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Leak of a cancelled 1996 “Duke Nukem Forever” side-scroller
- master_crab 4y agoLooks very Robocop vs Terminator!
- GalenErso 4y ago2D side scrolling games were still popular in browser Flash games until the mid 2000s. I remember playing a few of them on Miniclip and other websites. Shoutout to anyone who remembers Bonus.com around the year 2000. The website was an ad infested mess, but also home to some decent games.
- b1ue64 4y ago2d side scrolling games are still popular today*
- Insanity 4y agoI’m not sure if it is at the same level though. Both in terms of how mainstream they are and the calibre/size of the development studios behind them. I can’t off the top of my head think of a modern “AAA” sidescroller.
- bee_rider 4y agoHave they done a 2D Mario recently?
- lostgame 4y agoThey're rumoured to be working on it: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/mario-games-2d-nintendo-switch-report/ https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/mario-games-2d-nintendo-sw... There was also New Super Mario Bros. and New Super Mario Bros DS which were fantastic. There's also Super Mario Maker...so; yeah.
- simongray 4y agoThe last two installments of Mario had 2D sections and prior to that Nintendo had several releases of 2D Mario games used as launch games for their platforms.
- HideousKojima 4y agoSonic Mania?
- gmnash 4y agoMetroid Dread maybe? Amazing game either way.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoMetroid Dread is probably the latest significant AAA sidescroller.
- hoherd 4y agoSamus Returns was also incredible.
- wincy 4y agoLol that game makes me so stressed. When the robot shows up I experience dread, so mission accomplished. I had to stop playing it after awhile I just didn’t find the “Dread” parts fun. I’ll go play something less stressful like Elden Ring.
- ghostwriter 4y agoAside the name, what does make Metroid Dread a triple-A title, though? After playing Blasphemous, Huntdown, Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, and a few others for the past year, I can't say Metroid Dread has a distinctive trait that would make it standing out as AAA. The competition from indie studios is tough nowadays, many of them release AAA-grade titles without labelling them as such.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoAAA used to simply imply good graphics. These days it tends to refer to that and the hand-craftedness of things. Like every moment being designed for some player impact. The new Tomb Raiders are the most emblematic of this imo, though not in a good way. AAA games tend not to feel like a set of standard mechanics and actors arranged in different levels. They have a lot more special circumstances. Worst case this is just cut scenes. Commonly it's special control schemes for specific situations that break the standard game design and may be cool or may suck. I haven't played any of these titles, including Metroid so I can't comment. But... idk Hollow Knight was an excellent 2d side scroller with beautiful art that was clearly not AAA to no detriment, imo. Nintendo does things their own way too so it's always funky. In my headcannon this transitioned most clearly with the cultural shift of Halo 3 being AAA to CoD4 being AAA.
- CM30 4y agoNot sure if Wii U is modern, but since it's on Switch too... Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze? That's 100% a triple A 2D platformer, with incredible graphics, some damn impressive level design that takes advantage of multiple foreground layers and numerous interconnected level specific mechanics and one of the best soundtracks in recent times.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agothere's a newish crash bandicoot too
- unixhero 4y agoTrine
- lightedman 4y ago"I can’t off the top of my head think of a modern “AAA” sidescroller." Dead Cells is great.
- semi-extrinsic 4y agoRayman Legends on Nintendo Switch (2017) is one example, I guess?
- LegitShady 4y agoOri and the blind forest?
- syntheweave 4y agoThey really don't have to be "AAA" to be a decent product. My nieces and nephew(ages 4-6) are all playing a Hotel Transylvania app on their tablets, which is a pretty straightforward collectathon platformer with a gajillion levels and a three-star ranking to encourage them to speedrun it. There are a lot of games like it, but as a plain-vanilla flavor of platformer it definitely does the job, and those kinds of games are F2P and generally well produced, with plenty of animation; the mobile market has some of the most extravagant budgets for 2D gaming, it just doesn't read as "premium" because of the business model and positioning. When we go upmarket from that it's more often a sidestep into indie games, which can address a specific niche better.
- twelvechairs 4y agoLets not forget Duke Nukem started with two moderately popular platformers [0] https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_I https://dukenukem.fandom.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_I
- adamgordonbell 4y agoDuke Nukem the side scroller was my first computer game and I loved it.
- Andrex 4y agoIn my house we had floppies of Duke, Commander Keen, and... Mario is Missing.
- armadsen 4y agoAre you my sibling? We had those plus Captain Comic, Jill of the Jungle, and Paganitzu. We weren’t allowed to have a video game console, so Mario is Missing was the closest I got to having a Nintendo.
- sasas 4y agoRecently someone has reverse engineered Duke Nukem 2 back to its original source code [1] [1] https://github.com/lethal-guitar/Duke2Reconstructed https://github.com/lethal-guitar/Duke2Reconstructed
- ChicagoDave 4y agoI loved those first two games. They were hard to complete and a ton of fun.
