Duke Nukem

Suck It, 3D Realms

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Skesis Nukem

I have been very tight lipped about the Duke Nukem Forever situation. I have been for a decade. When speaking of the project I have only ever defended the guys at 3D Realms. Making a game can’t possibly be an easy undertaking, especially a game established in success, steeped in expectation and absolutely festooned with the hopes and dreams of thousands of loyal fans.

My only real expectation has been that they release a good game that they have packed full of a love of the franchise and dripping with Duke Nukem goodness. Just as Duke Nukem 3D was the obvious evolution of the Duke Nukem platformers, so too should DNF be the obvious evolution of D3D.

At every engine change or design reboot or announcement that it was just a few months away those associates of mine who had already given up the ghost, their collective DNF will depleted, would chatter like the Skeksis at feast about the turgid state of the development process, its distention fueling rage. →  Read the rest

Review – Prey

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I first heard about Prey in 1998 when sci-fi shooter was announced by 3D Realms as being in production for release on the PC “in the near future.” Apparently the near future is almost ten years later, and the PC they were talking about is the XBox 360 (although it was released for the PC shortly after). Regardless of how much time it’s taken, this game was conceived ten years ago and it shows.

We heard you guys were looking for extras for the new Doom game. What the hell is Prey? Ah, why not.

The gameplay is perfectly straightforward. You run around the levels and shoot aliens, you take their weapons, and then you kill tougher aliens with those new, more powerful weapons. There are four basic armaments (a very small number when compared to other recent shooters) and they are as unimaginative as you can get. →  Read the rest

Ten years without a new genre

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A decade is a long time.

A few days ago in the comments to “Houston, Wii have a success story“, I made a rather old-fogey remark about re-hashes of games that I’d essentially been playing since 1992 or thereabouts. This got me thinking…when I complain about developers making the same game over and over, what I’m really complaining about is the fact that they’re making games in the same genres. Do you remember the sense of anticipation when you first played Wolf3D or Dune II? It didn’t just come from what you could do within that game – it was a realization of what that particular game meant for the future…because its underlying gameplay mechanics were simple enough and yet deep enough that they moved from being differently quirky games to inspiring an entire genre of development and expansion. →  Read the rest