Duke Nukem 2 did not age well at all
#1 Posted 02 March 2014 - 04:58 PM
Silly as it sounds, I like Duke Nukem 1 more than Duke Nukem 2. I don't' know exactly why, but it felt more fair than DN2. DN2 has lots of potential, but the really small viewing space and boss fights kill it. A remake that gives you a much larger viewing space would make the game a lot better.
#2 Posted 02 March 2014 - 05:15 PM
The problem with Duke 2 is the same with some old platformers like Rayman 1, the player have too small visibility. I wish there was an easy way to increase the player visibility to make the game less annoyng to play, like a mod, patch or something, but I guess it's not worth the work since these games have no native mod compatibility AFAIK.
#3 Posted 02 March 2014 - 05:33 PM
#4 Posted 02 March 2014 - 06:33 PM
#5 Posted 02 March 2014 - 06:41 PM
Lunick, on 02 March 2014 - 06:33 PM, said:
It sucks. You have to be right next to the edge to make it scroll, and the extremely limited view means you'll very likely run into an enemy without given any time to react to them because of how close you are to the edge.
#6 Posted 02 March 2014 - 07:40 PM
#8 Posted 02 March 2014 - 09:12 PM
This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 02 March 2014 - 09:39 PM
#9 Posted 03 March 2014 - 03:17 AM
ReaperMan, on 02 March 2014 - 07:40 PM, said:
IIRC it only uses 16 colors at once during actual game play, so that could be possible.
#10 Posted 03 March 2014 - 06:08 AM
This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 03 March 2014 - 06:09 AM
#11 Posted 03 March 2014 - 06:17 AM
This post has been edited by fuegerstef: 03 March 2014 - 06:18 AM
#12 Posted 03 March 2014 - 09:23 AM
#13 Posted 03 March 2014 - 12:07 PM
#14 Posted 03 March 2014 - 12:28 PM
Graphics have never really been Apogee/3D Realms strong side, their games have often been late to come out and somewhat behind on technology but making it up with design etc.
#16 Posted 03 March 2014 - 02:36 PM
Kathy, on 03 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:
IIRC, making sidescrollers work on PCs was a big thing around the time Apogee was in their prime.
#17 Posted 03 March 2014 - 02:38 PM
Kathy, on 03 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:
What sidescrollers did they make for PC in the early 90's? When I was a kid, Apogee games ruled the PC. Sure, I played other games, but the Apogee games were the best.
#18 Posted 03 March 2014 - 11:11 PM
Lucas Arts made a lot of adventure games around that time, Secret of Monkey Island was already a few years old by the time Duke II came out and it's. Fast forward a few years and there is the FPS Dark Forces which was not only technically impressive to the point it destroys Doom II and could be compared with - and even surpass in some areas - the "Big three" Build games - Room over Room, animated Polygon objects, stealth mechanics, objective-based missions and more - which, like many of their games, was also awesome to play though due to huge non-linear levels and complex puzzles, some people give up on it. Oh, and it had a kick-ass interactive soundtrack, especially if you had a GUS or SCC-1 to feed it through.
Still, Duke II stands out because it played well, it wasn't so much what it looked like, it looked acceptable (I really liked the visual style personally) but it played fast (if you slid the slider up) with loads of action, had awesome music (many games didn't, Jill of the Jungle never sounded right to me), and around 32 levels, the difficulty also seemed right and perhaps most importantly, collision detection worked quite well (many scroller games didn't at that time). The game perhaps worked so well in many ways because of it's simplicity.
On the down-side, I always found the SoundBlaster support to be a bit funky with some systems. As an example, I had a 486 setup with a SBPro 2 in it, the game used to not play some sounds and then freeze - wasn't the card as I moved it to a 486SX setup and it works fine. The young whippersnappers with their new-fangled emulators now will never know the joys of meeting the Recommended Specs on the box only to then spend hours turning parallel ports off, making a boot disk, fiddling with which drivers or memory managers to load/not load before getting annoyed, ripping the lid off and playing with IRQs, DMAs and IO Ports just to make something work (and likely having to put it back again to make something else work). I let the save system slide because many games had similar systems at that time and the levels weren't overly huge.
Despite Duke II's shortcomings, it's still my favorite Duke game, but as you can see, I understand that it has problems and I can see why other people are put off by them. But I don't think it's aged any worse than 95% of scrolling action games from it's time on the same platform, many have aged worse.
- It's funny how much you ramble when you have nothing better to do.
This post has been edited by High Treason: 03 March 2014 - 11:14 PM
#19 Posted 03 March 2014 - 11:55 PM
#20 Posted 04 March 2014 - 03:28 AM
#21 Posted 04 March 2014 - 03:24 PM
#22 Posted 07 March 2014 - 04:55 PM
#23 Posted 06 April 2014 - 08:51 AM
MusicallyInspired, on 02 March 2014 - 09:12 PM, said:
EDIT:
duke2_vga.png duke2_ega.png
I've just discovered a pixel shader in DOSBox SVN Daum called EGAfilter.fx that gives VGA output the appearance of EGA graphics. It's not super accurate but it's possible to play Duke Nukem II in quasi-EGA that way.