes, but D3D was still somewhat linear.
It's people like those and those that think we have to grow beyond "High school humor" since we're older now so we shouldn't/can't enjoy it anymore that seem to be the most critical.

Yeah, they're there to benefit something that Duke doesn't need in the first place. And if you also dislike them based on their own merits (like I do) then it's even worse.

It's like tartar sauce on ice cream. I don't personally like tartar sauce, but it does enhance the taste of fish. But that doesn't matter, because I'm eating ice cream.
The thing is, I liked Duke in DN3D and don't like him here, because they went from making him a silly quip-machine parody of 80s action heroes to making him a legitimate character who everyone looks up to... who makes even worse quips than before and talks just enough for him to come off as an asshole rather than a blue collar ass-kicker.

They expanded him just enough to make him suck. At this point it feels like they're trying to build on Duke Nukem as a legitimate character rather than as a parody of 80s action, and taking a parody seriously almost always winds up feeling weird. At least it does for me and quite a few other people. :)

Edit: for an example of what I mean, consider all the sex jokes in this game. Yeah, in Duke 3D he was rescuing babes and giving money to strippers, but those were cheeky diversions from the action (just like T&A in an action flick is there to break up the explosions and make sure things don't get too homoerotic). In DNF, you've got entire segments of the game (hell, entire chapters) that are nothing but sex jokes and innuendo and T&A. The balance really shifted, and what was an occasional cheap gag in DN3D now takes center stage right next to the action.

All the same elements are still there, but the way they're arranged this time definitely changes things, and it's not a change everyone likes. Tits 'n action in Duke Nukem is like philosophy and action in The Matrix... seems like it'd be easy to maintain right up to the point where it gets messed up.

It's still a parody, it's just also a parody of the people worshiping him. In a world where Brad Pitt is on the cover of every magazing and photographers follow his every move I think that more than makes sense.

It's painfully obvious to me a lot of people just don't get it. And that's fine... I don't get Glee, or Will Ferrell, or any other number of things. I finally watched the giantbomb quicklook and they rip into Duke for using the word "babe" because "people don't say that anymore." Yeah, no shit, that's the fucking point. He's a parody of 80's action movie heroes.

So is he a parody of 80s action heroes or modern celebrity? And where does slapping wall boobs factor into that? I mean, the strippers made sense in DN3D because it was a parody of the kinds of blue collar action heroes that were popular in the 80s (think Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in little China or Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse), but wall boobs? Dreaming about having to work for a lap dance? This stuff doesn't work as a parody of 80s action, and it has nothing to do with modern celebrity. It's just ramping up the sex because DN3D had it and this one needs more of it, there's nothing else to it.

I get it just fine. "It" being the fact that 3D Realms had a bunch of different iterations of this game and lost track of what they were doing along the way. It takes a walking Chuck Norris joke, bases a character around the punchline and forgets there was ever a Chuck Norris.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/06/duke-nukem-catches-a-plane-as-only-duke-nukem-can/

The wall boobs are kind of weird, I grant you. The strip club stuff is indeed a parody of the overly sexual macho man thing. Not every joke works perfectly, no. I said that above... I also said I have never seen a comedy that worked 100% of the time in my life.

In any case you're right that it obviously suffered from fractured development. No one is saying this is a perfect game or even a great game. We're saying it isn't a 2 out of 10 and it isn't some unable to be enjoyed slog through hell, at least for some of us. It's a good game with some flaws that feels outdated but since modern games aren't as good as old ones that's a hidden blessing in some aspects. That's all I am personally saying.

And definitely some people don't get it. Giantbomb didn't get it, for sure. Joystiq didn't get it. Maybe you do and maybe you don't, it certainly seems like you don't to me.

The more I play, the more obvious it is that it's not for everybody. I remember when I saw Duke's laundry list LOLing immediately when I saw it. 1 red tank top, 1 pair blue jeans, 1 pair tighty whities and 2 tube socks for stuffing the aforementioned tighty whities.

Personally, I love references and DNF has tons of them everywhere. Not to mention the irony and the little touches like Duke driving around in a toy car and using the buttocks of a statue of a woman as a part of a ramp.

I haven't had as much time over the last few days to play on account of having to babysit my nephew. But once I figured out that my controller needed calibration the game got a lot easier.

It would've been nice if the game weren't so easy, even on the hardest setting.

Just because I don't find a joke funny doesn't mean I don't get it. I get what 3D Realms was trying to do, but I also think that George Broussard was too in love with Duke as a character to actually fully let him be a parody of anything. So we get a game devoted to telling us how awesome Duke is on a constant basis, which doesn't mesh well with his origins as an 80s action hero parody since those were almost always working class underdogs.

And if it's meant to be a parody of people's reactions to action heroes, then it might have worked back in 1998 when Duke was still a legitimately big character in gaming. The gag doesn't play as well after over a decade of jokes.

But the biggest problem is that his persona is elevated above the action a lot of the time, when the entire reason people loved him is because of the action. It's like the later Jackie Chan movies that tried to rely on his comic abilities rather than his martial arts... his ability to deliver a joke made his action movies more notable, but they were an interesting aspect of his work, not the defining feature. Duke's thing for the babes was an amusing quirk that's been elevated into one of the defining aspects of the game, and although it worked as parody when it was an aside, it fails as parody when it's a defining feature.

tl;dr: Duke Nukem 3D was based on 80s action movies. Duke Nukem Forever was based on Duke Nukem 3D. The original source of the parody is lost, and the attempt to parody celebrity culture falls flat when Duke hasn't been a "celebrity" for over a decade.

EDIT: as for it not being a 2/10, I guess that's subjective, although remember that's the lowest score it's gotten so far and Destrucoid is kind of known for trolling. The rest of the reviews seem fair to me, given that I feel the same way about most of the game's flaws as they do. I mean, I understand that you and some others like it, but at the end of the day I was miserable while playing it so I find it hard to say "a 4/10 is too low" because that's about how much fun I had with it, if that.

Edit 2: hedwards, I will admit that the laundry list was pretty amusing. It seems that the more hidden a joke is, the better it is. Which makes me wonder why they insisted on shoving all their worst material right up in front.

I guess it's a matter of perspective, most of the things I'm laughing at are pretty subtle. I think that people who weren't brought up on Benny Hill and don't like Futurama, or similar referential humor are likely at a disadvantage. Most of the jokes seem to require knowledge of a wide variety of pop culture. Some of them like the Holsome twins carrying duke around in their purse aren't particularly subtle, in that you don't need to know who Paris Hilton is to get it.

IMHO finding the humor funny is an integral part of getting it. It's like other forms of entertainment, if you don't like it, then chances are it's not for you, and there are varying degrees of getting it. One of the reasons why I can watch Benny Hill, Monty Python and such so many times, is that I get it a bit more fully each time I watch.