cout << "Hello World";

Oh, hello there. I didn't hear you come in. Please, have a seat. I guess it's been a while since we've spoken, hasn't it? Not since 2008. My word, we have some catching up to do. Oh, bother, who has time for that? No one wants to hear my long-winded tales of my everyday life. But at least the world didn't end, right? That's always good. Of course, now the Mad Hatter is throwing some absurd Tea Parties all across my nation. But what are you gonna do? Oh well.

In other news, it's finally happened. I've been waiting impatiently for twelve years, and Duke Nukem Forever has finally been released for Xbox 360. So naturally, I shelled out the $60 for it, despite the bad reviews and my better judgement, because I just had to see it for myself. I had to know for sure that it wasn't just a fever dream. And it wasn't. There it is, in my Xbox. And after twelve fucking years of development, they still somehow managed to fuck up what should have been the best game ever. And I'm not talking Turok-remake bad. That I could deal with. This is just... sad.

Sure, Duke's back. Sure, he's fighting aliens again. But what used to feel like a fuck-plot-and-exposition sprinting-at-you-makes-my-bullets-go-faster-and-hurt-you-more testosterone-fest full of quips mocking pop culture and what was modern gaming has now become a twisted amalgamation of pieces of those elements, as if the developers were building some sort of Frankenstein's Monster from Lovecraftian corpses they neither understood nor could ever fully grasp.

As a shooter, the folks at Gearbox lovingly stole all the most common elements from every other fucking shooter on the market and mashed them into a Duke-esque mold in the hopes of passing it off as fourth-wall breaking mockery of other games. Instead of regenerating health or shields, you have "Ego". Drink a can of beer, and suddenly you have overshields - I mean, it makes you tougher. Definitely not a Halo ripoff. And of course, Duke doesn't have time for a flashlight. No, after getting rich and famous in the aftermath of the last game's events, he's got the dough to pick up a pair of night-vision sunglasses. Well that's fucking plausible. Most of the weapons from the old game are there, however, in spirit if not in full functionality. But as a shooter overall, I'm not blown away. Mediocre at best.

They compensated for that by adding plot. Not good plot, mind you, but they tried. Good job, Gearbox. Now take this juicebox and go color in the other room while I talk to the grownups. Because Holy Ninja-Kicking Christ, is the exposition poorly done. It's so bad, while playing the first three levels, I actually got fucking bored. Playing a video game. Me. To put this in perspective, this is a guy who dug a 25x20 quarry down to the bedrock in Minecraft without mods, saying your shiny new game bored me to tears to the point that I was surfing the web while your NPCs jabbered, or while your loading screens chugged on and on for what felt like eons at a time. I swear, new species could evolve and die out in the space of time it takes to load a new zone.

But it's okay, because Duke Nukem is known for all the interactive shit strewn through the levels that have no impact on the actual game but are just neat to mess with. Like pool tables and strippers! The good news: there are still strippers, and eventually you even get some nicely rendered bare breasts. Bad news: You need to have the patience to play through a bunch of levels to get to them, and there are plenty of minigames with terrible controls to slow you the fuck down in between. There's still a pool table in this incarnation of Duke's adventures, but Odin knows the controls and physics have only gotten clunkier and less realistic. And don't even attempt the pinball machine. It's enough to make you lose faith in programmers.

The one thing I'll give them some credit for is that for every three to five dumb one-liners they've given Duke to spout (many of which are weak jokes referencing the old classic, like "I've got balls of... fail."), they give him one truly funny one ("Power armor is for pussies!" when offered Master Chief's suit from the Halo series).

But all in all, it's just not enough. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I've built up my expectations too much over the years. Maybe it was wrong of me to expect the shining golden god of video games when I should have known that the amount of time it spent in development could only be a bad sign for Duke. Or maybe not. Maybe it is our duty to use these two incarnations, placed side by side, to finally boil down just what makes a shooter good, and what makes a flop. Science can guide us to a new golden age of entertainment, and Duke here is the perfect test subject.

In any case, the next game I buy for my birthday will be one which has had a demo publicly released.