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STEAM announcements & updates 2011 Thread 3 | Buy now, play later.
- Thread starter Snuggles
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Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Duke Nukem Forever
I liked it. I didn't love it. It's not a great game. It's not in any way a follow-up to Duke 3D. But I liked it. I would place it along-side most of the sort of average or forgettable games I've played. I'm re-reading through reviews and I'm truly flabbergasted at how the game ended up with a 50-odd Metacritic--it's not half as bad on any level as most of the games that get slammed as hard as this one did.
Here's what doesn't work about the game:
- It's ugly. Sometimes incredibly ugly. There are very few areas that I'd describe as aesthetically pleasing. There are a few places on the Vegas Strip, inside and outside the Casino, and the stages about two thirds of the way through the game where Duke gets shrunk and goes inside a machine are nice visually. Here's a screenshot of what I thought was the nicest looking area in the game.
- The Ego system. At the beginning of the game you have virtually no health. Interacting with objects, Duke 3d style, gives you additional health. By the end of the game you have much more. This is combined with regenerating health. I feel like both systems are working against each other. I played on the "Medium" difficulty and explored a lot, and I could generally just power through environmental hazards
- Some of the first-person platforming. There are a number of such segments in the game. Some of them work, some of them don't. Unfortunately the first major platforming segment in the game, inside Duke's Casino, is probably the worst in the game. It's really too bad, because some of the later first-person platforming sections worked very well for me.
- The dream sequence level. Basically it's a 20 minute level where you can play with a ton of different interactive objects, but the actual level itself is stupid and once you're done playing with stuff, it takes too long to move on.
- The two-weapon limit. Okay, so, they patched the game so you can carry four weapons. I played with four weapons. This doesn't apparently change the game's balance at all, so the game is still balanced for two weapons. I felt like I had broken the game's balance by keeping the Devastator for the entire game once I got it for the first time. Sometimes I had no ammo, but most major setpieces had an unlimited ammo refill box. Bosses can only be hurt with explosives*, and every boss area has infinite ammo crates for explosives.
- The humour doesn't connect all that well. There are a few funny lines; when you finish a puzzle that uses valves, Duke says "God I hate Valve puzzles", but for every funny line there's a lame "LOL HAY GUYS OTHER GAMES LOL" reference. I wish they had played a few more sight gags. I kind of feel like Duke 3D made light of the fact that Duke had his own burger joint and tons of shit named after him and was this massive egotist, whereas DNF plays it almost straight about those things. There's nothing visually humourous about Duke Burger. It's just a burger place. Everyone in the game takes it seriously. So it's not a joke. I did find the ending funny.
- Octaking, the second-last boss. You fight him twice. The second fight is abominably bad. You're on a thin straight platform with essentially no cover. You have to run back and forth. He repeatedly spawns enemies who fly to either end of the platform. Since you're basically restricted to 2D movement, you can't really dodge the shots the enemies fire at you. This was very frustrating. I googled this after finishing the game and everyone else found it frustrating too.
Here's what worked about the game:
- Variety. The game really does mix it up. You have platforming segments. You have shooting segments. You have vehicle segments--these are not amazing, but they do break up the pace and they are functional. You have turret and helicopter segments. You have physics puzzles. You have setpiece battles. I never felt like any one segment dragged on too long, things felt very dynamic.
- The guns themselves. The shotgun had a nice kick. Enemies were appropriately squishy. The Melee execution kills were fun and presented a nice risk/reward balance. Melee executions regenerate your health to full immediately; so especially if you use the freeze ray, you need to strike a balance between not getting shot while you freeze the enemies and getting to punch enough of them to regen your health. The shrink ray is underused, as is the freeze ray, and both are really just one-off gimmicks since you can only carry a small handful of weapons and they don't deserve a slot in your inventory. There are three new weapons, all carried by aliens; an alien machine gun, an alien rifle, and an alien homing mini-rocket energy launcher. Meh. Compared with Duke 3D, the explosive weapons are the main change; both the RPG and Devastator have pretty low ammo counts so they're basically unusable outside of boss battles where there are ammo crates, and you MUST use them in the boss battles with no option not to. Laser tripmines are useless, pipebombs are better than they were. I rarely used the Ripper but it seemed to inherit the pain/hitstun effects from the best chainguns gaming had. Anyway, I generally felt that the guns and shooting things were good. The game is slow enough that I played on a console controller and the auto-aim system was well chosen, no bullet bending autoaim, but it did have a snap-to when you use the iron sight type button.
