Duke Nukem Forever was in development for fifteen years. A time-frame so long it achieved a unique kind of hype when it was finally announced this legendarily delayed game would see release. Of course not a single person in their right mind thought this thing was good. In fact you could argue many gamers were excited to play a crappy retro first person shooter as long as it had Duke and all the raunchy humor that came with him. But then the game finally came out and was just sort of... okay. Duke Nukem Forever wasn't so bad it was good, but it wasn't very good, either. It played like a middle-of-the-road shooter with a variety of half-hearted mini-games to spice up the repetitive action. It didn't feel old-school enough to be retro, and it wasn't modern enough to feel contemporary, so it all just felt dated. In addition, the real problem facing Duke Nukem was that HE felt dated too. Duke trades on his raunchiness, his ability to give digital strippers digital dollars for boobs, use toilets where you push E on your keyboard to pee, and spit out gritty action-movie one liners - ideally while exploding stuff from a jet pack. And while these elements were all present, they felt somehow benign. Between dated references, lame one-liners and a disjointed vibe overall, Duke felt like an old Andrew Dice Clay routine or Jerky Boyz tape - something better remembered than re-experienced. Duke was a persona dormant for 15 years. He reemerged into a world where franchises like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, Postal, Borderlands and dozens of other games tickle a lot of the same buttons Duke did, but far better. There are countless gaming moments that make you guffaw the same way Duke's raunchiest easter eggs did, and while Duke Nukem 3D deserves credit for being one of the first franchises to own this brand of sophomoric tongue-in-cheek humour, Forever is unfortunately an example of how it can go wrong when the creative spark is extinguished.
