Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition – 3D Realms - 1997 - First time playing?: No, played on Windows (Eduke32) as a teen

[Content Warning: Duke Nukem 3D includes cartoon gore, mild nudity and implied rape. While not graphic partially due to graphical limitations of the time, consider that a heads-up for some touchy subject matter.]

The King has spoken. This doll must play Duke Nukem 3D.

Aliens stole our chicks, go and rip their heads off and shit down their necks. Do you need more story than this?

Much like Tomb Raider, this is another favourite game of mine I've played extensively on another platform, that being the Windows eduke32 source port, but this is my first time playing the Macintosh version. Also like Tomb Raider, while it doesn't have much new to seek it out for over the more common DOS original, it's still an absolutely superb port that feels spot on to how the original plays and runs smooth as butter. The UI has even been enhanced, now you can access graphical and control options in-game without having to load up a separate configuration exe like you did with the DOS original. Not only that, but it's the Atomic Edition as well, which means we have the excellent Plutonium Pak expansion levels here too and we're not missing out on content like the Saturn and N64 ports were. Well, except for the third party expansions. It seems that Duke it out in DC was the only other expansion that got an official Mac release. With some tinkering you can likely get the other expansions working too, the port supports GRP files to let you play add-on content and I was able to load up the Nuclear Winter GRP from the DOS version and it mostly worked fine with the exception of mismatched music tracks.

Duke 3D follows on from the lesser known but still well regarded Duke Nukem 1 and 2 for DOS, a duology of family friendly 2D platformers from that era of Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle. In Duke 1, a mad scientist interrupts a pink shirted Duke from watching Oprah so you gotta go destroy all his robots to save the day. In Duke Nukem 2, he's abducted by aliens who want to steal his genius super intelligent Rick and Morty watching brain. The plots are silly, Duke Nukem is a goofy action cartoon character and the violence is tame with no gore or realistic weaponry.

Then Duke Nukem 3D hit and a lot changed. While retaining much of the tongue in cheek cartoonish tone, the game was bloodier, more vulgar and much MUCH more sexual. All of this was used to make an even more overt parody of such sleazy ultraviolent action movies of the 80s, something that in spite of the crudeness managed to endear itself to many people through the sheer attention to detail of the amount of interactivity in the game's world, the unique neon lit L.A. setting in all of its filthy glory that was like no other game of the time, and last but not least, the character of Duke himself, an absurd hypermasculine steroid-fuelled chad of a man who has had quite enough of the bullshit of these alien bastards and will make it well known with an endless supply of taunts, 80s movie one-liners, brutality and humiliation. Unique for the time as well was his fully voice acted dialogue constantly commentating on his actions and surroundings throughout gameplay, in contrast to the standard silent protagonists of most early 90s first person shooters. Duke is a genuinely fun character who brings a ton of personality to his game, and as of late has seen something of a resurgence as a meme icon thanks to his iconic voice provided by Jon St John and his over-the-top nature making nearly anything said in his bitcrushed gravelly voice sound hilarious.

However, it wasn't just the outrageous adult content and humour that made Duke Nukem 3D special. In terms of gameplay and technical feats, Duke Nukem 3D was incredibly ambitious and ground breaking in many ways, pushing the technically 2D Build Engine to its absolute limits to make one of the most varied and memorable 3D shooters of all time. Duke lacked the polish of Doom and Quake in many ways, the difficulty balancing was much more clumsy, the level design can be more obtuse and often counter intuitive, plus the Build Engine in general is just a bit on the janky side to begin with, what with how even opening a door wrong can be enough to instantly kill you on the spot. Duke Nukem and many of the other highlights of the Build Engine instead make up for these shortcomings by going above and beyond the simple template of Doom and Quake with more weapons, more items, more intricate level design, creative set pieces and a ton more variety. If Doom is the FPS equivalent of Mario, a game that while not the first of its kind ended up setting in stone a lot of the conventions used to this day and created something of a base for the genre moving forward, then Duke Nukem 3D could be considered the Sonic of this analogy, something aiming to expand on those formulas and push the genre to new heights, sometimes with mixed results but nonetheless creating something fresh with an infectious high energy personality that’s hard not to get energised by yourself.

