Of course I would have trouble writing a post about Duke Nukem Forever. It’s unavoidable. The universe has decided that not only will the game be cursed for all eternity, any entity that spawns from the fact that the game exists will also fall on hardship. My ability to provide riveting commentary is no exception, it would seem. I’ve been trying to come up with this post since the day Gearbox and 2K announced that they had dug up DNF’s mangled carcass and were in the process of hooking the electrodes to its brain. They were bringing it back to life. And they were going to ship it, for realz this time.
Ever since that news came out I’ve been searching for the words to express my excitement for Duke Nukem Forever’s latest opportunity at reaching the store shelves. Nothing worked. Nothing! I tried to take the pure, over-the-top fanboy route — just gush fanboy goo all over BattlePlay about Duke and his new found developers. Here’s a brief segment to give you an idea of where it was going:
Oh my god! Oh my god! YES! Duke’s in the hands of Gearbox. This should be AWESOME! Where can I pre-order?
And it went on like that for another four to five hundred words — not exactly what I was looking for.
Then I tried to provide a glimpse into my nostalgia laced past, a past where Duke 3D was stashed away in a “c:/windows/temp” directory on almost every single computer in my high-school’s computer labs. Countless hours were spent on the school’s LAN trying to catch one of my friends right between the eyes with a rocket-propelled grenade:
… and that’s where I learned the power of keyboard shortcuts … as we’d whisper through our teeth to each other, “teacher! teacher! ALT TAB! ALT TAB!”
That one didn’t pan out either for some reason. I kept persisting, though. I even went the other direction once it was clear that not only was Duke Nukem Forever not going to meet the decades-plus worth of expectations I had stored away, it was actually a huge, steaming pile of shit:
I’ve never been so hyped for a game that ended up getting a 3.0 on Gamespot. How is that possible? You have to be trying extremely hard to get a 3.0 on Gamespot…
Again, it was just more generic reactionary comments that I’m sure everyone expressed 47,000 times over the last few weeks. So I squished it, and at least a half dozen other attempts. It would seem that it was just not a post that I was meant to write. And, maybe that’s OK. I’m not here to waste people’s time with a post I don’t believe is good. Sometimes the successful post is the one that you don’t write. Sometimes the successful project is the one that you just let die.
By the way, I will never play Duke Nukem Forever. Never. I’m not even sure I will pick up the next Duke branded title, even with Gearbox and 2K starting from scratch. And it’s not because I don’t think they could do a great job with it, not in the least. It’s more just comes down to the fact that they did the fans of Duke wrong — especially the ones that pre-ordered or picked up the game on day one (to the rest of you that are still buying it: that’s on you, dummy). They didn’t know the buzz saw of shitiness they were walking into. And that sucks. It’s a shitty move 2K, Gearbox — a real shitty move.