Duke4.net Forums: Duke Nukem 2 did not age well at all - Duke4.net Forums

Jump to content

Page 1 of 1
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic

Duke Nukem 2 did not age well at all

#1

You have barely any room to dodge enemy attacks unless enemies shoot at the very edge of the screen while you're on the other edge because most of the room is taken up by the HUD. Even with speed at it's slowest, you'll still get jumped often because of the really small amount of space you actually have. The game tries to encourage you to constantly shoot, but puts shit like rockets that fuck you over if you actually walk around while hammering the fire key. Your default weapon is weaksauce and the game puts like two weapons in each level, so you better be ready to conserve ammo or else. The bosses are awful, awful bulletsponges.

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

User is offline   LkMax 

#2

I also prefer the first Duke over Duke 2.
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.
1

User is offline   necroslut 

#3

The combination of small window, big sprites and choppy scrolling does make Duke 2 a bit frustrating to play. I agree that Duke 1 has aged better, but it's not as cool.
0

User is offline   Lunick 

#4

The scrolling of the window turns the game off completely for me :/
0

#5

View PostLunick, on 02 March 2014 - 06:33 PM, said:

The scrolling of the window turns the game off completely for me :/


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.
0

User is offline   ReaperMan 

#6

Am i the only one who felt that Duke Nukem 2 was originally going to be an EGA game... but then they switched it to VGA at the last minute? Because it honestly doesn't use very many VGA colors.
1

User is offline   Person of Color 

  • Senior Unpaid Intern at Viceland

#7

No I feel the same way, honestly.
0

User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#8

Still looks good, though. I wonder what it'd look like with a standard EGA palette...

EDIT:

Attached Image: duke2_vga.png Attached Image: duke2_ega.png

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 02 March 2014 - 09:39 PM

3

User is offline   necroslut 

#9

View PostReaperMan, on 02 March 2014 - 07:40 PM, said:

Am i the only one who felt that Duke Nukem 2 was originally going to be an EGA game... but then they switched it to VGA at the last minute? Because it honestly doesn't use very many VGA colors.

IIRC it only uses 16 colors at once during actual game play, so that could be possible.
0

User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#10

No, it uses more than that. My screenshot counted the number of colours at around 20. When converting the palette to standard EGA in my experiment some colours had to be lost.

This post has been edited by MusicallyInspired: 03 March 2014 - 06:09 AM

0

User is offline   ---- 

#11

Compared to other games of that time Duke Nukem 2 didn't even look good or play well when it originally came out.

This post has been edited by fuegerstef: 03 March 2014 - 06:18 AM

0

User is offline   necroslut 

#12

It was very actionpacked compared to other PC sidescrollers at the time though, many who shared issues like choppy scrolling.
0

User is offline   Yause 

#13

Few of Apogee's games compared well to other titles of the time. They mainly got attention because of the platform: arcade and console style games on the PC.
0

User is offline   necroslut 

#14

For the platform (PC) at the time, I think they beat pretty much all competition. Epic's games from the time are shit compared to Apogee's, even though they sometimes had better graphics. The only other dev/publisher who could rival Apogee's quality was probably Sierra, and they were in a completely different game.
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.
0

User is offline   Kathy 

#15

Origin Systems, Interplay, Lucasarts?
0

#16

View PostKathy, on 03 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:

Origin Systems, Interplay, Lucasarts?


IIRC, making sidescrollers work on PCs was a big thing around the time Apogee was in their prime.
1

User is offline   necroslut 

#17

View PostKathy, on 03 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:

Origin Systems, Interplay, Lucasarts?

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.
1

#18

Origin didn't make any side-scrollers that I know of, but they certainly made impressive RPGs. Ultima Underworld, for example, from a technical standpoint is amazing, it predates Wolf3D yet had shading, 3D objects and sloped floors to name a few innovations... Though I suspect many had frame-rate issues (I should rake the box out and try it on my 386 - though I'd have to downgrade it to do it properly - to see what happens). Unfortunately the controls sucked and I hear it didn't play very well compared with the rest of the series (which is generally in high regard) - I can''t judge it too well as RPGs aren't my thing and I suck at them (can't be bothered to learn how to play them properly).

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

2

User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#19

I used to have a Voyetra sound card and almost every single Apogee game's digital sound effects were extremely distorted with it. It wasn't until years later that I was able to hear the sound effects in their purity. Still, loved those games all the same. I didn't grow up on Nintendo and Sega, I grew up on Apogee platformers.
0

User is offline   Kathy 

#20

Okay, hold your horses. I thought necroslut switched to talking in general.
0

#21

I like Duke Nukem II but the first one has definitely aged better IMO, has more of a classic arcade feel to it.
0

User is offline   blackharted3 

  • Resident Dufus

#22

Let's face the first good Duke games was 3D. The first Duke game was better then the second. 3D doesn't seem to age as well as 2D I notice. Rare exceptions are things like, well any Naughty Dog PS1 game, or Rare title.
-2

User is offline   MrFlibble 

#23

View PostMusicallyInspired, on 02 March 2014 - 09:12 PM, said:

Still looks good, though. I wonder what it'd look like with a standard EGA palette...

EDIT:

Attachment duke2_vga.png Attachment 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.

Attached thumbnail(s)

  • Attached Image: duke2_ega.png

0

User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#24

Fascinating!
0

Share this topic:


Page 1 of 1
  • You cannot start a new topic
  • You cannot reply to this topic


All copyrights and trademarks not owned by Voidpoint, LLC are the sole property of their respective owners. Play Ion Fury! ;) © Voidpoint, LLC

Enter your sign in name and password


Sign in options