hedwards: Which is the problem, if one doesn't like the game fine, but it's been pretty lopsided in terms of the folks that liked the game tending to be more articulate than those that haven't liked the game. Not to mention the tendency I've seen to deliberately misread comments.
Given that I've felt the exact opposite, I'm inclined to say this is confirmation bias more than anything else. Most of the people defending the game have been saying "it's fun" without saying what
makes it fun, or "Duke is back" which seems to imply they're more excited about the return of the brand than anything else. The complainers have at least given reason for their opinions... so many reasons, in fact, that they get labeled as nitpickers!
But again, maybe I'm just inserting my own reasons into negative replies and seeing them as better reasoned. Maybe you're doing the same.
As for the game's humor...well, I view it the same way I view Disaster Movie. I don't think less of anybody as a person if they laugh at it, but I'm not likely to take their recommendations on comedy in the future. And yes, I really do find the humor on the level of Disaster Movie, nothing but a stream of faux-offensiveness mixed in with blatant references that the game frequently gets wrong or misses the point of. My favorite example of the game missing the point of its own reference is when Duke says "remember when I said I'd kill you last? I lied." This is a line taken from Commando, but the only reason it works in Commando is because John Matrix
said he'd kill that guy last, and is now in fact killing him earlier than that. It's a callback to an earlier line, which Duke of course doesn't have, so either you get the reference (and the joke is that... it's a reference), or it's just nonsense. This is bad, lazy writing, where the humor comes almost exclusively from just recognizing something.
So, again. You're free to like it, but if you tell me later on that you found a movie hilarious, I'm probably going to look for a second opinion, because clearly your humor doesn't match up with mine. :)