Duke Nukem

If you can imagine Super Mario with blonde hair and a really big gun, then you have Duke Nukem 1. Without charm and grace this game, now widely available as shareware, is mindless slog of shooting the same baddies and jumping the same ramps for three long episodes. But this is where it all started and if ever start to feel nostalgic then boot up the 486 (anything over is truly wasted on this game) and cause some mini carnage.

For hardcore DukeMatchers only I'm afraid folks.

Near future. Year of 1997. Dr. Proton(changed from Blunderwitz early in his career. Good change!) is a brilliant nuclear physicist. A radiation accident leads him to go berserk, and sport a wicked steel plate, think Mortal Kombat's Kano meets Batman's Two-Face. He works out of his secret underground fortress. Now a madman, he's determined to take over the world. He'll use his army of high technology robots to help him complete his plan. They are in serious need of being taken out. The appearance of some of them is similar to the T-1 of... ugh, Terminator 3. Others are like the flying HK-Drones. Some are like the ED209 with back legs that function like pogo sticks, allowing them to hop high in the air. You, as Duke Nukem, the eponymous superhero for our modern time, takes upon the task of stopping him, when the CIA hires him for it. The first episode takes place in the devastated city of Los Angeles, with you starting atop a skyscraper, and working your way down. It's been taken over, with serious property damage done and no people to be found. The second, you chase him to his secret moonbase. In the third, he escapes into the future, and you pursue him through time, to put a permanent end to his mad schemes.

This is colorful and seriously addictive. The main goal of the game is to get to the exit of each map, while destroying enemies and collecting. Many objects on screen can be shot including obstacles and blocks. Besides points, some collectibles include powerups for health(one of the handful of bars, or all of them at once... and watch them closely! You may find you have to give up at least one in some places to even complete this) or rad weapon(while it'll fry some of the pick-ups, the one leg of chicken will become a whole one! Yum...?), which looks like a SPAS-12 because that's awesome, and some inventory items with special abilities. Find keys for the doors, along with other manual transportation: teleporters, elevators(hold down for how far). The last portion of each has no exit, and is instead completed by finding and defeating the villain. At the end of all but the final one, you can receive up to seven 10,000 point bonuses, earned by making certain achievements in the area, such as destroying all cameras, through which you're being watched. Enter your name on the High Score table. The background might have a spaceship. You can save after any area, with F1 and then S. There are 9 slots, and it stores how much life you have, and goes back to that when you die! So don't suicide to get full if you didn't have it!

This plays like the first three Commander Keens, or Dark Ages, from the same period. Simple jumping puzzles(some requiring special boots! And there are gloves that let you climb along some ceilings, and if there's a platform above, throw yourself up there, tons of fun, and allows for creative level design, which they take great advantage of), some memorization, increasing in challenge gradually and all about timing, speed, reflexes and eye-to-hand-coordination. This hardly ever cheaply throws things at you to make you do things over, instead relying on your skill, and your ability to roll with sudden occurrences. Say, is something falling out of the sky? Has it recently? No to both? Then it for sure will soon. Unless your location is inside. What will it be? Wait and see, and be ready for it! Of course, a lot of things, the first time you see 'em, you're not sure whether to touch and/or use, kill and/or avoid, or something you'll just pass through. Rarely do a lot of these show up at once, they're introduced over time. You open boxes for their contents. Note that the grey ones may have dynamite! Hey, you get about half a second to get away, and their reach is relatively short! They go boom outwards, meaning that their creamy nougat center is safe. And they may contain the letters of your name, which don't only serve to teaching basic spelling. Not everything in your way can be killed or the like, some of these things, you can merely avoid, such as the exhausts that periodically send out flames, the ground-spears that may be bigger than they look, the stationary at-a-set-pace-vary-for-each-bouncing spiked balls that you have to be careful around.

There are numerous varied foes, and they have different armor, movement patterns and the like. They and you attack to either side(and don't touch them!), so be at the right height when firing, and not when their projectiles would hit! And keep in mind, they move as fast as you, so they can be outrun! Some attack when they'd get you, some every so often. They often don't move if you can't see them, so may have to inch closer to them to get them to approach you. Mutant, green, one-eyed snake-like ones... hey, get your mind outta the gutter! Actually, that probably is where they come from, biological waste or something. Nearly half of them is just the mouth! It has half a dozen legs or more, and walks on vertical surfaces! Helicopters. Man-sized purple Energizer bunny(!). Floating orb-worms. You'll traverse mercury mines. The graphics do borrow heavily from other ones, such as Turrican and the MS-DOS version of Mega Man. Great place to... mimic, let's go with that. The solid sound FX do come off very basic today, and electrical currents produce what is meant to a low hum, and is now, annoying. There being no music gets to be deafeningly silent. Lines are written, not spoken, and instead of cutscenes, backstory and plot is conveyed via text. This took me 4 hours to complete.

There is a lot of mild violence in this. I recommend this to any fan of run and gun platform games, especially from this era. 8/10

I'm a fan of all members of the "Duke Nukem" family. I started playing Duke Nukem in 1991 when it was first around, and I was amazed by the "realism"! Nowadays, this sounds absurd. Who would think someone with completely red skin and yellow hair is realistic? Back then, it was a triumph for computer gaming. I enjoyed the side scrolling games, and I still recommend it if you feel nostalgic.

7/10