I wasn't crazy about FEAR 2, Condemned 2, and thought Condemned was really, really uneven. FEAR was good but had the world's most bland environments, Contract JACK was awful, so... the last Monolith game I like without any reservations is Tron 2.0.

Of course, I'll always love them for No One Lives Forever and Blood.

Oh, forgot about Condemned 2. That's their only recent one I haven't played. I quite enjoyed Condemned though. And I never did play any of the NOLF games, JACK included. Tron 2.0 was awesome.

Yeah, they definitely pulled ideas from Prey during The Hive level, and the way you interact with various objects throughout the game. They were probably working on Duke Forever at the same time and some of the ideas were carried over, since Prey took 11 years to develop.

How can you not understand what it is? How can you play even 5 minutes of the game and not realize Duke is a joke character? Even if you don't get the 80's action hero thing surely you can grasp that this is for amusement, not for serious. Same thing with the world around him, how can those twins or those military guys be anything but jokes and parodies?

The seriousness with which so many reviews took that stuff is mind-boggling. Even if you're right and it was poorly done quality wise (which I do not agree with) it is still mind-numbingly obvious what the intention was.

Everybody gets that Duke Nukem is a joke, and everybody gets that he's a parody of 80s action heroes. This isn't rocket science, it's not flying over anybody's head.

The issues people have are that:
1) They don't think it's a good or consistent parody,
2) They don't think it's a particularly interesting or relevant parody in 2011, and
3) They don't think the humor holds up outside the confines of the parody aspect.

You keep repeating "it's a joke" as though that's something people don't get. People get it. Everyone gets it. It's blindingly obvious. There's no room for misinterpretation. They just don't think it's a funny, interesting or well-told joke.

Edit: And people are taking it seriously because they find some of the humor genuinely distasteful. Just because something's a joke doesn't mean it's excused from any judgment forever, just ask Tracy Morgan right about now. If you disagree, that's fine, but don't paint people as just "not getting it." There's no grand statement here to be missed.

I didn't know Bulletstorm even had a PC demo out. Thanks for that. I was actually watching a Let's Play of it the other day, and it looked like genuine stupid fun. The bit that I saw had plenty of action soundtracked to a constant stream of cleverly inane dialogue. If they didn't screw it up too badly, I could probably have a blast with it.

I don't want to derail this thread (it's too much fun!), but I'm inclined to ask, since you seem to have at least somewhat enjoyed the game: the biggest criticism I've heard of Bulletstorm is that the 'kill with skill' combos (which I gather you need to make use of in order to earn new weapons and upgrades) are too rigid, and reward trial and error and repetition more than imagination. Do you agree with that? Is it a major issue?

I'd say it mostly depends on you, if you are willing to experiment or are you satisfied by just shooting and repeating a few combos.

nice while the fans and 2k are doing everything to suppress those who thrashed the game, a single user managed to fix up some things in the game
http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=125594

I have a hard time figuring out why people can't see the humor. I suspect that it's as I pointed out earlier that some people just don't get the style of referential humor involved. Some of the jokes are pretty obvious, but some of them are much more subtle. I had to laugh when mini-Duke was dealing with those ROUS.

The parody aspect is pretty obvious. I mean, I'm not sure how one can't see and appreciate that, I mean Duke's riding around in a frickin RC car at one point. Which was an absolute blast, I might add.

Well, for those who were just wanting an updated DN3D, DN3D: Reloaded should be coming out when it's done, which is basically just a reworking of DN3D with the Unreal 3 engine and a few minor tweaks to the maps. Considering it's only a half year old made by volunteers, that's pretty good.

You're bouncing around man. I am talking about people who obviously did NOT get the joke. People who say things like "why does he call them babes?" That is not getting the joke if I ever saw it. In response to that you said maybe they missed the joke because it was poorly presented... I am saying poorly presented or not, it's obvious either way. Now you're coming at me again with "no one missed the joke." We're going in circles.

I like the humor, you don't. I like the gameplay, you don't (and since you called Half-Life 2 a slog and too slow your opinion is irrelevant anyway :P ). The simple fact is we have different opinions and should leave it at that. Tastes differ.

What baffles me has nothing to do with you. What baffles me is why Duke is getting tons of reviews lower than for any FPS in history. It's not at all that bad, not even close. Pretty much everything I have written in this thread is about THAT, not about your personal enjoyment or lack thereof.

The RC car is a pretty good example of why I didn't like the game.