- The... I can't believe I'm saying this... physics puzzles. They all worked for me. I didn't get any jank where I couldn't get mechanisms to trigger. They were all logical. They all had the good feeling when you figured out what to do. The scissor-lift / crane barrel puzzle in the Hoover dam was fun.
- Getting drunk. When you drink beer, your vision blurs and you take less damage. Good if you're surrounded and you just want to survive long enough to run and regenerate. What I liked was Duke drunkenly slurring "YOU'RE MAH BOY, BLUE!!!!" as he crushed and threw the beer cans. Hahahaha. Unfortunately the post-game soundboard does not include this line as best as I can tell.
- Some of the first-person platforming. About half of Duke Burger involves Duke being shrunk and platforming his way around the kitchen area. The floor is electrified, so you need to get to the power switch and turn it off. You go around and up and down the shelves and the actual pathway is pretty dense. You end up hopping across frying grills by jumping and landing on top of buns so you don't burn yourself. It's funny, it's well paced, it's well executed, and the jumping physics never bothered me.
- Technical performance. The game ran fine and the load times were short. The console versions had serious load time issues, but they weren't present here.
- The unlockable concept art, soundboard, development screenshots, trailers, and development timeline. I especially liked the shots of the "studio" (read: house) that the game got finished in after 3D Realms went under. Really a labour of love for those guys.
Overall:
I think that if you approach the game without any baggage, and you enjoy your time with 7/10 shooters, you will enjoy this. I liked it better than Deus Ex 2 (Metacritic 80). I liked it better than Dark Sector (Metacritic 66). I liked it better than Dark Void (Metacritic 57). I liked it better than either Kane and Lynch game (Metacritic 67 and 66). I liked it better than shockingly bad stuff like Exodus from the Earth. If you have really discerning standards and you only like playing amazing games, skip DNF. But if you play a lot of iffy stuff, you'll enjoy your time here.
8.2 hours played on Steam including time I left it paused on the menu, time spent on the post-game unlockables, etc. I played on the Medium difficulty 31/62 achievements.
I took 26 screens of DNF while playing. They spoil some of the bosses. Feel free to check them out.
I liked it. I didn't love it. It's not a great game. It's not in any way a follow-up to Duke 3D. But I liked it. I would place it along-side most of the sort of average or forgettable games I've played. I'm re-reading through reviews and I'm truly flabbergasted at how the game ended up with a 50-odd Metacritic--it's not half as bad on any level as most of the games that get slammed as hard as this one did.
Here's what doesn't work about the game:
- It's ugly. Sometimes incredibly ugly. There are very few areas that I'd describe as aesthetically pleasing. There are a few places on the Vegas Strip, inside and outside the Casino, and the stages about two thirds of the way through the game where Duke gets shrunk and goes inside a machine are nice visually. Here's a screenshot of what I thought was the nicest looking area in the game.
- The Ego system. At the beginning of the game you have virtually no health. Interacting with objects, Duke 3d style, gives you additional health. By the end of the game you have much more. This is combined with regenerating health. I feel like both systems are working against each other. I played on the "Medium" difficulty and explored a lot, and I could generally just power through environmental hazards
- Some of the first-person platforming. There are a number of such segments in the game. Some of them work, some of them don't. Unfortunately the first major platforming segment in the game, inside Duke's Casino, is probably the worst in the game. It's really too bad, because some of the later first-person platforming sections worked very well for me.
- The dream sequence level. Basically it's a 20 minute level where you can play with a ton of different interactive objects, but the actual level itself is stupid and once you're done playing with stuff, it takes too long to move on.
- The two-weapon limit. Okay, so, they patched the game so you can carry four weapons. I played with four weapons. This doesn't apparently change the game's balance at all, so the game is still balanced for two weapons. I felt like I had broken the game's balance by keeping the Devastator for the entire game once I got it for the first time. Sometimes I had no ammo, but most major setpieces had an unlimited ammo refill box. Bosses can only be hurt with explosives*, and every boss area has infinite ammo crates for explosives.
