I watched my buddy play the first three hours of the game last night. Despite my forwarding dozens of reviews indicating how piss poor the game was to him, he bought it anyway for full price. That was all the Duke I needed to see for the rest of my lifetime.
Its sad that so many people are going to buy this just because it has the Duke name on it. I really hate that a game company will be rewarded for creating something so half-assed. Heres another fairly thorough review from Totalbuscuit, my current favorite game comentator. Watching the gameplay footage it actually looks kinda tedious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q86vWgaLuwE
Exactly. I feel bad for the devs to have spent so much time on this only to have the game universally panned. That's going to leave a mark. I feel they might have gone over the line in the humour department. I mean, it feels more like Postal and Postal 2 in terms of humour rather than the fun corny humour of Duke3D. I visited my brother this week, and he surprised me by saying that he bought the game even knowing it was terrible. Like me, he liked the first one (technically the 3rd one) and we often death-matched together. At this point, the devs are likely positioning themselves for the nostalgia alone.
I'd buy that. I never played the original game. In fact--I'm surprised that nobody thought of doing this before now. Surely I'm not the only person who missed out on older games like this, and would buy updated versions today? Some of these older games won't even run on today's computers When they're done remaking Duke Nukem, they can remake Blood and System Shock.
I can only imagine what Gearbox felt when it paid for the assets to DNF, received them, started looking through everything, and saw what it had just ponied up for. I would imagine Randy Pitchford has voodoo dolls of George Broussard and Scott Miller that he abuses on a regular basis nowadays. GOG has already added a bunch of EA's back catalog (including Wing Commander: Privateer!) this month, and it said recently that it hopes to include other ORIGIN titles such as System Shock and Syndicate in the near future. They run in a custom DOSBox shell, so you shouldn't have a problem with them.
Wow, I've heard of GOG but I had no idea their catalogue had so many awesome games. Ultima Underworld, Privateer, Dungeon Keeper....that front page looks like my root directory in the 90s.
Agreed. Actually, part of the agreement is that they can't sell it. It will be available for free. There'd been lots of Unreal mods in the past that had all ceased due to legal action, but until now, nothing has had an official license. But If it's good enough, I can see the devs changing the license and selling it on XBL or something. And yeah, GOG is a great site. I often buy older games from there that I missed out on the first time around.
I like this review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th2z0xT-X5s He says that it's only the mainstream media that is consistently giving it 3/10. He thinks it deserves 6.5/10, and so do most players it seems. So the professional reviewers either... (i) are told/persuaded what rating to give a game. (ii) know more-or-less what rating they're going to give a game before actually playing it, and enter the reviewing process with that prejudice of whether they want to see the game to be a success or a failure. (iii) rate a game highly if it follows the direction the big gaming companies want to lead us in. They rate a game low if it strays far from that direction.
Watch the Giant Bomb Quick Look and fast-forward to the end where they try out the multiplayer. It looks like it's WORSE than the singleplayer campaign by a metric shitload...eight guys running around a boring level ALL playing as Duke (because there are no other character models, apparently) with minimal frames of animation. I just about fell over upon seeing something like that actually get released.
You and me both. The weapons alone would be worth the price of admission. I knew I was going to love that game from the first level--when Caleb kicks open the door of the funeral parlour, and growls: "Open for business!" But I couldn't get Blood II: The Chosen to run at all. That's true. I recently played Necrovision, which has a rating of 63 on Metacritic. That was not without its charms, but I probably wouldn't play it again. And if DNF is no better, then I'll probably give it a miss.
But 6.5 is a fair and accurate score, and that's what players want from a rating. When most players feel that the game is worth 6.5, then that's the rating it should have. A score of 3 is both insulting and misleading, and we have to wonder why all mainstream media outlets are reviewing the game with such an inappropriate score. It reminds me of the uproar we had a few years ago with the music charts, because the number one was dictated by the record companies, and not by consumer spending. It's a case of manipulating data to manipulate hype, instead of data being a neutral measurement of consumer interest.
DNF isn't that bad. Graphics are decent, game play is pretty solid. It's not reinventing anything genre wise but I didn't expect it to. It's Duke Nukem so potty humor abounds but it's not like your running around picking up turds and smearing them all over the place. Although I did do that for a bit. Some of the criticism is justified. Levels are pretty linear and only being able to hang on to two weapons is dumb. Pretty much just running shotgun / chaingun. The RPG and rail gun are cool but not practical in game. They don't hold enough ammo and the pig cops are fast, get in close, and jump at ya, which makes the shotgun pretty effective. I would give the game a 7/10.
If that was the case then all big releases from the major studios would always be rated highly. This is obviously not what happens. I think the real problem is that the actual numbers that reviewers give games, and this extends way beyond the "mainstream" outlets, are simply just completely out of whack. This is true for scores of all ranges. You basically have a good game at 9+, and okay game at 7 and a bad game at 4 or lower. You can see this phenomena on ALL games. This is why I really like Ars Technica's reviews these days... they rate games as either Buy, Rent or Pass. Number scores are so slanted in both directions that they're pretty meaningless now. Nor is this sort of thing limited to actual reviewers... I know of a few games that are 80-ish on metacritic where the user reviews have been flooded with 0's.
Mmm... Better than Kool-Aid. Blood II lost some of the charm, I think, by moving to a futuristic setting. It wasn't a bad game but I didn't find it as quirky and amusing as the original. As for DNF, it does sound like it's being given unfairly poor reviews. It sounds like a thoroughly mediocre game, not an awful one. But it's hard to escape the hype surrounding it. It was never going to be the groundbreaking title 3D Realms promised for so many years. It's a victim of its own publicity, not to mention its interminable development cycle.
Users don't always review fairly either, especially when they are anonymous. People vote zero to pull down the average as much as they can, often because they have some personal grievance with the game/developer. Their vote is not a true opinion of the game's entertainment value. It's a problem with all simple voting systems, which still seem to be used despite various workarounds that do a so-so job, such as: - rejecting votes that fall outside of the interquartile range, or - using a root-mean-square of the number of votes, so that 10 actual votes has weight 100, and 4 actual votes has weight 16. - each reviewer is not anonymous, and that they each have a reputation, and the inaccuracy of their votes decreases their own reviewer reputation, which in turn means that their votes carry less weight. These systems encourage reviewers to give fair and accurate scores, rather than vote tactically or otherwise attempt to distort the rating.