by: Noah Hess

October 02, 2008

Duke Nukem 3D is one of those games that most every gamer knows about. The game was legendary back when it was released on the PC in January of 1996. Now it has been released on the Xbox Live Arcade with some enhancements and online play for 800MSP. So how does the game hold up after more then twelve years from its original release?


For those of you unfamiliar with the game think of another FPS classic, Doom but with a touch of camp and plenty of gags. Though they are both games you should try out, Duke Nukem is the better of the two. The game is a FPS, of course, with 2D graphics mixed with some 3D elements. You play as Duke Nukem who has just returned to the planet to find that aliens have occupied it, and your job is to chew bubble gum and kick ass. You start out with a pistol and your foot and as you go through the game you get other weapons like pipe bombs, shrink rays, freeze guns, RPGs, and more. The game has over 30 levels and takes place in over four episodes. The first level takes place in L.A. in an X-rated video theater. The game has a lot of ‘adult’ situations and humor. Many of Duke’s lines such as “Hail to the king baby” come from the Evil Dead movies and other blockbuster titles. You even at one point follow up on Duke’s threat of “I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck”. The game can be beaten quickly if you speed run through it, otherwise it's going to take some time and you are going to get your money’s worth for sure.


The game play remains unchanged from the PC versions except for the fact that you are now using a 360 controller to play it and it has support for rumble. The only bad thing about the controller use over a keyboard is that you now cycle between weapons with the bumpers, meaning you won’t be able to instantly select the weapon you want without cycling through every one in between the on you have equipped and the one you want. It's not a big deal though.


The new features added, such as the review and respawn video when you die, are all great additions that are just making a good game better. What you can do now when you die is watch your own gameplay from the beginning of the level to the point that you were killed, you can then choose anywhere on that timeline to respawn. This keeps you from having to start the level over from the beginning or constantly save/load your game and it works very well. This also saves clips of your runs and allows you to upload these videos to the xbox live leader boards if you so desire. The game now has bilinear filtering and motion blur as well which adds to the visuals of the game over the PC counterpart. Needless to say, if you are used to playing Gears of War and Halo you are going to think the graphics suck (which in comparison, they do). However, those that were fans of the original will notice the slight improvement.


The game also now offers online co-op and versus (Dukematch). The Dukematch games are either free-for-all (up to 8 players) or one-on-one gametypes, there are no team gametypes. It is kind of fun for as old as the game is, but don’t expect it to be something you just keep going back to. The place where the online aspect really shines is the co-op play with up to 8 players. So if you have 7 other friends that have the game you can invite them all to play with you or join some strangers. You can have any combination of friends/strangers playing with you and either way you are going to have a blast.

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The game is the classic Duke with some great tweaks and it still rocks just as hard as it did when it came out on PC. At only ten bucks you can’t really go wrong. You will also be able to get some easy achievements if you are into that thing.

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