- The humour doesn't connect all that well. There are a few funny lines; when you finish a puzzle that uses valves, Duke says "God I hate Valve puzzles", but for every funny line there's a lame "LOL HAY GUYS OTHER GAMES LOL" reference. I wish they had played a few more sight gags. I kind of feel like Duke 3D made light of the fact that Duke had his own burger joint and tons of shit named after him and was this massive egotist, whereas DNF plays it almost straight about those things. There's nothing visually humourous about Duke Burger. It's just a burger place. Everyone in the game takes it seriously. So it's not a joke. I did find the ending funny.
- Octaking, the second-last boss. You fight him twice. The second fight is abominably bad. You're on a thin straight platform with essentially no cover. You have to run back and forth. He repeatedly spawns enemies who fly to either end of the platform. Since you're basically restricted to 2D movement, you can't really dodge the shots the enemies fire at you. This was very frustrating. I googled this after finishing the game and everyone else found it frustrating too.
Here's what worked about the game:
- Variety. The game really does mix it up. You have platforming segments. You have shooting segments. You have vehicle segments--these are not amazing, but they do break up the pace and they are functional. You have turret and helicopter segments. You have physics puzzles. You have setpiece battles. I never felt like any one segment dragged on too long, things felt very dynamic.
- The guns themselves. The shotgun had a nice kick. Enemies were appropriately squishy. The Melee execution kills were fun and presented a nice risk/reward balance. Melee executions regenerate your health to full immediately; so especially if you use the freeze ray, you need to strike a balance between not getting shot while you freeze the enemies and getting to punch enough of them to regen your health. The shrink ray is underused, as is the freeze ray, and both are really just one-off gimmicks since you can only carry a small handful of weapons and they don't deserve a slot in your inventory. There are three new weapons, all carried by aliens; an alien machine gun, an alien rifle, and an alien homing mini-rocket energy launcher. Meh. Compared with Duke 3D, the explosive weapons are the main change; both the RPG and Devastator have pretty low ammo counts so they're basically unusable outside of boss battles where there are ammo crates, and you MUST use them in the boss battles with no option not to. Laser tripmines are useless, pipebombs are better than they were. I rarely used the Ripper but it seemed to inherit the pain/hitstun effects from the best chainguns gaming had. Anyway, I generally felt that the guns and shooting things were good. The game is slow enough that I played on a console controller and the auto-aim system was well chosen, no bullet bending autoaim, but it did have a snap-to when you use the iron sight type button.
- The... I can't believe I'm saying this... physics puzzles. They all worked for me. I didn't get any jank where I couldn't get mechanisms to trigger. They were all logical. They all had the good feeling when you figured out what to do. The scissor-lift / crane barrel puzzle in the Hoover dam was fun.
- Getting drunk. When you drink beer, your vision blurs and you take less damage. Good if you're surrounded and you just want to survive long enough to run and regenerate. What I liked was Duke drunkenly slurring "YOU'RE MAH BOY, BLUE!!!!" as he crushed and threw the beer cans. Hahahaha. Unfortunately the post-game soundboard does not include this line as best as I can tell.
- Some of the first-person platforming. About half of Duke Burger involves Duke being shrunk and platforming his way around the kitchen area. The floor is electrified, so you need to get to the power switch and turn it off. You go around and up and down the shelves and the actual pathway is pretty dense. You end up hopping across frying grills by jumping and landing on top of buns so you don't burn yourself. It's funny, it's well paced, it's well executed, and the jumping physics never bothered me.
- Technical performance. The game ran fine and the load times were short. The console versions had serious load time issues, but they weren't present here.
- The unlockable concept art, soundboard, development screenshots, trailers, and development timeline. I especially liked the shots of the "studio" (read: house) that the game got finished in after 3D Realms went under. Really a labour of love for those guys.
Overall:
I think that if you approach the game without any baggage, and you enjoy your time with 7/10 shooters, you will enjoy this. I liked it better than Deus Ex 2 (Metacritic 80). I liked it better than Dark Sector (Metacritic 66). I liked it better than Dark Void (Metacritic 57). I liked it better than either Kane and Lynch game (Metacritic 67 and 66). I liked it better than shockingly bad stuff like Exodus from the Earth. If you have really discerning standards and you only like playing amazing games, skip DNF. But if you play a lot of iffy stuff, you'll enjoy your time here.
