Information about Duke Nukem 3D:

Duke Nukem 3D was written by a divison of Apogee Software named 3D Realms. Duke Nukem 3D started distribution in mid-1996, but most people don't know that work on this sophisticated 3D shoot-em-up genre game started immediately after the release of Duke Nukem 2. 3D Realms has released an older, 1994-era, version of Duke Nukem 3D, code-named LameDuke.

Duke Nukem 3D is a first person shoot-em-up type game. Since it uses a lot of graphics and sound, naturally you have to have a good computer to play it. It has made the ranks of almost all the top ten lists for games on this continent and others. Duke Nukem 3D is a DOOM-style game, that is the game does not have a finite number of views to be seen by the player. In DOOM and Duke, a pattern for a wall known as a texture, is mapped onto the wall. This means the game can generate an infinite number of views, making the graphics of very high quality. Duke3D supports high-resolution on your monitor, meaning that you can see more of the display around you. Its graphics are much more detailed than MOST other 3D games of its type on the market. Its requirements are also lower than competing games like Id Software's Quake. However, even with lower reqirements, Duke3D maintains game quality on even the slowest of 486's. Duke3D also has extensive support for the main series of sound cards to make the game more interesting to play.

The registered game comes with a total of thirty levels, including two multiplayer only levels. Its sound-tracks are also extractable, meaning that if you like one of the background sound-tracks, you can extract it from the game and play it in Windows. It also comes with utilities to snip out wall textures you might like for purposes such as Windows wallpaper. Hey, if you really like a texture that much, you can print it out and use it as REAL room wallpaper. 3D Realms has taken Id Software's lenient provisions for expandablity to a whole new level. They have distributed tools along with the game so the end-user can create their own levels and fill them with textures the user may like and bring from other places such as using pictures from the Net as pictures on a wall in a bedroom. 3D Realms has published file-specifications for Duke3D map files and also sent out three sample maps to demonstrate how various effects were done. Other expandability features include three files outside the game itself that control the game's options like the amounts of damage done by the various projectiles. These can be edited in a normal text editor for wild levels to make the player notice the intricacies of the level.

Duke3D allows levels to have floors over floors, to a limited extent. Even so, this is more than DOOM could provide for level-makers. This allows for two story buildings and such. The limitation is that you cannot see both floors or ceilings at the same time or the game will not draw it correctly and crash. The game graphics engine also allows for other intricacies like sloped floors and ceilings, which allows for structures to have peaked roofs and points like stalagmites and stalactites. These features go beyond what other earlier first-person shoot-em-up games like DOOM and Wolfenstein could do. These features allow you to make realistic levels and structures like a model of your house, unless your house has a hole in the ceiling that allows you to see both floors or ceilings. You can also place things known as palettes. These give a wall, floor or object a colored hue, as if being lit by colored lights such as a dance hall. You can give the rooms hues like blue, red-orange, yellow-brown and night-vision colors. This is done when the player is supposedly wearing night-vision goggles.

The game provides a staggering array of weapons for you to dispatch enemies with. Since Duke3D is set in the close future, some of the weapons like the freeze ray have not been invented yet. The game provides conventional weapons like pistols, shotguns and a small ripper chaingun, as well as hand-held missile weapons like rocket-propelled grenades, pipe-bombs and a devastator weapon that launches swarms of tiny stinger missiles. There are also futuristic weapons such as the shrinker ray which shrinks enemies down to a few inches in height for you to stomp, laser tripbombs. These are placed on walls and a laser beam that, when broken, releases a powerful explosive charge. There is also a freeze ray to chill your enemies down to near absolute zero for easy smashing. A player who has collected all the weapons is a walking armory.

The game has over twelve types of monsters, from the lowly assault trooper to the powerful alien invasion overlord. They range in health and ability from cat/snake-cross assault troopers and captains with small wrist-mounted ray guns to assault commanders who hover and fire small missiles with great accuracy. The aliens have supposedly mutated the entire Los Angeles police force into humanoid pigs! Talk about your bacon! There are also large, pulsing creatures with large heads called octabrains that shoot pulses of mental energy at you along with piercing bites from their powerful jaws. There are also protozoid slimers that hatch from eggs to slide up your legs and feed on your innards. There are kamakaze-style sentry drones guarding various places on the orbiting space-station that hunt down targets and explode close by. Enforcers are lizard-like humanoids that carry ripper chainguns and spit poisonous green glop and leap high into the air.

To help the player from being instantly killed, there are various power-ups to be found in the game such as a portable medical kit, atomic-health units, armor vests similar to Kevlar, steroids to increase the speed at which Duke Nukem runs and his resilience to enemy fire, a holographic likeness of Duke Nukem to fool enemies and make a quick escape, a jetpack for flying around, night-vision goggles for viewing things in dim areas, scuba-gear for travelling long periods underwater where Duke Nukem cannot hold his breath, and protective boots for travelling in areas such as toxic sludge and scalding hot lava streams. Keycards are seen throughout the game, in red, yellow and blue varieties to unlock doors and access ports.


A big factor in the popularity of both DOOM and Duke3D is their multiplayer ability. Now, not all the opponents are computer generated. With Duke3D, you can link two computers using a serial cable or a modem or upwards of eight with an IPX compatible network, and play them in one of two multiplayer modes, co-operative, where the goal is to play the single-player levels while tackling the problems as a group, and the most popular DUKEMATCH in which you play a level to turn your opponent into as many piles of virtual goo as you can. A good DUKEMATCH level is fairly small in size, because you want to spend your time fighting and not searching each other out. Usually, on most of the original Duke3D levels, there are special switches for multiplayer that are not available for the single player. Usually these switches are to open hidden doors to teleporters so the players can move around faster through the level. These doors and switches are invisible to the single player, otherwise it would make it a short game because often there are two linked teleporters near the start and exits of a level, so all the player would have to do to beat the level is hop through the teleporter and hit the switch. Speaking of that, the end-of-level button is quite realistic. It looks like a red radiation warning sign. When you press space on it, you see it unfold and the words "AUTO DESTRUCT" appear inside it, as if they were hidden inside, and an animated, quite life-like, fist smashes down on a button inside and the level fades down in a flash of light.



I recommend this game to any SERIOUS gamer who wants a good 3D adventure.

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