OK, so I have never actually played Duke Nukem 3D, so I am going to do so now. I was originally just going to fire it up, but then I looked at these forums and saw a whole lot of people talking about eDuke32. So my main question is, should I use it?

I don't want to play it with enhanced graphics, because I want the original experience. Enhanced graphics are for future playthroughs. I'm even OK with playing it on the keyboard, but it seems that there may have actually been native support for mouselook in the original game? People in these forums have discussed ways to enable mouselook both in the original game and by using eDuke32 to enable it. Is one version noticeably better than the other? Is native mouselook worse than that enabled by eDuke32? I generally prefer mouselook but I don't want to use it if it was not in the game originally because I feel it would be an unfair advantage.

The other thing I would consider is using eDuke32 to enable higher resolutions, but using the original graphics. Is that possible? Can I run it widescreen without using any 3rd-party graphical mods? That would be cool, but not essential.

Finally, eDuke32 claims to squash a bunch of bugs.. how important is that? Is it worth using eDuke32 even if I don't end up using any of its special options (i.e. if I use original graphics, original resolution, and original control scheme) just for the bug fixes?

Thanks!

Sounds good, thanks Vagabond. I just wanted to be sure that it wouldn't spoil the "true" Duke 3D experience, because I'm a little crazy. Sounds like it's perfectly configurable though and won't add any 3rd party stuff if I don't want it to.

I should be starting the game in the next few days, I'll post back if I have any trouble getting it working. Looks like there's plenty of threads on how to do that already though.

I second Vagabond here. I played Duke Nukem 3D quite a long time ago on a Win98 machine, back when machines had a proper DOS environment, and was able to play it fine. The mouselook was manageable but nowhere near as smooth as Windows games.

Anyway, on modern machines there is no proper DOS any more which is why GOG provide a bundled DOSBox with their DOS games. It should still work well, and you will get the classic control and mouselook feel with it.

However, this all said, eDuke32 is by far superior. Firstly it is a Windows application so runs natively on modern Windows OSes, and gives you a nice and smooth mouselook. As for the graphics, you can choose whether to play with the classic sprites or 3D models and you can choose whether to play in low or high resolution.

It is also easier to use mods with eDuke32 as you can specify any additional mod files to load on starting up the game, rather than the patching method used back in the DOS days.

And finally, enjoy it, it's a great game.