The second you start a new game, alien bastards have already shot down your ride and you’re thrown straight into gameplay. Immediately I have to gush, Duke Nukem 3D is a contender for my favourite first level in any video game I’ve ever played. Hollywood Holocaust, er, edgy title aside, does an absolutely brilliant job of letting you know exactly what you’re in for the second you start playing with everything that sets Duke Nukem apart from its peers introduced here. The level of interactivity you can expect is introduced in the very first room, a rooftop with a vent leading down to the main level. The vent is blocked off by a fan which you can either kick to break open, or you can shoot the explosive gas canisters next to the vent to destroy it entirely. Drop down the freshly wrecked vent and you’re on the main street of the level outside a cinema, directly in front of an enemy to unload your pistol into. In contrast to the environments of Doom mainly consisting of the same few stone textures, this street is full of detail and brimming with personality. There’s billboards, flickering neon street lights, rats scampering across the ground and decorations across the sidewalks such as palm trees, street signs and fire hydrants. You might experiment at this point with the jump command which was fairly non-standard for the time (another even earlier example is Star Wars: Dark Forces), seeing the wooden crate in front of you inviting you to try it out, and if you jump from there up to the billboard you can find your second weapon, the rocket launcher. A little further down the street you’ll also find an alien flying above you with a jetpack, giving you a chance to also use the mouse controlled aiming allowing you to aim up and down.

Moving forward from here you can enter the cinema, discovering that it’s not just a bit of set dressing, but a building with a full interior that serves as the core of the level. From here you can find even more rooms, the front desk, the restroom, the projector room and an arcade. Every room here serves a different purpose in introducing mechanics. The front desk serves as a hub connecting the other areas and also introduces light switches, which you may be seeking out instinctively upon seeing how dimly lit the room is, and if you jump behind the desk you can also access the security camera feed, allowing you to get some surveillance of the full level with some hints indicating where you can find some secret rooms yet to be explored. The restroom demonstrates the game’s functional mirrors, cleverly also introducing them in a way that can show the tactical advantage they can offer by showing an unalerted alien in the reflection that you now know to expect and can get the jump on once you turn around that corner. More interactivity is on display here such as the urinals which you can actually take a piss in, true immersive sim gaming right here, or you can break them open and drink the water spraying out of them. I never said Duke Nukem 3D was a high brow game, further demonstrated by the fact that you can open the stall to reveal an alien squatting on the toilet. The projector room can be accessed from here also by breaking open a vent that you may take notice of after the intro of the stage had you break a similar vent. The projector room includes the red key card needed to progress further in the level, and also serves as an introduction to secrets, with a secret room opening up when you jump on top of the projector, very directly encouraged by the presence of an atomic health pickup on top of said projector. Furthermore, if you enter the projector room from the main hallway accessed via the front desk, you get a taste of the destructive environments of the game too, with an explosion blowing away a chunk of the wall, revealing a health pickup inside of it which can now be obtained.

The arcade contains the locked door leading to the level exit which you need the red keycard to open, while also bringing back those explosive gas canisters from the intro. Shooting those once again causes an explosion and takes out a chunk of the wall that reveals a new passage leading back to the first cinema room you entered. From here, you can either progress forward, or you could take this shortcut back to the start as a cue to explore more and use what you now know about the mechanics that have been introduced to you to find some secrets. Since you know that explosions can destroy chunks of the level, you might notice the crack on the projector screen and fire a rocket at that to reveal a hidden room with the jetpack behind it. You might have noticed that the security camera feed behind the front desk shows a view from an apartment overlooking the street outside the cinema and head back there to find out you can enter the apartment building next to the billboard by jumping through the window. You’ll likely find other branching paths and shortcuts as well, such as how you can access the cinema through another cracked wall in a booth on the street, letting you know that the game is full of branching paths and shortcuts like this gradually opening up the level more and more and giving you more freedom as you progress. There is so much to see and do here and this is just the first level, just the first perfect taster of what is to come in Duke Nukem 3D.

