Duke Nukem Forever 3D

Will this thing ever go away? Haunted, haunted I am by the orange singlet. It’s because of that gag I made back in 2001 isn’t it? About the alien sex seeming fake? We April Fooled you guys good, and I remember with much fondness that one guy who apparently had a stand-up fight with the manager of a proto-EB because DNF wasn’t out even though PCPP said it was... Yeah. Good times.

So flip to 2011, and how bad was the actual Duke Nukem Forever? So bad it wasn’t even bad. Like Daikatana, it was meh. But unlike Daikatana, a meh DNF wasn’t funny at all. We videogames humourists gave those bastards 15 years of free “publicity”. We needed – DESERVED – a better ultimate punchline. Instead, we got what we got.

Meanwhile, what we got here is a Duke Nukem 3D mod that is built entirely around key scenes from the 2001 trailer. Yes, the 2001 trailer, not the 1998 trailer or the 2003 trailer or any of the other trailers up until that last awful trailer about bricks. All those trailers that, even watching them again now, made DNF seem like the most awesome self-aware FPS that could ever be, gaming’s answer to Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness, working those splines and binary space partitions and meshes or whatever to their max.

Which in all fairness is what this mod does too, pushing the venerable Build engine to absolute breaking point. Okay, technically it doesn’t actually use Build itself, rather a later renderer that supports modern PCs and “high” resolutions, not that 1920 x 1080 does Duke3D’s art any favours. And it cheats with a few real polygons worming their way in among the 2.5D and the sprites. But it’s still butt-ugly and BBS-basic.

The creators, Gambini and Mikko Sandt, call this Duke Nukem Forever 2013 which I think is a little grand. You download the modestly-sized install (mmn, less than 30MB), pull one of the files out of your legitimate copy of Duke3D (cough), and run a batch file. Boom, you’re in. Vegas, baby. All the Duke iconography is here – the Lady Killer, his bike, hot chicks – but instead of being wrapped in a terrible generic shooter from 2011, it’s inside the game we all once knew and told people Quake was better than.

Naturally faux-Build can’t do everything the 2001 trailer asks of the game, and the running gag here is terrible Build-versions of scenes we all watched over and over back in the prehistoric dawn of time itself. It’s got that total conversion feel of trying slightly too hard, and because of that while some bits work really well, other bits are more like... I’m going to say celebrations of how far gaming has since come. The sequences riding Duke’s bike out in the desert while fighting commandeered army trucks that drive around and around and around in an endless loop is either a postmodern comment on how gaming hasn’t really moved on much, or just evidence of how the real DNF was never going to work anyway.

This is what literary historians would call a “palimpsest”, where an older text gets erased and a new one written over it. Except this is a weird sort of palimpsest where the monks went oh crap we weren’t supposed to delete this, quick fill it all back in, and there were only four or five descriptive passages left not covered in medieval Tippex.

I have a reasonable degree of respect for how Gambini and Sandt took a three-second shot of a shameless Terminator rip-off in the trailer and turned it into an entire sequence where you have to battle shameless Terminator rip-offs with an M-16 that has the handle wrapped in a US flag. That the game is coherent at all is impressive.

On the other hand this is also the gaming equivalent of a Sad Keanu meme. DELAYED GAME TO UPGRADE ENGINE --- ENDED UP RELEASING AS DUKE3D TC. It’s cruel in a way, because for all the George Broussards at 3D Realms, surely there were rooms full of dedicated, passionate creative types who, at the very least, churned out kickass trailers year after year. DNF, the concept, was cheese grilled to perfection, and for years we waited for our chance to jump that jetboat through the shack window, to admire that shiny multipoly stripper ass. And then we waited more years with amused cynicism while we played Half-Life 2 (and secretly wished it had more of DNF’s irreverence). Finally, we waited a last brace of years with a sort of puzzled frown over how this damn thing could still be alive, and when 3D Realms imploded and I cannot even be bothered looking up who it was picked it up, we expected, at the very LEAST, something as good as Prey.

The Dukiest (Duchiest? DOUCHIEST??) thing about Duke Nukem Forever 3D 2013 Edition is that the mod itself is a giant raised middle finger to 3D Realms and Human Head and every sallow corporate hack who shuffled millions of dollars around various bank accounts in the name of this benighted IP.

If this had come out in 1997, it would have been a triumph. A final grand, glorious, stupid, joyous hurrah for the age of 2.5D. Today, it’s a cat with a pithy phrase under it in Impact. Please Duke, for your own sake, as a meme in the true sense of the word, just die.