The First 15 Minutes: Duke Nukem Forever Demo

While gaming it up last night, I couldn’t help but notice an e-mail from Gearbox popping up in the corner with a message I’ve long been waiting for: the Duke Nukem Forever demo is here! Jamie has wittily announced that earlier today, so I am not going to be redundant.

I did however give the demo a pass through and captured the first 15 minutes with FRAPS to post to our YouTube. So, if you are curious about the game, but don’t feel like downloading the 2GB demo, or are unable to, this should appease you. Given we’re dealing with Duke here, it shouldn’t need to be said… but viewer beware. There is a lot of vulgarity strewn through the gameplay.

As a life-long Duke fan (no joke, I cleared through the first game when I was 9), I was in sheer awe when I first loaded the demo up. I still have an old PC magazine from 1999 that previewed the first iteration of the game, so to see the logo on my desktop with the game launching soon after… magic.

While the older Duke Nukem games were far from deserving of anything less than an M rating, DNF takes things to the next level and becomes what I’m sure is the most vulgar and outrageous game I’ve ever laid my eyes on. When was the last time you played a game that kicked things off with you relieving yourself at a urinal? Or during an intermission had some of the giddiest girls around sucking… well, I’ll stop there.

It’s no secret that DNF has experienced multiple graphics engine changes, and as such, I didn’t expect to see Dirt 3 or Battlefield 3 quality graphics. It’s a good thing, because for the most part, the entire game is reminiscent of a console port, and even though I was running the game at 1920×1200 with full details, it felt like I was running the game at a lower resolution.

Still, graphics don’t equal gameplay. In that department, the game doesn’t strike me as being a masterpiece, but it does get the job done (kind of like Duke). I felt like I still needed some sort of precision to slice through a pig cop at a distance, and at the default difficulty, the game is rather challenging. Can the game capture non-Duke fans? At this point I’m not too sure, and as a Duke fan, I don’t think I could see it from that point-of-view. So, that’s where we’d love to hear some of your opinions. Play the demo? Tell us what you think!

The demo didn’t quite blow me away as I had hoped it would, but I still loved it, and even played through it a second time (and likely a third by the time the day is through). The launch trailer shows a lot more to the game than the demo does, so I can see this turning out to be a great game even if it’s not perfect.