- cookiengineer 4y agoThe screenshots reminded me of Secret Agent (sometimes rebranded as Agent Sam or Secret Agent Man), and indeed Jim Norwood worked on it, too. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Agent_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Agent_(video_game)
- 4y ago
- beached_whale 4y agoDuke Nukem Forever, the non-side scroller but released version, was the reason I stopped pre-ordering games. What a waste of money
- devindotcom 4y agoLooks a lot like Abuse. I would have played it! The original Duke Nukem sidescrollers were fun. Them and Commander Keen, Dangerous Dave, Jazz Jackrabbit... what else?
- xahrepap 4y agoCrystal Caves was a ton of fun.
- madaxe_again 4y agoI remember playing it on a compaq 286 with a monochrome TN display - huge ghost trails on everything - but it was great.
- bane 4y agoThere's a modern "port" of it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1330890/Crystal_Caves_HD/ and you can play the original https://archive.org/details/CrystalCaves https://archive.org/details/CrystalCaves
- caf 4y agoPrince of Persia
- branon 4y agohttps://rentry.org/x0r_jmp https://rentry.org/x0r_jmp is the source for this I believe.
- OneLeggedCat 4y agoHail to The King, baby
- brap 4y agoBlow it out your ass
- johndhi 4y agoYou know you cared about computers in the 80s/90s if you're drawn to Duke Nukem headlines
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brightball 4y agoI was once ranked #10 on Case’s Ladder in Duke Nukem back in the day. With a dial up modem on a system called Kali. Good times.
- nlh 4y agoAhh I remember Kali - thanks for the reminder. For others who have a tinge of memory on this, the Wikipedia article has a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(software)
- smcl 4y ago> Today, Kali's network is still operational but development has largely ceased. It’s still going!?
- RajT88 4y agoThis would undoubtedly have been more fun to play than the real DNF.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- danjc 4y agoCurious to know the history here. Was it scrapped because 3d was replacing this format? Duke Nukem 3d was also released in '96.
- magic_hamster 4y agoAmazingly nobody mentioned it yet, but around Christmas the leak of the 2001 DNF build came to some fruition with the release of the "first slice" from the DNF restoration project. If you liked Duke Nukem 3D, this will be a treat for you. It has that certain personality and charm that was long lost by the time DNF 2011 came out. You can download it for free on moddb: https://www.moddb.com/mods/dnf2001-restoration-project https://www.moddb.com/mods/dnf2001-restoration-project
- Tepix 4y agoWhat's a safe way to try this? DOSBox?
- Ciantic 4y agoThrough your browser, it's playable using this Archive link: https://archive.org/details/duke-nukem-forever-1996-side-scroller-playable https://archive.org/details/duke-nukem-forever-1996-side-scr...
- imhoguy 4y agoNow we need a leak of Flash Player source code :)
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoWe meet again, Doktor Jones.
- pluc 4y ago"I can't believe these fucking leaks Also here's a link for it that will never expire" uuuh ok
- barbecue_sauce 4y agoI vaguely remember seeing a black and white screenshot of this in the back of a 3D Realms manual/cd-booklet (possibly for another 3D Realms game, or for the Macintosh release of Duke Nukem 3D which would have released after development on Duke Nukem Forever was underway).
- sho_hn 4y agoWhat I'd love to see is a leak of the original "Prey". Not the id Tech 4-powered shooter by Human Head Studios, but the 3D Realms one. So many stories about this one. At least 3 generations of creatives, a KMFDM soundtrack, a perhaps over-ambitious heavily portals-based engine, destructible environments, later engine work by Corinne Yu, etc. Edit: Oh wow! I just googled for a YouTube video of the 199x E3 demos to link here, and the 1995 version apparently did leak days ago: https://archive.org/details/prey-1195/ https://archive.org/details/prey-1195/ Next, a leak of the 1997 rework please: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBDzzOzS4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBDzzOzS4E The level of detail and the dynamic portals were just so cool at the time. The demos from about 4:00 onward and especially at 5:00 onward more or less predict the later gameplay of Valve's Portal games. Edit 2: Since this is HN, after all, here's a fascinating Usenet discussion with on the of the Prey engine developers, W. Scarboro, on his experiences with the portals approach: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics.algorithms/c/2Oa-MyPJ9fg https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics.algorithms/c/2Oa-M... Unfortunately since passed away, at only 31, due to asthma.
- boastful_inaba 4y agoYou're in luck! An early engine test for the original Prey leaked just this last week. (So early, it's before the portals concept.)
- raffraffraff 4y agoDoes it have LAN multiplayer? Please say it has...
- _Microft 4y agohttps://nitter.net/vinciusmedeiro6/status/1607187382335324162 https://nitter.net/vinciusmedeiro6/status/160718738233532416...
- LocalH 4y agoI love seeing prototype and prerelease builds leak. I can only hope the binders full of discs at Harmonix follow that same fate some day in the future.