Cheapo video game bonanza!!!!

I fancied a change from watching B-Movies, so for this time round I settled on reviewing a gaggle of bargain bin second hand games I picked up whilst in town the other day...for the princely sum of five English pounds...

Duke Nukem Forever (2011)

Yeeeeeeeeees, this one cost me a whole £2 it did.
Ive always liked the Duke Nukem games, ever since I got hold of Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn way back in good old 1996, and I certainly got my moneys worth out of that game ah tells thee (I still have it along with my Saturn, packed away in a box).
For me, Duke Nukem, along with DooM, Quake and a couple of others whose names escape me, marked the start of the FPS genre as a whole, and harkened back to a more simple time when all that an FPS player was required to do was shoot anything that moved with whatever weapons they could find and use best, there was no need for any intricately detailed stories, complex puzzly bits or even the need to consult online guides whenever you got to the point where you didn't have a fucking clue what you were supposed to be doing...see something...shoot it...that was all you needed to know.

Duke Nukem (Taking) Forever began development in 1997, a fact referenced in the games opening sequence, and as I'm sure we are all aware, the game went through numerous hands before finally someone was in a position to say "yes, its finally going to come out, stop bothering us".
Most reviews I've read or seen covering this game pan it mercilessly, citing that its humour is in poor taste/not politically correct/blatantly offensive etc, and that the gameplay is linear, predictable and doesn't feature good enough multiplayer elements to make it worth bothering about and so on....to these points I say, good, I'm glad you hate it.

The reason I say this is because I, like many others, believe that "modern" FPS games have gotten just as stale, repetitive and quite frankly, boring, as what these 1st/2nd generation FPS games such as Duke Nukem managed to get. Hell, Even the Nukem series fell afoul of shifting tastes when the games "Time to Kill" and "Land of the Babes" ended up trying to emulate Tomb Raider by becoming 3rd person shooters and failing miserably.


The game itself offers a simple plot line, 15 years after Duke saved the earth from alien invasion, he finds himself having to do it again, for the same reasons...the aliens are stealing our babes!.

Throughout the various levels, you pick up the same guns you used back in 1996, and for the most part you use them to punch holes in the same aliens you shot at in 1996.

Although the game has numerous flaws, chief among them being the fact that you can only ever carry 2 weapons, one of which really, really needs to be a rocket launcher of some sort, and the fact that most of the games weapons are inaccurate and underpowered, the rest of the games problems are identical to whichever CoD game is out this month/whichever CoD DLC pack is out this month, namely stuff like your guy not being able to step over small terrain features, not getting much protection from cover and sometimes it not being terribly clear what you're supposed to be doing.

Duke doesn't give a fuck about all this stuff though, as throughout the game, he makes numerous swipes at "modern" FPS/3PS games, including Halo, CoD, Gears of War, Dead Space etc, they even manage to throw in a few references to games such as Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Portal.

On its own though, without the rose tinted lens of nostalgia, Duke Nukem Forever is a thoroughly average game, and I can understand why those who have only ever known the modern incarnations CoD/MoH/BF series don't like it, I can also understand why bleeding heart Social Justice Warrior types dislike the idea of a hyper-masculine wisecracking asshole like Duke getting his own game without him having some sort of defining element of tragedy in his background.

So yeah, although I liked this game, it isn't a particularly good one, and only really worth the £2 I paid for it. I wouldn't mind giving the DLC for this game, "The Doctor Who Cloned Me" a go at some point in the future, but not today..

Overall - 5/10





Homefront (2011)

This one cost me £2 as well.....


So, apparently, in the year 2027 the western seaboard of the USA is invaded by Korean communist BASTARDS hailing from the recently reunited "Greater Korean Republic" which since the problems in the middle east turned into a full scale shooting war has become somewhat powerful and even more belligerent than usual, probably because petrol prices suddenly rocketed up to about $20 a gallon...ooh er!

There was a film made in the mid 80s called "Red Dawn" in which the USSR invaded the USA and a young Patrick Swayze and his teenaged chums fought them off...this is the same thing...just updated due to the fact that the Russians are supposedly our bezzie m8s now...hmm.

A straightforward "modern" FPS this be, being fully "CoD compliant", with a gritty, emotional storyline, lots of hi tech gadgets and plenty of foreign devils for you to empty your 5.56mm assault rifles into as you and your chums at "la resistance" heroically fight the good fight to make the world safe for democracy again.

Speaking of the storyline, many of the bits of background are filled in via collecting newspaper clippings you come across here and there while you move through the various war torn streets, and most of them read like they were written by the unholy sexual union of dubya bush, alex jones and the entire staff of FOX news, concentrating mainly on how the US military has been reduced in size and firepower during the early 21st century now that warfare would mostly be conducted via electronic means as opposed to good old shooty bang bang....obviously, this was a reyt silly move as those pesky commies moved in and proved they had the biggest and most potent sexual organs as they stamped on uncle sams face and then teabagged him.

Unfortunately though, the single player campaign ends up being a wee bit linear, although it tries to break this up by having rail shooter bits and even bits where you pilot choppers and stuff, theres nothing in there to push your skills to the limit, nor are there any nasty hidden things that jump out and surprise you.

All in all this isn't a bad game, but in all honesty it contains nothing new, hell, I didn't even have to take a gander at the controls, being as they were more or less identical to the "standard" layout for FPS games in this day and age. The single player campaign is bland at best, I managed to complete it in its entirety in one afternoon with very little challenge on my awesum l337 skillz. It seems that, like with so many games these days, its all about the multiplayer DLC.

Overall - 4/10


Rainbow Six: Vegas (2006)

Eeeeh, Tom Clancy eh?, he didn't half love his realistic war simulations, and this realistic war simulation only cos me a quid.
Last time i played anything with the words "Tom Clancy" written on it, I believe it also had "Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow" on the box, as well as the PS2 logo, so its been a while.

So, in 2010 some terrorists do something requiring the intervention of Team America etc etc etc...bang bang, boom boom, die commie bastard, America FUCK YEAH! and so on.

God this game is boring, no seriously, all you do is walk along, run into some terrorist guys, shoot them and then move on to the next bit, rinse and repeat until completion.
Because this is a "Tacticool" type FPS, the controls are nice and complicated so you can carry multiple grenade types, weapon attachments and even order other guys around, where their input into the particular situation is of dubious quality, and also make use of various types of vision goggles so you can actually see what the fuck you're supposed to be shooting at.
Add to this the fact that as per usual, sometimes its difficult to be able to clearly understand what you're supposed to be doing, and the fact that your support guys quite often get in your way, or get themselves killed while milling about in the open, and it becomes pretty clear pretty quick that, as per the norm for this day and age, no one gives a fuck about the single player campaign, its aaaaaallllll about the multiplayer.

*yawn*

Overall - 4/10