The Great Playthrough: Game 54 - Duke Nukem 3D

That's right, the pictures of me holding
games and making stupid faces are back!

Duke Nukem 3D
Released on: PC, Sega Saturn, Playstation, Nintendo 64, Mega Drive...... and many many more
Played on: Sega Saturn
Release date: 1996

It's time for another FPS review... no, don't skip to the end assuming that I hated it. It's possible that I didn't... I mean, I know that my track record is that of the four FPS' I have reviewed in this blog, three of them have scored a 6 or under... but that doesn't mean I've written of the genre, does it?

Well, no.

First of all, I must make one thing clear. There is no genre of games which I would completely write off. I'll try anything. Sports games, strategy games, RPGs... hell, I'll even play Sega Bass Fishing to give it a try. As sometimes you can get a diamond in the rough.

And is Duke Nukem 3D that diamond?

Well - sort of.

I remember playing Duke 3D for ages when it first came out on PC, and I thought it was one of the greatest things ever. It was like Doom - but funny! How could I not like it? And that sense of good humour and entertainment swept me up and kept me playing through this review.

Don't get me wrong, as a game it is far from perfect. In fact, if "perfect" was a small island in the outer hebredes, Duke Nukem 3D would be somewhere in orbit around Jupiter.

But for some reason, it's entertaining. Even though it is full of problems (wonky jumping physics, the dodgy sound effects, the difficulty level that isn't so much a curve as it is a series of random, very sharp, unexpected spikes!)  it still kept me smiling all the way through - through the frustrations, through the strange level design - I was always entertained.

And sometimes that's all that you need from a game! It's not a game I shall EVER play to completion, because I suspect it would wear thin after a while, but for the occasional bit of FPS blasting? I could do far worse.

I suppose I ought to talk about how this game, originally designed for PC, fares on a console with a traditional joypad setup - and the answer is, remarkably well! (Apart from the fact that you cannot aim upwards, so if enemies are hovering you need to jump AND shoot - which drives your accuracy down through the floor!)

This has been a very "bitty" review, I know, but I feel like a review should reflect a game, and I feel that Duke Nukem 3D is fun in short bursts.

(Plus, I know that the previous blog was very long, so I thought I'd make this shorter!)

Rating: 7/10
Time played: Just under an hour.
Will I play it again? Not instantly, but probably sometime in the future...