sethsez: So are you saying it should get a gold star for completion?

Because, okay, fine. Good on 'em for finally getting the game out.

But given that it's being released as a full title with a big marketing push, it's going to be reviewed as such. You can admire (or be fascinated by) the work that goes into a fiasco while still recognizing the final result for what it is, positive or not.

I mean, some other fiascos: Team Fortress 2, Mother 3, Half-Life 2, and the original Halo.

sethsez: The current rumor going around (and one I quite like) is that it's going to be a prequel where Duke becomes... well, Duke. At the very least it presents some new opportunities for jokes.

GameRager: Agreed......every so many dozen yards you'd find a crashed dropship or crate with weapons in it to swap if you needed them, same with here.

sethsez: If 8-track were released today it'd be a bad technology that wouldn't get adopted, and that people would rightfully laugh at. Again, not sure that your analogy is helping you here.

Mentalepsy: But you also said that if they let you carry all the weapons at once, the game would be too easy. Do you still feel that that's true?

GameRager: Yeah I do.....the game with regen health is hard sometimes in a few areas where duke can't move(mothership/etc) but in most areas it's darn easy if you're an FPS veteran. With all the weapons it'd be a kiddy game....we could call it DukeJr.

Mentalepsy: So then, why doesn't it make the game too easy if there are convenient weapon caches every dozen yards, at which you can presumably pick up whatever tool you need at the moment?

GameRager: I meant they should give them a little slack for releasing an older game now seeing as it was mostly made years ago and just slapped together recently......like maybe a grade higher for that.

Not an A or even A-, just a grade higher. With all the 80's & 90's most mags give out a few more points as consideration for this wouldn't be unfair to anyone.

sethsez: And I disagree, and cite those games I listed above for my reason why. Team Fortress 2 completely changed its art style and engine, and VASTLY overhauled its style of gameplay during development, but came out fine. Mother 3 was originally designed for the N64, but came out on the GBA a decade later to critical acclaim (unfortunately it never got an official English release, but it did get a great fan translation). Half-Life 2 famously changed up tons of gameplay developments and was as much of a joke as Duke Nukem Forever was for a while, especially after the leak that revealed how much of the game was incomplete. Halo was originally going to be an RTS for Mac computers and ended up as an Xbox FPS... and I don't think I need to say anything more about how bizarre that is.

Point being, games can go through development hell, be the butt of jokes for years, and come out the other end smelling like daisies. Those games don't get the praise they get because they somehow managed to be released after a hectic and prolonged schedule, they get praise because they're good games.
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No idea. My guess is that they're random levels cleaned up and rearranged to act as a finale to this, because god knows the ending to this game is awful.

GameRager: It's more the picking which you want and hoping it'll get you through the next section bit that is the challenge, as doors close behind you sometimes ala FEAR/Condemned/etc. You can pick one weapon and not be able to effectively use it while also being cut off sometimes from that same supply point if it's beyond the door.

Mentalepsy: So the game's difficulty and level layout were explicitly balanced using the two-weapon limit as a baseline assumption?

GameRager: give it some slack

sethsez: Again, why? Production hell is no excuse for the final product when things like Apocalypse Now or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot can result from it, and as I already said, games have come out of it just fine as well.

It might be worth giving George Broussard a pat on the back, but it's not worth cutting the final product any slack in a review. Too many other people have shown that it's possible to pull a great product (or hell, a work of art) out of a situation like this to cut 3D Realms any slack on this effort. If it stands up then it stands up, like Halo and Team Fortress 2 and Mother 3 before it, and if it doesn't stand up then it deserves what it gets, like Too Human and Chinese Democracy before it.

sethsez: Then your problem is with the reviews given to those games, not the reviews given to this one. I agree, for example, that Dragon Age II got ridiculous scores despite being a piece of shit... but that doesn't mean I think bad games should have their scores inflated to compensate, it means I think Dragon Age II should have gotten lower scores.

Mentalepsy: I'll cut to the chase, then: Broussard's quote about gamepads aside, either they built the game assuming that you'd be carrying two weapons (which begs the question of why they didn't build it around carrying all weapons instead - it didn't make Doom, Blood or Duke 3D too easy, after all), or they built the game assuming you could carry all (or at least more than two) weapons, hacked the limit in later, and perhaps updated the levels a bit to compensate (which begs the question of why the limit -had- to be implemented to maintain the difficulty).

Weapon / ammo capacity, combat mechanics, and level design all need to mesh with each other as the game is being constructed - I don't see why one aspect or another must be a certain way in order to produce a challenging game.