Duke Nukem Forever

So I just got around to beating Duke Nukem Forever at the weekend.  Like everyone has known since the day this thing came out, it's a complete piece of shit.  It's one of those games that lives in infamy because of how long it took for it to came out.  It started development in 1997 but wasn't released until 2011.  I mean how many other games can you think of that took that long to develop?  There aren't many.  Unfortunately we weren't rewarded for our patience and Forever ended up being a stinking mess.

The game follows the titular Duke Nukem, a fucking asshole who's hobbies include sexing up women and shooting aliens in the face.  After saving the world in Duke Nukem 3D he becomes super famous and is living it up until the aliens come back down again and start making life hard again.  From there, it's just shooting things in the face and you do nothing but this until the very end of the game where you piss in somethings face and finally watch credits.

The thing that pissed people off though wasn't the terrible plot because Duke Nukem was never about plot.  The game play is so far removed from everything that made Duke 3D great that it's almost offensive.  Gone is that crazy good, labyrinthine level design from the good old build engine days.  Instead what we got was a shitty, linear 2 weapon shooter with regenerating health and crappy set piece battles every so often.  It wasn't Duke Nukem any more, it was just a Generic Console FPS #3671 featuring Duke Nukem.

I know for a fact that the games overall shittiness was down to its huge development time, engines changing every other day of the week and money issues but part of me wants to believe that maybe the dev team were a little smarter than that.  I desperately want to believe that they saw what a steaming pile of shit the FPS genre has become over the years and made DNF as a sort of parody and middle finger to the people who enjoy these kind of games.  Hell, there are multiple points in the game where you find little references to things like Halo, Dead Space and Gears of War where Duke or a supporting character will comment about how these characters are complete pussies.

However in reality that's absolutely not the case and the game just sucks because life isn't fair.  I wasted my time, if you haven't played it then don't bother and go play Duke 3D.

Where is Half Life 3? (Or Episode 3)

I love me some Half Life, but I've got concerns for this series and I'm really hoping Valve proves me wrong on this one.

Half Life 2: Episode 2 was a game released in 2007 to follow up on the events from Episode 1 and Half Life2.  The game was intense as all hell and a shit ton of fun to play and got fans more invested in the Half Life 2 plot and universe with all sorts of crazy shit going on.  But the game ended on a bit of a cliffhanger, and we have barely heard anything about an Episode 3.  It's been so long that people are thinking that Episode 3 won't even be a thing and instead we'll just get a Half Life 3 instead.

Now I've not really been following all the news too closely but after giving a quick skim of the Half Life wiki on news regarding the next game, there has been nothing super concrete and everything seems like a bit of a mystery.

What I'm worried about is that Half Life 3 will go the same way of Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever or Too Human.  These games had huge development times and large amounts of hype, and then when they released they sucked ASS.  I trust Valve to not make a game that's shitty quality wise, but can they really deliver on the 6 years of hype that's been flying around since Episode 2?  Given the amount of time it's been, I don't think they will be able to do it, but I'm crossing my fingers and really hoping that they prove me very, very wrong.