8.2 hours played on Steam including time I left it paused on the menu, time spent on the post-game unlockables, etc. I played on the Medium difficulty 31/62 achievements.
I took 26 screens of DNF while playing. They spoil some of the bosses. Feel free to check them out.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
Damn that looks nice, but it's Mac only? 
Also, I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who really dug the kitchen segment of Duke.
Also, I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who really dug the kitchen segment of Duke.
Take a look at this thread.Stallion Free said:Damn that looks nice, but it's Mac only?
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Stallion Free said:Damn that looks nice, but it's Mac only?
Yeah, sorry man. I've never seen a good Windows alternative either, so whenever someone asks for a game inventory program I always just hope they have a Mac, hahaha.
It's even got cool statistics like this:
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
Damn, now you gotta rub it in Stump? That's cold.
I wasn't looking for a new way of keeping track really, I just thought I'd try out the one Stump uses.Brazil said:
The Broken Ska Record
Member
Wait...I have a Mac.
Gonna try that out later today. Is there one that keeps track of Blu-rays as well?
Gonna try that out later today. Is there one that keeps track of Blu-rays as well?
Phife Dawg
Member
I use dvd profiler in its free version. Quite satisfied with it but maybe there are other, better tools out there.The Broken Ska Record said:Wait...I have a Mac.
Gonna try that out later today. Is there one that keeps track of Blu-rays as well?
edit:
Uhm, dunno if they have a mac version though.
Huevos de Oro
Member
Why hello there, sexy gurl.SalsaShark said:
Thanks HTown for the guide.
The Broken Ska Record
Member
Cool. I have a PC too, so that's not an issue.Phife Dawg said:
Also, in keeping with the thread, I bought TR: Underworld. Probably won't play it till early next year though.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
The Broken Ska Record said:Wait...I have a Mac.
Gonna try that out later today. Is there one that keeps track of Blu-rays as well?
The same company that makes Gamepedia also makes DVDpedia, Bookpedia, and CDpedia. Unfortunately they're a little on the pricey side so you might want to just pick up one of them. I decided to buy Gamepedia and DVDpedia, personally, because those are the things I really need to keep track of.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Weenerz said:
gahhh
Very special thanks to the donor who fixed this dilemma, ahahah.
Dog Problems
Banned
Awesome to see Kaptain Brawe is finally a daily deal.
jim-jam bongs
Member
SalsaShark said:
That 'stache looks very becoming on you. If I were on you, I'd be coming too.
Huevos de Oro
Member
Lol, when did this happen?Gravijah said:
Dead Prince
Banned
girls can look like that taking pillsSalsaShark said:
show us the goods girl.
jaundicejuice
Member
jim-jam bongs
Member
jaundicejuice said:
Uh okay.
So I feel like donating plasma is really cool. And buying games is cool too. So why do I feel like donating plasma in order to buy games is really fucked?
Glass Rebel
Member
jim-jam bongs said:
As someone who donates regularily I feel appalled by the idea that you should get money for donating. wtf.
jaundicejuice
Member
In regards to the plasma thing...when you're a student you do sketchy shit for money? I dunno.
Also how is the campaign of the early DoW titles, are they still worth playing through? Sorry if this has been discussed but I went back through the last couple of pages searching for "Dawn" and the most I got was a discussion about DoW2 or how the DoW games were somehow too expensive.
Also how is the campaign of the early DoW titles, are they still worth playing through? Sorry if this has been discussed but I went back through the last couple of pages searching for "Dawn" and the most I got was a discussion about DoW2 or how the DoW games were somehow too expensive.
TetraxShards
Member
DoW Vanilla and Winter Assault have okay campaigns. Story's fine if you like Warhammer, and they're reasonably challenging.
Dark Crusade has a Risk-style world map with the seven factions fighting over a planet. It's pretty awesome and should last you awhile. I haven't played Soulstorm.
Dark Crusade has a Risk-style world map with the seven factions fighting over a planet. It's pretty awesome and should last you awhile. I haven't played Soulstorm.
jaundicejuice
Member
Bought. The original DoW games are some of the last games in Steam's back catalogue that I want.
jaundicejuice
Member
derFeef said:
Like jim-jam said, donating plasma is fine, buying games is fine but donating plasma for the express purpose of buying games seems, well, weird.
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