Sorry Duke, but your stint as the poster boy for video game satire has long since passed into the annals of 90s pop culture. As everyone expected, Duke Nukem Forever's eventual release after a tumultuous 15 years in development hell resulted in a game that felt like various disjointed pieces of code stapled together to form a barely workable whole. The series' trademark humour felt painfully dated. Gameplay fared no better either, and mechanics genuinely felt like they were from the 90s, and not in a good way. Duke himself came across as a relic of an old, outdated industry dominated by a male perspective; spouting supposed-to-be-pithy references to past events in the entertainment industry that were already years old themselves. Despite the missteps of recent years though, Duke remains an iconic - if dated - video game character. He's a part of the industry's history, and we shouldn't let Duke Nukem Forever cloud the many fond memories we had as our younger selves playing Duke Nukem 3D on a dishwasher-sized PC.
Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.