For humor/parody, you've got a goldmine here. Duke, a quintessential 80s action hero, gets shrunk down into what is essentially his own action figure, the quintessential 80s toy. If there's ever a time for making fun of 80s action heroes it's gotta be that, right? But instead we get Duke acknowledging the connection to a kid, a woman saying she knows where she'd like to put him (which doesn't really play into the parody aspect of anything and is just a dumb sex joke, again), and... that's about it. It's a rough sketch of an idea, not even a first draft. It's why I think this version of Duke is an expansion of the one from Duke 3D rather than actually being a parody of anything this time around, because it seems like Broussard and crew pass up every opportunity for actual parody in favor of shit and tit jokes.

But that'd be fine if the gameplay worked, and you know what? It does... for a little while. The RC car, like a lot of the gimmicks in Duke Nukem Forever, just lasts too damn long. There's really only one thing to it (find ramps, boost over them) and there's pretty much no danger, so it's just driving down what amounts to a long corridor for so long that it actually needs to load halfway through. Which, granted, leads to the part where you have to open the gate, one of the few clever bits of level design in the game (if still cribbed directly from the vehicle sections in Half-Life 2), but then we get right back to the driving, which hasn't gotten any more difficult or more interesting. Drive down path, boost over ramps.

Maybe if it had some more chaos going on (you know, more than a single babe being kidnapped by a single alien onscreen at once) or some actual danger (the casino's being blown to hell by aliens, surely some flying debris could have been scripted in) it might have worked better. And maybe if something more had been done with the writing then it might have allowed for some one liners that actually poke fun at the nature of 80s heroes being reduced to action figures, rather than just referencing it and using the rest of the time for sex jokes.

As it is, there's the germ of a great idea there, both for humor and for action. Action hero becomes his own action figure and drives around his own casino as it's being attacked by aliens who are stealing Earth's babes right in front of him as he's powerless to do anything about it! But this is pretty much the dullest possible implementation of that concept. Like a lot of the game, there's a solid idea betrayed by a completely botched execution.

Also, just so I'm not CONSTANTLY complaining, the parts of the game I liked:
-It has a damn good shotgun, which is a rarity these days.
-Pipebombs are still fun.
-Execution moves are a solid way to keep action moving.
-Duke using his ego as a shield, and increasing it through doing manly things, is a hell of a lot more clever than anything else in the game.
-Ghost Town was actually a good firefight. The game needed a LOT more stuff like that.

And that's about it for the list of things I can say I enjoyed without extreme qualifications.

It about him being irresistible to women, like most action heroes seem to be in movies and such. Again, you didn't get it.

And again, just because I don't think a joke works doesn't mean I didn't get it. Yes, that's what they're going for but it immediately detracts from the fact that he's been shrunk down to toy size. The Holsom twins finding him cute as a toy works a hell of a lot better for the segment, the "I know where I'd like to stick him" line is just a restatement of the same "women love him" schtick that just had the potential to be undermined by his shrinking ten seconds earlier.

If you're going to make Duke small and powerless, why not go all the way with it? The answer is because it'd get in the way of a dumb sex joke.

The game saves all of its "it's not the size that counts" gags for the very end of the sequence, which is dumb as hell. Again, they're given easy jokes and the potential for parody on a silver platter (take an action hero known for his strength and virility and make him weak and emasculated), and they just completely blow it.

You didn't say the joke didn't work, you said it wasn't related to the action hero parody. BUT IT IS.

Stop taking not getting it as some kind of personal insult you have to deny. It's okay you don't get some of it. I don't get a lot of comedy, it's not a statement of intelligence. I won't debate with you further if you keep going back and changing what you said all the time.

But you're not debating, you're just stating "you don't get it" over and over.

Again, it's not confusing. I know why the game has women adoring Duke. This is not hard. My contention, as it always has been, is that the game handles it so poorly that it functions more as a dumb sex joke than as legitimate parody.

If you think it works as parody, that's fine. But it's an issue of disagreeing on the effectiveness of the joke, not an issue of getting what it's trying to say. It's blindingly obvious, which is why I don't preface everything with "I know it's going for [x] but I think it fails because...". If you'd rather I start doing that, then fine, I will.

For any future confusion: I know that the sex jokes in the game are meant to be a send-up of action film machismo (although personally I think it works better as a parody of Bond and the like rather than actual 80s films, where sex with women almost always played a distant second in importance to the bond between men, which is something this game barely touches on). I know this every time I say "this sex joke is not a parody of action films" because I am claiming it doesn't function well as a parody. Again, if you'd like me to change my wording there then I will to avoid further confusion.

I also contend that many of the sex jokes exist not because they're a conscious parody of action films, but because they're a ramping up of the sex in Duke Nukem 3D that helped it sell so well. There's no other explanation for things like wall-boobs spurting milk when you slap them.