Duke Nukem Forever/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Duke Nukem Forever was the most popular game at PAX Prime 2010, with lines that were four-and-a-half hour waits. It's fair to say that the news that not only had Gearbox been working on the game, but they were nearly done and it would actually be out within a year drove many fans into tears of joy.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Breather Level: After The Hive you go to the the strip club, and have a scavenger hunt to get a lap dance. It turns out it was All Just a Dream.
    • And in The Doctor Who Cloned Me DLC, The Burning Bush chapter, which plays pretty much in the same way in that you're given a couple of scavanger hunt tasks to carry out.
  • Broken Base: Over the Two-Gun system. Some say it's a nice change, showing 3D Realms wasn't seeking to just re-hash Duke 3D in prettier graphics, and are willing to try different things with Duke. They also cite how it's only a gun limiter, with Pipebombs, tripmines, Steroids, etc unaffected. Others say it's 3D Realms/Gearbox changing Duke to what's popular. Then there's the 3rd party saying they did it because of consoles and their limited controls (the officially given reason), and that console FPS players would get confused and/or frustrated by having more than 2 guns at a time. This particular base breaker was alleviated somewhat in a patch which allows Duke to carry four guns at a time.
  • Crazy Awesome: It's Duke Nukem. What did you expect? Incredibly Lame Fun...?
  • Contested Sequel: And let's leave it at that.
  • Critical Backlash: Duke Nukem Forever has gotten scathing reviews from many critics, yet it still managed to sell enough to be profitable. Some critics have even said they're somewhat insulted with how well DNF has sold, in spite of the thrashing they gave it.
  • Dead Baby Comedy/Dude, Not Funny: The level "The Hive".
  • Demonic Spiders: Octabrains and berserk pig cops, capable of killing you in two hits. They always seem to be in tight areas with no cover. The Octabrains are also incredibly agile, capable of hurling things at you (including ammo from certain weapons you fired and your own pipe-bombs), and has an attack that can take out a large chunk of your ego bar, in addition to usually attacking in swarms, crossing this trope with Goddamn Bats
  • Dude, Not Funny:
    • One of the less popular aspects involve the Capture the Babe mode. When you grab the other team's "babe", sometimes she'll start to freak out and struggle as you take her back to your base, so you have to give her a smack on her behind to quiet her down. It has started again the debate about sexism in games.
    • A XBOX magazine said this in their review.

"For the most part, the game isn't so much offensive or misogynistic...one colossally misjudged sequence early in the game where the combination of nudity, body horror and at the end, a particularly unpleasant one-liner makes for a genuinely harrowing experience. The Alien Hive level, is filled with whimpering, tortured, semi naked women...Duke's trademark flippancy makes him sound like a total sociopath...we weren't expecting anything this distasteful, even from a Duke Nukem game."

  • Fan Hater:
    • From critics as well as average gamers; for example, one such site labeled DNF's fans as "gullible twelve year olds."
    • This guy goes so far as to call out pretty much all game critics who didn't express disgust at the game's sexism and condemn the game as terrible, whether or not they even liked the game.
  • Foe Yay: The audio recordings of Doctor Proton that plays in the training chambers of the Me, Myself and I chapter in the The Doctor Who Cloned Me DLC makes you wonder if he has feelings for Duke especially when he gets to the love part. Adding to that is he's making clones of Duke, of all people.
    • Lampshaded with the achievement you get when you finally defeat Doctor Proton: Heart To Heart.
  • Follow the Leader: The biggest criticism of the game is its similarities to other modern shooters.
  • Four Point Scale: A notable Aversion.
  • Goddamned Bats: Octabrains. They tend to attack in swarms of two or more, they fly, they're incredibly agile, and if they're not throwing things littered around the game environment at you, a blast of their energy ball can knock helluva lot off your Ego bar. And did we mention that they can grab large ammo projectiles you fired (say, RPGs, devastator rockets or your pipe-bomb) and hurl them back at you? And fighting them underwater just makes things more difficult.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Randy Pitchford left 3DRealms to form Gearbox Software. Guess which software studio is developing (and finishing) the game now...
    • Gearbox, the company now in charge of Duke Nukem Forever, are also the ones who ported Halo to the PC. In game, he finds Spartan armor and calls anyone who wears it a "pussy". He pointed that out just 15 years ago, but when finding a different marine.
  • Hype Aversion: Given its reputation and just how long it's been in development, this was inevitable.
  • Hype Backlash: Also inevitable, considering how long the game was in development and then generating hype when it was close to release. Other than the reviews posted all over the internet, we'll just leave it at that.
  • Internet Backdraft: The cover art seen above is rather unpopular with the fan base. Just head on to the Gearbox forums and look in this topic. Try and say the cover represents the game accurately, how Duke looks cool, or that his left arm looks perfectly fine to you.
  • Marty Stu: The Duke is played this way for laughs. He's absolutely perfect. He practically owns the world at this point. He's worshipped by his women and audience, and he's so strong that he can lift 600-pound weights, force open high-tech doors using just his arms, and take down an alien fleet by himself.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Always Bet on Duke", a tagline printed on one of the early promotional posters for the game; upon the announcement of the game actually getting released, people started saying they can finally cash in their bets.
  • Misblamed:
    • Certain reviewers have put the blame for the finished product's various flaws wholly on Gearbox; some even seem to be under the impression that they restarted the game from scratch after they took over the project. In actual fact, the finished product is about 80-90% the product of 3DRealms, as George Broussard himself has frequently bemoaned. Whether Gearbox should have done a complete reboot of the project is a legitimate question, but most of the disturbing content was the product of 3DRealms.
    • Gearbox also came under fire for threats to blacklist reviewers who rated the game poorly. It was actually Rednar public relations who was responsible, who Gearbox promptly fired.
  • Older Than They Think: Most news sites tend to forget that the "ego is health" mechanic first appeared in the Playstation game Land of the Babes and Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, where doing things like shooting members of the women's resistence would lower your health (in the former), and that rescuing women and killing enemies would raise it (in the latter). Also, the alien-impregnated chicks in the Hive level could be found all over in previous games.
  • Porting Disaster: When the game was first released on the Xbox 360, the textures didn't load properly, the blood decals flickered constantly, the frame rate was very uneven, and the loading times were atrocious. However, after the release of The Doctor Who Cloned Me, it seems like most, if not all, of these issues have been rectified.
  • Pungeon Master: Debatable on whether Duke is one. Some of the one-liners are offhand puns of the situation

(after mauling a pigcop with a forklift in Forkstop part 2:) Fork you!

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