Hello it's blogging time once again and it's July 4th, and that means its Independence Day!, the day we celebrate American Independence, and what better way to celebrate by looking at a game that takes place in the nations capital. Not only that, Its special today as I'm covering a game from the 90s, A decade I don't really look into that much when it comes to classic games. However, that doesn't mean there weren't important and memorable games produced in that decade from Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat to Super Mario World and Sonic The Hedgehog. and when it came to the PC side of gaming, the early to mid 90's was the golden age of Shareware and the early days of first person shooters. Titles like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Descent and Quake all made to the top of game charts nationwide, and one of those titles was Duke Nukem 3D, Developed and published by 3D Realms and distributed by FormGen in 1996 for MS-DOS PCs. With ports for the Macintosh, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and Tiger Electronics Gamecom following shortly after.
For PC Gamers of a certain age, This game needs no introduction, but the story behind it does which begins with 3D Realms themselves, founded in 1987 in Garland, Texas as Apogee Software, By Scott Miller as a way to distribute his game Kingdom Of Kroz.
After helping fellow Texas developer Id Software distribute Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons, they developed their own franchise, and in July of 1991, the result was Duke Nukem, a platformer where you played as the titular character who has to stop the evil Doctor Proton and his army of robotic minions, both on Earth and in space.
Despite the character being just a generic self absobed tough guy with a gun, it was still a success with a sequel, Duke Nukem II being released 2 years later.
After doing more distribution work for Id Software distributing Comander Keen Goodbye, Galaxy! and Wolfenstein 3D, they started looking to develop their own 3D engine for their own First Person Shooter featuring the Duke Nukem character after seeing the success of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Programmer Ken Silverman was tasked with creating this engine, which they called BUILD, with Silverman getting a working demo finished by December of 1994. At first it was going to be more of a Doom like version of the earlier Duke Nukem games, with more fantastical weapons and a silent protagonist.
However, most of the staff at Apogee disapproved of this, In fact it was so poorly received that it was internally known as Lame Duke. Luckily, inspiration struck, and the game got a complete overhaul and became Duke Nukem 3D. It was the final Duke game released under the shareware model, and also the 1st to come to CD. While it used the same format of FPS's of the time including episodicly divided levels to explore, the need to find key cards to unlock doors, monsters closets, and maze like level designs, What set it apart was its personality, uniqueness and humor, the engine made the game full of interactive objects and creative enemies and weapons, as well as industry disrupting adult content. By this point Duke evolved from a generic self absorbed tough guy with a gun to an action hero amalgam of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Campbell and Rowdy Roddy Piper that always got the girls and had something to say, spewing great one-liners and clever pop culture references.
The plot goes that the aliens have crash-landed into the Capitol Building and have launched a massive invasion of Washington, D.C. Duke Nukem arrives to find that the alien invaders have captured several national monuments and critical government buildings, but in the end, Duke defeats the invading army and rescues the President from the Cycloid Emperor.
The pack doesn't add much new content only 10 new levels replacing Shrapnel City in the main Atomic Edition. Each of the levels take place at a different landmark in DC. Level 1: Hell to the Chief takes place in the White House, Level 2: Memorial Service takes place at the Lincoln Memorial, Level 3: Nuked Files takes place in the FBI, Level 4: Smithsonian Terror takes place in the Smithsonian Museum, Level 5: Capitol Punishment takes place in the Capitol building, Level 6: Metro Mayhem takes place in the DC Metro system, Level 7: Brown Water takes place in the DC sewer system, Level 8: Dread October takes place on a submarine, and Level 9: Nuke Proof takes place in a Nuclear Bunker. Level 10: Top Secret is a secret bonus level where you use a time machine to go back to Aztec times, which accessible via a secret exit in Level 6. Now there's good and bad to this, the good is that each level is recreated as hyperrealisticly acutely down to the finest details that the BUILD engine can allow, especially the Smithsonian. The bad is that due to the designs, it leads to a lot of backtracking.
So what do I think? Well, I Do like the attention to detail that they put in the levels, However I can see what the reviewers from back in the day meant when they said the backtracking and puzzles can be quite irksome. As somebody who has yet to complete Duke 3d fully and only started playing duke it out dc just today, I did have to refer to walkthroughs a little to find out every little detail without getting lost. Plus I HATE the timed buttons used to open the door to the Atomic Health in Level 2.