So, it does a lot right, and this is just the first level, only a taste of the creative ideas and varied weaponry and enemies to come, but it also does a lot wrong. Unfortunately, as much as I adore it, there are a few early telltale signs of what I’d consider flaws with this game present even in the first level. Namely the explosions. Scripted explosions are extremely common, be it from an enemy busting down a wall or collapsing buildings, and they're very cool when they're not suddenly coming out of nowhere right on top of you and instantly gibbing you on the spot. There's a set piece right after you go through the locked door at the arcade where some aliens blast through the wall and I genuinely have no idea how to reliably get past this without taking at least a little damage since you need the wall gone to pass through the wrecked remains to the level exit (unless you use the jetpack to access the level exit from outside), but the explosives only seem to go off once you're already in damage range. Sudden explosions out of nowhere like this are common, untelegraphed, ridiculously powerful and often capable of one-shotting you if you're unfortunate enough to be in the centre of it all and always very, very cheap. Heck, even the explosions you're responsible for setting off yourself can be unpredictable. In the arcade, there's only gas canisters in one corner of the room so it would be safe to assume if you stay away from that corner you'll be safe right? Nope, destroying those canisters causes the entire arcade to explode, constant chain reactions of explosions filling the entire room, so you better get out of that room fast after firing a few shots.

Something a bit jarring you'll run into early as well is that Duke is surprisingly a glass cannon, but I guess that's what you can expect when you substitute Doomguy's full body armour for a tank top and bare muscles. Regardless, you die very quickly in Duke 3D, especially from explosions. Getting caught in your own rocket launcher's blast can be enough to one shot you on the spot, common enemies like Pig Cops have powerful and accurate hitscan shotgun blasts, Octabrains can take out over a third of your health with a direct hit, you don't have nearly as much room for error here. Duke is much harder than Doom or Quake, but you have some tools to even the playing field. One of the big ones is the portable medkit, allowing you to instantly heal up to 100hp on the fly whenever you want with the single press of a button, absolutely a life saver. Nonetheless, how fragile you are can really cause some frustrating cheap deaths, one that I often ran into was dying because I ran out of ammo for the shotgun and the game then automatically equipped the rocket launcher in its place, causing this dumbass chad to blow his own face off.

It doesn’t help that, as mentioned earlier, the Build Engine is pretty jank. Getting crushed is an instant kill in Duke Nukem 3D and every other Build game I’ve played, which is an issue because this engine’s collision detection is wonky as all hell. Any time you’re forced to interact with any moving part of level geometry, whether it be a subway train or a rotating gate, there is always the risk of your hitbox jittering just slightly outside of the level geometry, which is enough for the game to instantly gib you on the spot as if you got crushed by a steamroller. Even opening doors requires some caution as a result, since a door swinging open can push you into a wall and that can potentially be enough to crush you too. Everything feels a bit unstable and unreliable in the Build Engine, and while through trial and error I’ve mostly adapted to its weird physics and quirks, it’s still capable of catching me off guard in a few often nasty spots. I almost always play first-person shooters without saving mid-level for an extra challenge and am very capable of doing that in Duke Nukem 3D, this playthrough on Mac being the second time I’ve done this, but getting through the majority of a 30-minute long massive map only to lose all that progress because I clipped into a wall is always devastating.

