Duke Nukem watches Oprah. I learnt this from the very second line of dialogue in Duke Nukem, the original platform game.
This was my first experience with Duke Nukem, outside of the venerable volumes of content written about this iconic video game character I'd read so much about in Australian gaming magazine PC Powerplay while growing up.
Yet, I never, until this day, had played the original game.
Those of you who are long-time readers might be quick to jump to my conclusions about this title. It is, after all, a platforming game.
What this is, however, is a cleverly designed platforming game. There's no cheap chasms that you have to time perfectly, and more importantly, you've got a life bar, which makes things far more forgiving compared to the arcade-inpsired instant death of all the original platforming games I've experienced in my gaming life.
This is is essentially a side scrolling doom game, which is what I played on my computer when I was young and impressionable. IN terms of how well this game has aged, well, that's a different story all-together.
When you're running full tilt to the right, or the left, the game engine's draw calls are punished, leading to some poor visual experience that is akin to continued parallax errors - but given the time this game was released, that's the sort of thing that:
- Would not be noticeable when this game released
- Would not be a hardware issue due to the speed of processors at the time
A combination of CRT magnetism and other factors would most certainly be at play in the dens where this game was born, but to me, it "reminded" me of Metroid on the GBA (in 2D) - an interesting side-scrolling shooter / platformer with a story to tell, the story of a rough and tough man who watches daytime TV.