Did you miss me? Review

Did you miss me?

Hello Duke Nukem fans! It’s been a while since I last visited the N64 for

some righteous ass-kicking. For a while I even thought about abandoning the Nintendo

as a wimp system, because of that last lame Duke Nukem 64

game. But the Duke doesn’t give up easily, and I’ve come back, this time with

an all new time-travelling, alien-blasting adventure. Sound familiar? It is.

Those

pesky aliens just never learn. Fine by me; I’m a patient teacher with a 12-guage

ruler for slappen’ them on the wrist. This time, they’ve attacked New York, and

they’ve even brought a time machine along with them… again. Their plan is to monkey

with earth’s past and enslave the human race while the weapons are still weak

and when I’m not there to twist their little alien heads off. No way I’m gonna

let any alien take a bite out of the Big Apple. So it looks like it’s Time

To Kill.

Oops. My mistake. I got confused for a sec. Duke Nukem: Zero Hour is

a totally original game, and not a remake of Time To Kill. Sure, they’re

both third person Duke games where I travel around in time blasting aliens, but

the similarity ends there. Zero Hour is much more like the original Duke

Nukem 3D and the little 3D Duke sometimes looks more like a bit of an afterthought.

Unlike those other Lara-style games, I can’t even really interact with environment

at all; just run, shoot and jump. It feels just like a first person shooter. Been

there, done that.

The graphics are pretty good for the Nintendo. They removed the lame sprite

enemies from Duke Nukem 64 and replaced just about everything with 3D objects.

You can see a fair distance ahead before the fog takes over, and the framerate

is respectable. However, the graphics, especially the framerate, take a nosedive

if you don’t have the RAM expansion pack.

The level design is pretty average. The environments are nice and take you

through modern New York, the Wild Wild West (without rap), and an apocalyptic

future of alien design. Far too often, however, I found myself scouring empty

levels, just looking for that crack in the wall that I missed, or that obscure

last jump, so that I could finally get back to the fightin’. The Duke doesn’t

like to be kept from killin’ things.

But

who cares about that boring crap? Let’s go down the official Duke Nukem checklist:

Guns – Check. Always gotta start with

those beautiful tools of destruction. Zero Hour features a whopping array

of 19 different ones: from the classic Colt .45 revolver, to spectacular alien

death-rays.

Aliens – Check. Got a full brood of 27

aliens to contend with. Some of them look awfully similar, but they’re all here:

the lizardy ones, the pig cops (who don’t look as much like pigs as they used

to), the big floaty ones, some new human zombies, brood ‘hatchlings’, and plenty

of drone sentries that do the dirty work for lazy aliens.

Crude Jokes – Check. The Duke ain’t lost

his sense of humor, and I’ve still got plenty of zingers for the whole family

. . . well, maybe just half of the family. From Lewinski’s Clam Juice to Mr. Plough,

Zero hour is chock full of low humor and obscure Simpson’s trivia.

Babes – Only partial credit here. There

are babes, but they don’t look very good, and they don’t move. There’s also no

way to offer them any money! Chicks love that, and the Duke is known to be generous,

but I still couldn’t get a single babe to lift a finger, much less give me a show.

This is one lame strip club.

That’s the end of my list, and the whole story on Zero Hour. It’s a

hard game, which is good – blasting alien scum was never easy. But, it’s a pretty

un-original game too. You’re still gonna have to do better, GT software designers.

That pansy-ass Bond still has a better game than

I do.