There’s also the, shall we say, questionable aspects of Duke 3Ds tone and theming that would likely be irresponsible to not touch on. I actually don’t have any issues with Duke as a character in this game, for such a perverted character he seems to respect women well enough, tips sex workers generously and hates seeing women get hurt and abused by the aliens. His entire motivation is summed up simply with the line “Nobody steals our chicks and lives”. It’s just that, well… this is a little tonally weird right? Like, the reason the aliens kidnapped all of the women is specifically for breeding purposes, which of course means rape, and throughout many of the levels you can find naked and presumably impregnated women bound in alien cocoons and tentacles, surrounded by eggs and begging for death. You can’t really rescue these girls either, there’s no way for you to break them out of the cocoons, the best you can do is kill all of the aliens in the level to prevent them from getting caught in any further crossfire. Now, it should be made clear that this isn’t glorified, Duke directly says “this really pisses me off” upon entering rooms filled with captured girls, plus the game actively punishes you for killing them by spawning in more enemies to ambush you, alongside Duke uttering a mournful “damn it…” under his breath whenever one dies. Plus, the entire game is about killing the bastards who did these disgusting acts. But like, this feels out of place, right? Like, there’s a time and place for darker subject matter like this, but I don’t think that place is right next to fat aliens in hovercrafts shooting missiles out of their assholes. I’m also not really sure how the designers expected the players to react to this, like the way that the cocooned babes moan “kill me…” in a pained tone, as that is in fact a reference to the movie Aliens, keeping in line with the movie references and quotes of the rest of the game, so are we meant to see this as horrifying, or as a fun reference, or as a weird mixture of both? I have no idea and I kind of doubt that the designers thought that heavily about it either. I’m more forgiving of Duke 3D’s tonal weirdness primarily because the later sequel Duke Nukem Forever is much worse about this stuff, but it definitely feels off regardless. It’s the kind of thing that requires some content warnings, in short.

With so many criticisms it might leave you wondering why Duke 3D is still something I love, so let me make it clear that in spite of the sudden deaths, janky engine, wonky difficulty curve and tonal weirdness, Duke 3D does so much cool stuff that more than saves the game for me, instead managing to turn it into a classic of the genre. The non-linearity alluded to while discussing Hollywood Holocaust is a huge part of the draw to me, in addition to the movement and traversal through these levels. Duke feels fantastic to control, his speed is just right, his jump has just the right amount of weight to it with excellent mid-air control, crouching can be used to quickly duck out of the way of danger, it all feels very freeing, the kind of game where you don’t feel restricted in your movement at all because of how much precise and tight control you have over your character. The level design is able to take advantage of this as well with maps much more vertically designed than Doom’s much more flat terrain, giving a larger sense of scale to many of these stages such as Flood Zone, a level in a flooded city where you jump back and forward between hopping across the rooftops of skyscrapers and exploring the submerged buildings below, or The Abyss, where you make your way across steep canyons that eventually lead to a spiralling walkway leading up to the massive alien ship in the centre of it all. This could of resulted in an extremely frustrating game laden with excessive sudden death do-or-die platforming which is always awkward in first-person shooters where you can’t even see your feet, but that’s why the jetpack is such a brilliant addition, allowing you to save yourself if you slip up a jump, thus giving you a safety net and preventing falling off a platform from being an immediate game over. Yet there’s also a resource management angle to this, do you keep your jetpack fuel for those safety purposes, or do you use it to find shortcuts or secrets in the level?

Both the level design and environmental design as a whole is absolutely superb here. You have a map function as is standard of shooters of this era, but unlike Doom I never end up needing to use it in Duke 3D at all solely because every room is so visually distinct and sticks in my mind, with enough landmarks for me to be able to identify where I am in the level when backtracking without a map at all. 3D Realms really went above and beyond with packing every single level with a ton to see and interact with. Lots of unique assets can be missed entirely because they’re kept in well hidden secrets, such as the recreation of the Starship Enterprise’s bridge from Star Trek or the Wampa’s cave from Star Wars. Even parts of the level that you’re not even meant to access at all still contain little easter eggs such as messages on the wall saying “You aren’t supposed to be here”. Levels don’t blend together in Duke 3D because all of them are set in radically different locations. Well, okay, except for Episode 2, every level there is “the space level”, but this still applies for the rest of the game. Episode 3 has you start in a sushi restaurant, then you go to a bank, then the flooded city, then a skyscraper, then the movie set and so on. There's also a lot of interactivity, what with the previously mentioned destructible environments, but also small touches just added in to mess around with, such as tipping the sex workers or singing karaoke or playing with the billiards table.

