Always Bet On Poo
Duke Nukem Forever is out. No, really! It only took 15 years. So now people can talk about the game as opposed to the development drama. Surprisingly, a shooter that took 15 years to make about a foul-mouthed Schwarzenegger clone did not address the same target market as, say, Shadow of the Colossus or Braid. To quote Ars Technica:
In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It's not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.
So, this is not a game that is not going to make you feel deeply about life, unless to you life is poo (in which case, Blizzard's World of Warcraft has entire quest lines that will bring you fulfillment). This is a game where... well, here, look at the cover.
WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING, PEOPLE. This is not subtle! Look, there's a nuclear explosion, and Vegas, and aliens, and covering all of that is some big guy who is waiting patiently for you to give his pistol a blowjob. This is not Shakespeare! Well, except for the plays we don't talk about. This is the very epitome of embarrassing low brow entertainment. This is, to put not too fine a point on it, the gaming equivalent of a strip club. Which is fine! The fact that strip clubs exist do not prevent you from going to a sushi bar for a nice dinner. It's a big world, and they coexist peacefully. Plus, if you do want to go to a strip club (and I'm totally not judging you here, really) you're not going to consult the reviews first. "Oh, I'm not going to Spearmint Rhino tonight, the review in Friday's Times said it was loud and overrated." NO! You just go! You just buy the game, and you play it, and you maybe giggle slightly nervously as you blow pregnant rape victims apart with your shotgun. You just DO, OK? This is why reviewers exist, really. They exist to have FUN with games like these. Such as the above-mentioned Ars Technica review:
I have to install and play this piece of garbage on the PC to see how that version holds up, and make sure there's nothing to be salvaged from the multiplayer.
Or Destructoid:
A festering irrelevance with nothing to offer the world.
Or Gamespot:
While much of Duke Nukem Forever is embarrassingly bad--the kind of game you point and laugh at--its biggest problem is that it's so tedious...This game takes an icon and turns him into a laughingstock. Except, no one's laughing.
Or the Escapist:
A deeply flawed game that I would have stopped playing after five minutes were it not a requirement of my job to play longer.
This is what reviewers pray for nightly. A game that is so awfully, joyously unreviewable that every drop of snark they can muster can just masterfully splatter all over the virtual page. Reviewers are grateful for things like this. Such as this review of the movie aimed at the identical target market for DNF, Sucker Punch.
The first is its complete failure to create any sort of meaningful narrative. To be blunt: This movie is dumb and doesn’t make sense and appears to have been written by sleeping frogs.
Now come on. Admit it. The reviewer loved writing this. I mean, you can't use "appears to have been written by sleeping frogs" for, say, the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Sometimes a movie, or a game, is just so gloriously off the rails that you rejoice at being able to bust out the metaphors you never, ever get away with. Which makes the hamfisted attempts at 'damage control' by Jim Redner, until-very-recently-2K's public relations rep, even more odd.
too many went too far with their reviews...we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom
What? No! You don't threaten people with access to content management publishing systems to stop using content management publishing systems! Much like DNF wallows in the joy of its own affection for poo, its PR team should wallow in the joy of the reviews that point out it's poo. Link to them! Celebrate them! Give DukePoints to whomever uses the most spittle-flecked metaphors! You're poo, you like poo, roll around in the poo and smile while you show everyone your poo! And then, announce Duke Nukem Forever After. 2012 release.