Fuke yeah: Duke Nukem's no flakey fluke

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 18 October 2010 11:06

Your IT - Entertainment

All right, mother-nukers, Duke Nukem's soon to blast and wisecrack his way back into the hearts and minds of both the old and a new generation with two radioactively tasty treats: the loooong-awaited sequel that is Duke Nukem Forever and Duke Nukem Next-Gen: a redux of the 1996 Duke Nukem 3D. Go get some!

Duke Nukem, the Schwarzenegger-esque first person shooter action hero that is the antithesis of the original and much quieter characters in 'corridor shooters' has caught the public imagination several times in his gaming incarnations.

While Duke is famous for his comedic wisecracks, bad language and butt-kickin' behaviour, the character and those behind him are even more famous for having never released 'Duke Nukem Forever', a sequel that has spent more than a decade as 'vapourware'.

However that's all set to change, with games developer Gearbox having taken on the challenge to finally release what is surely one of the most anticipated games of all time and playable code already available to a very lucky few, including visitors last Saturday, 16th of October, at 'Australia's First Video Game Bar' where for twelve hours and on five screens, Duke Nukem Forever was playable by the public!

If the actual release of Duke Nukem Forever actually lives up to the hype, proving to be a great single player and massively mighty multiplayer game, it could step up Gearbox's profit profits into overdrive and guarantee Mr Nukem - and his fans - passage onto Starship Duke Nukem: The Inevitable Sequel that needs to be even better than the previous game.

After all, it's a big universe. There are plenty of aliens out there and they all seem to want a piece of us!

But focusing on sequels isn't the only way to keep Duke's fans truly satisfied.

Frederick "fresch" Schreiber is a Duke Nukem fan that started doing work on remaking some classic games using today's 3D game engines.

Although he started work on Daikatana and SiN remakes, Daikatana wasn't a popular game (despite interest from Daikatana's designer, John Romero, who also designed Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake in seeing an updated version) and SiN was, according to 'fresch', shut down by 'MumboJumbo who own the rights'.

So, fresch decided to start work on a Duke Nukem 3D remake, using the Unreal Engine 3 - the same engine being used for Duke Nukem Forever, and went about the process of trying to get the rights to actually release the game in some form, rather than doing a lot of work and having the efforts shut down.

Continued on page two, please blast a hole through to page two to read on!