Regardless, this is a shooter first and foremost, so how are those guns? Duke’s arsenal is incredibly vast, creative, varied and a joy to use. You have your conventional Doom-esque guns like the pistol, shotgun, chaingun cannon and rocket launcher, all feel great with the right amount of kick to them, but that’s only scratching the surface. Another early addition to the arsenal is the remote pipe bombs, allowing you to toss an explosive which you can then detonate whenever you’re ready with a tap of the detonator button, it won’t blow up until you press that button. In addition to being a very satisfying level of control to have over explosives, they also handle differently to the rocket launcher in that they’re thrown, meaning you can toss them at enemies below you or over walls, giving you options even if you don’t have direct line of sight.

By episode 2 the new weapons really get outlandish. One of the coolest in my opinion is the Shrinker, allowing you to shrink aliens down to the size of a harmless mouse and simply step on them to finish them off, very powerful as it’s a one-hit kill but risky since running into the battlefield to stomp a shrunken alien can leave you a sitting duck for any other enemies in the area. Episode 4 gives you a variation on this concept with the Expander, which instead causes enemies to inflate with a cartoony rubbery stretching sound effect and then pop like a balloon spraying gory confetti everywhere. My favourite however is absolutely the Devastator. Explosive weapons are always my favourite in shooters, so giving me two missile launchers that can be dual wielded, loaded with 99 missiles which can be launched with the rapidfire speed of a machine gun? It’s so damn satisfying and gloriously over-the-top, but kept from being overpowered by having it burn through ammo very quickly and the missiles being weaker than the explosions caused by the rocket launcher or pipe bombs. The last two weapons I’m not too crazy about however. The laser tripbombs are honestly kind of useless, the idea is that you’re meant to plant them on a wall and then any enemy that walks past them will be exploded, but the process of setting up the bomb and then carefully luring the enemy into the laser is way more time consuming and far more risky than just, y’know, devastating them with the Devastator. It seems to be a weapon designed more for deathmatch than the single-player campaign. The Freezethrower is definitely better, freezing enemies into ice sculptures that can then be shattered by another gun or a kick. Unlike the Shrinker, the Freezethrower actually does damage as well as immobilising the enemy, so even if an enemy thaws out they’ll still only have 1hp left. It has its uses but the ammo for it is rare and it burns through ammo very quickly, so it kind of feels like a lesser Shrinker to me.

One of my favourite aspects of the weapons however is the melee attack of all things. The Mighty Foot is handled a bit differently than melee in other shooters of the time in that you can still use it as a melee attack even when you’re equipped with a gun thanks to the quick kick key and the fact that your melee attack isn’t reliant on your hands being free. The freezethrower and shrinker are designed around this since the kick is how you finish off aliens with those guns. It can help if you get cornered and are in a bind, if an enemy is pinning you against a wall you can keep firing your gun but also use the kick to do additional damage on top of your gunfire, taking them down faster before they have as much of a chance to tear through your HP.

