Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes
What a strange phenomenon Duke Nukem is...er, was. It was basically only ever just one game. Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II are not games that anybody you know actually played, despite what they may have told you. Duke Nukem 3D was the 'hit' (though the PlayStation port is a turd), and what followed was a very, very, very long wait for Duke Nukem Forever, which culminated in total failure and a case of gamer blue balls very unworthy of the man himself.
The game opens with a quiet drama scene. Too quiet, as I had no idea what either polygonal avatar said.
In between, we had a few games spat out onto console which were popular-ish, in Time to Kill and Land of the Babes, which bore virtually no resemblance to the famed Duke 3D further than the main character being a chap with a a gold desert eagle, rippling pectorals and repertoire of tired, borrowed one-liners. Unlike Duke 3D, they were both third-person shooters with tank controls. They involved lots of turning in place, jumping over gaps, climbing obstacles and falling repeatedly to your death.
Enemies include pigs, insects and gun-toting gorillas.
I'll stop teasing. They were Tomb Raider clones. Time to Kill came first, but Land of the Babes is first alphabetically, so...
Dook can now swim, for no reason other than Lara Croft being able to do it too.
It seems puzzling to go from Duke 3D's fast-paced blast-a-thon to a far more sedate, clunky action platformer. The only way it makes sense is to look at things through a lens where at the time, Tomb Raider had reached official juggernaut status and was seemingly setting the blueprint for 3D action games. I'm glad we learned from that mistake.
Groan.
Land of the Babes isn't particularly good. It starts out with a handful of good ideas and stumbles through the execution of the lot of them. The controls are rubbish in a way that makes you appreciate Tomb Raider so much more; the buttons and abilities are more or less exactly the same, but Duke manages to get himself stuck on corners, walls, steps, more or less anything with an edge. You can only jump directly forward, with no mid-air deviation possible, which I guess is more faithful to the true laws of physics, but that surely isn't something important in a God damn Duke Nukem game.
You must hold L1 to lock-on, otherwise you won't hit bugger all. Combined with strafing and shooting it makes for quite the RSI-inducer.
Objective-wise, it's no different to Duke 3D with the key-collecting, button-pressing and door-kicking. The guns lack any sort of punchiness and enemies are bullet sponges. You know what would have made this game a whole lot better? Actually making it the first-person shooter it was supposed to be.
Kept my attention for: An evening
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill
Time to Kill came a year earlier to Land of the Babes, so I was expecting a step down, but I surely wasn't expecting a step up.
Hurr.
This is simply a better game. It's not significantly better, or enough for me to warrant granting an extra point, but it is faster paced, less clunky (but still quite clunky), and makes you sit through less pointless loading before you are allowed to get into it. Enemies are still bullet sponges, but not to quite the same degree. There is a 'walk' function in order to help line up your jumps (again, just like Tomb Raider). The auto-aim is automatic without the need to press a button.
A lizard man? I don't know either.
None of it makes any sense still, but at least it doesn't particularly try to advertise itself as anything but a stupid excuse to make bang sounds in the direction of evil aliens and make some wisecracks, rather than its sequel that tried to make you sit through badly-mastered dialogue every few minutes.
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The stupid platforming sections are maddening.
So basically, for Land of the Babes, they took all the constituent parts of Time to Kill, made each of them worse, then called it job done. Sad! Many such cases.
Kept my attention for: An hour or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10
Dukes of Hazzard II: Daisy Dukes It Out
I didn't bother with the first one, and what a great decision it turned out to be. The bottom line is that Dukes of Hazzard II is bloody terrible, although the developers have clearly spent quite a lot of money to try to convince you otherwise.
The horror...
It's a pseudo-racing game (another 'car game' that doesn't really involve racing) where you drive around to complete various simplistic objectives, but between each level are confusingly lavish FMV sequences containing long conversations about the plot. Characters exchange threats, make plans and explain what everyone is doing with a degree of seriousness normally reserved for games whose next level isn't "drive down the road collecting floating tokens". It's a strange contrast. Somebody has put real effort into making what amounts to a Dukes of Hazzard television episode, then occasionally interrupts it so you can play one of the worst driving games on the PlayStation.
[car looking exactly the same as it does at any other time]
Rather than racing around conventional tracks, you barrel about the same deserted freeform area completing missions. In theory, you might say this could have been at least halfway interesting. There's a faint suggestion of an extremely limited and empty GTA here, with roads, dirt tracks and open ground which you can tackle from different directions. Unfortunately, there's almost nothing in it. The whole place feels as though the population was evacuated shortly before filming began, and the levels are merely pootling around in the General Lee, trying not to crash into a poorly-modelled fir tree thanks to the garbage controls.
The bustling locale of Hazzard County.
The cars control like air hockey pucks slipping along a Georgian countryside which has been thoroughly greased. They slide and swivel across the ground with little sense of weight, and it makes virtually no difference whether you're driving on tarmac or gravel. It looks horrendous as well. Everything is grainy and indistinct, which means the presence of the expensive FMVs becomes confusing. Why does this awful token-collecting driving game have so much plot?
Really bad.
Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10
Dune 2000
It's semi-interesting playing something like Dune 2000 now, after its explosion from relatively niche science fiction series twenty years ago into the international giga-franchise starring babyfaced A-lister darlings it is today. Having seen the new movies, at the very least I can say that it meant I halfway understood the narrative dump at the opening to this game; I'd have been totally lost going into it otherwise.
No idea.
Not to worry, though, as I became totally lost anyway within moments. It's a real-time strategy game, which was always going to be ropey with a clunky PlayStation controller and a 320x240 display. I thought I'd give the 'practice' mode a go in order to learn what it was I was supposed to be doing. Alas, no such instruction was forthcoming. Instead, 'practice' mode just throws you into a typical non-'mission' round of the game. So without a manual to hand, I was unlikely to get far in my quest to dominate the planet.
That's John Rhys-Davies. Or alternatively, Gimli from The Lord of the Rings.
One thing the game is not short of, though, is cringe live-action FMV scenes, at the pre-menu sequence and between levels. I guess Command and Conquer did it too. Not much else to say. I didn't achieve much. File away with A IV Evolution..
Kept my attention for: 20 minutes
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10
Dynasty Warriors
Dynasty Warriors? A fighting game? It's more likely than you think.
It's possible to parry enemy attacks in sequence if you time it right.
So it turns out that the first entry in the Japanese-do-Chinese hack-and-slash series was actually a Soul Calibur-flavoured weapons-based stab-em-up. I've never played any of the other ones either.
Each character has a weapon. Here's a spear and a, er, giant barbell thing.
It looks great. Sharing an award with Bloody Roar 2 for tastiest looking fighting game, pushing out a crisp 480p too. The actual fighting bit is a bit slow and unresponsive, though, and putting combinations together isn't as accessible as it might be in something like Tekken.
Throws are possible, but it seems harder to pull off Tekken-style juggling moves.
There are the usual versus, survival, practice modes, but the main single player game is just straightforward fight-the-other-characters-one-by-one deal with no narrative. Come on guys, it's 1997; every playable character requires a lengthy, melodramatic character art slideshow overlaid with a scrolling wall of expositionary text whenever you start the game.
Vaguely interesting for a bit. Middle of the road stuff otherwise.
Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10
That wraps up the letter D.