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I loved the original Duke Nukem, and other side scrollers from that era such as Commander Keen. Duke Nukem 3D wasn't all that great if I remember.

1letterunixname 3y ago
Duke Nukem 2D sidescrollers with the Keen sound fx. The original Duke 3D and some expansions were alright but they got progressively worse with larger budgets and longer development cycles.
pengaru 3y ago
Agreed. Duke3D was junk, but a big part of that was the stiff 3D FPS competition from id. I think people stopped caring about the Duke series enough to remember/play the 2D scrollers not so much because Duke3D overshadowed them, but more that there were far better games to play than any of them. DOOM and Quake practically owned PC gaming in my sphere for quite some time. Even Descent didn't do too well despite the 6DoF tech being impressive at the time.
- throwaway675309 3y ago
  Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game if you were the type of kid that liked to modify your games rather than just consume them. For a lot of us in grade school, it was our first introduction to games that actively encouraged you to mod them, it came with a level editor for the Build engine, and you could open up the CON files to physically alter the actual scripts and behavior of items and entities. And when compared to id software's games (particularly the brown horribly muted color palette of quake), Duke Nukem 3d absolutely shone with personality and interactivity. There's a reason that it consistently scored in the 90s in old school PC gamer magazines.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    What I'm hearing is that you loved the Build engine and tooling surrounding it. That's somewhat orthogonal to Duke3D the game played-as-shipped... I did software-rendered graphics programming back in the VGA days and a lot of your muted color palette complaint stems from a necessary compromise to support dynamic lighting in 256-colors. A huge part of what made DOOM so amazing was the dark environment and atmospheric, dynamic lighting. That they managed this in 256-colors was unbelievable a the time. Quake supported a software rendering mode on VGA as well, IIRC, also with dynamic lighting. I tried playing with dynamic lighting w/texture mapping hacks in 256-colors after playing DOOM showed it was possible, and it only really worked well with dark/goth-y muted textures because you have very little dynamic range. Try fitting an RGB color cube in 8 bits... Unless my memory is flawed, Duke3D didn't even attempt any dynamic lighting in the 8bpp VGA modes of the era. It was bright and colorful, but so were Wolf3D and Commander Keen.
klyrs 3y ago
The thing that made Duke Nukem 3D great was its irreverence, compared to the seriousness of its contemporaries. It wasn't meant to be "great." It was fun.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Irreverence, and richness of the environments. Mirrors! Decorations that could be destroyed! Jetpacks! It felt so much freer than prior popular FPS games. A bunch of that stuff become standard fare in FPS games soon after, but Wolf3D, if not being the first to do those things (Rise of the Triad had some of that stuff, and came out first, but was nowhere near as popular as Duke3D) definitely popularized them and was a lot of players' first exposure to some of those features. It wasn't just goofier than the FPS games people were used to at the time—it felt like a leap forward in realism and capabilities.
  - thedougd 3y ago
    Qbert on the arcade machine in the strip club.
- Fnoord 3y ago
  Shake it baby. Do you wanna dance? And there was this one time I bought a Penthouse (I was 12) because I wanted the Duke Nukem Penthouse level which came with it.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Duke Nukem 2D sidescrollers with the Keen sound fx. The original Duke 3D and some expansions were alright but they got progressively worse with larger budgets and longer development cycles.

pengaru 3y ago

Agreed. Duke3D was junk, but a big part of that was the stiff 3D FPS competition from id. I think people stopped caring about the Duke series enough to remember/play the 2D scrollers not so much because Duke3D overshadowed them, but more that there were far better games to play than any of them. DOOM and Quake practically owned PC gaming in my sphere for quite some time. Even Descent didn't do too well despite the 6DoF tech being impressive at the time.

throwaway675309 3y ago
Duke Nukem 3-D was a great game if you were the type of kid that liked to modify your games rather than just consume them. For a lot of us in grade school, it was our first introduction to games that actively encouraged you to mod them, it came with a level editor for the Build engine, and you could open up the CON files to physically alter the actual scripts and behavior of items and entities. And when compared to id software's games (particularly the brown horribly muted color palette of quake), Duke Nukem 3d absolutely shone with personality and interactivity. There's a reason that it consistently scored in the 90s in old school PC gamer magazines.
- pengaru 3y ago
  What I'm hearing is that you loved the Build engine and tooling surrounding it. That's somewhat orthogonal to Duke3D the game played-as-shipped... I did software-rendered graphics programming back in the VGA days and a lot of your muted color palette complaint stems from a necessary compromise to support dynamic lighting in 256-colors. A huge part of what made DOOM so amazing was the dark environment and atmospheric, dynamic lighting. That they managed this in 256-colors was unbelievable a the time. Quake supported a software rendering mode on VGA as well, IIRC, also with dynamic lighting. I tried playing with dynamic lighting w/texture mapping hacks in 256-colors after playing DOOM showed it was possible, and it only really worked well with dark/goth-y muted textures because you have very little dynamic range. Try fitting an RGB color cube in 8 bits... Unless my memory is flawed, Duke3D didn't even attempt any dynamic lighting in the 8bpp VGA modes of the era. It was bright and colorful, but so were Wolf3D and Commander Keen.

klyrs 3y ago

The thing that made Duke Nukem 3D great was its irreverence, compared to the seriousness of its contemporaries. It wasn't meant to be "great." It was fun.

yamtaddle 3y ago
Irreverence, and richness of the environments. Mirrors! Decorations that could be destroyed! Jetpacks! It felt so much freer than prior popular FPS games. A bunch of that stuff become standard fare in FPS games soon after, but Wolf3D, if not being the first to do those things (Rise of the Triad had some of that stuff, and came out first, but was nowhere near as popular as Duke3D) definitely popularized them and was a lot of players' first exposure to some of those features. It wasn't just goofier than the FPS games people were used to at the time—it felt like a leap forward in realism and capabilities.
- thedougd 3y ago
  Qbert on the arcade machine in the strip club.
Fnoord 3y ago
Shake it baby. Do you wanna dance? And there was this one time I bought a Penthouse (I was 12) because I wanted the Duke Nukem Penthouse level which came with it.