Just as varied as the weapons are the aliens you fight, an extremely diverse and memorable rogue’s gallery designed to put all of those guns to their best use and keep enemy encounters feeling fresh throughout. Troopers are the basic grunts serving the role of the Zombiemen or imps from Doom, though they have a few quirks such as often having jetpacks or their teleportation ability. Pig cops are equipped with hitscanning shotguns, very powerful but the pigs have a clear animation of them readying their gun when they’re about to fire, letting you know to quickly duck into cover before they blast you. Octabrains are common aquatic foes due to their ability to swim and attack at the same time, but they also can appear floating through the air as well. Their psychic blasts hit hard and they’re a bit tanky but they’re extremely weak to both the rocket launcher and the Devastator, a single shot from either of them being enough to gib them. Enforcers are hitscanners like the Pig Cops but much faster and more aggressive and equipped with a chaingun cannon instead of a shotgun, harder to dodge but does far less damage than the shotgun so as long as you get out of the way before you soak up too much damage you’ll be safe. Assault Commanders are those fat rocket-shitting aliens mentioned earlier, they’re slow and a big target but a direct hit from a rocket can mess you up badly and you have to keep the splash damage in mind as well, meaning that it’s best to not stick close to walls when fighting them, the more open space you have the better.

The one enemy that kinda sucks is the Sentry Drone. They’re flying metal blimp looking hovercrafts that immediately ram you and explode on contact. They’re extremely fast and tend to ambush you a lot, being placed beside doors and such to immediately jump you the second you enter the room. They’re very good at dodging rockets as well and are very tanky, able to take several shotgun blasts before finally going down. Episode 2 is generally infamous for the drone spam and it can get really irritating to constantly take damage the second you enter any room thanks to those ambushes, but they’re much more sparingly used in the rest of the game thankfully. Episode 4 also introduces some new enemies that weren’t in the base game. Pig Cops can attack you in tanks now with deadly rapid fire machine guns, which you can either destroy with your weaponry or by hitting the giant nuclear button on the back of their tank that causes them to detonate on the spot. The other addition is the Protector Drone, these being very different from the Sentry Drones, instead being lanky somewhat Xenomorph-esque aliens with acid blood. They’re immune to the Shrinker and are in fact even capable of shrinking Duke down with their own shrink ray projectiles, leaving Duke unable to fight back and at risk of being stomped on. Like the Pig Cops, this attack thankfully has a very clear wind-up animation letting you know to get out of the way the second you see it. They’re also actually good for getting usage out of the Freezethrower thanks to its high damage output and minimal splash damage which prevents you from blowing yourself up if your target gets too close to you, which is very likely with Protector Drones as they move extremely fast, so their addition is very much appreciated for giving that weapon more value.

“Freeing” is really the word I’d use to describe how Duke Nukem 3D feels to play. The genre has evolved past its restrictive origins in Doom, now providing the player with features we now take for granted such as full mouselook, jumping, crouching, melee attacks you can use without unequipping your weapon and more. Duke was not the first to do all of this, again I will point out that Dark Forces has a very Build Engine-esque feel to it and did a lot of this stuff a year earlier, but Duke did it with tight, smooth controls, far more varied weapons and power-ups and brilliant non-linear level design that encourages exploration and thinking outside of the box to take full advantage of the wide selection of toys you have to play with between Duke’s moveset and the weapons themselves, while also having satisfying combat with well balanced enemy rosters and guns that keeps the game challenging and engaging no matter what route you take through these expansive levels. That’s why to this day Duke Nukem is still a blast in spite of all of the shortcomings, while inconsistent in quality for sure, when it’s at its peak there’s few games in the genre that feel as incredible to play as Duke. If you’re after the same level of consistently high quality and tight design of Doom but in a more modern and less restrictive engine, then I’d recommend Quake over this, which is far less janky throughout. On the other hand, Duke Nukem is the game for anyone that thought that Quake played it too safe and didn't do enough to expand the formula beyond simply “Doom in full 3D”. Even with the limitations of a 2.5D engine just like Doom, Duke Nukem in many ways managed to be the far more ambitious game despite the restrictions of not even being full 3D. What more can I say except, hail to the king, baby.

The DOS version of Duke Nukem 3D including all expansions can be bought from Zoom, which can then be used with EDuke32, an excellent source port of Duke 3D capable of running on nearly any computer. Steam also has a modern port of Duke Nukem 3D called the 20th Anniversary World Tour, which includes an exclusive fifth episode and developer commentary, but does not include the expansion packs.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 5th October 2023