Duke Nukem Forever Coming to Mac in August

[koruki]

I played it and my conclusion is.

Its not worth paying for

Its not worth playing if it was free

Its not worth playing unless you are getting paid WELL to do so.

Sad cause I loved the original Duke, I can still play it now, even with its crap graphics its still a better game than this sorry piece of S(*&

 

[Irishman]

It's because it took 12 years that it is so awful. Technically it was more like 15 years.

The project lost focus and restarted so many times there was no chance it was going to be good. A throwback to old FPS games that started, say, a couple years ago might have worked. But a relic with ancient design principles with new ones welded on top can't.

So, what is it people are hating about it?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Notch (the developer of Minecraft,) said it best:

I got Duke Nukem Forever a while ago. I’ve been playing it on and off ever since. This review might contain some minor spoilers.

Click “Read more” to read my review.

When you click "Read more", you get:

Don’t play it.

I was a huge fan of Duke Nukem in high school and college. I still enjoy a good raunchy game/movie on occasion.

DNF sucks. Plain and simple. It's technically outdated, the 'plot' is stupid, and the 'in-jokes' are even outdated so badly that it's not even sarcastically funny. It's just dumb.

Even friends who think the Farrelly brothers, "Meet the Spartans", and the "Scary Movie" series, are the height of cinematic production quality agree that the humor in DNF is just plain dumb.

 

[rickvanr]

I thought this game was wildly fun. I don't understand all the hate.

I might play through it again

 

[winston1236]

and no one will buy it, next

 

[Corban987]

This game sux. I tried it on windows, played 5 minutes and was disgusted at how poor the controls were and the graphics. This game had so much potential but was totally destroyed. I like the idea of it coming to mac and think many more should. I just hope the failure of this game on the mac doesn't set a precendance for others in the future.

 

[sm.wilson]

Oh cool, another game for machines that can't run it worth a damn. Thank you for the port, Aspyr, but even properly coded games have hardly a chance of running smoothly.

 

[66318]

Here I was ready to bash Aspyr for yet again announcing a Mac game after the Windows release, but then I saw the Steam part with SteamPlay. I can't find solid confirmation on this, but could it mean we start seeing more cross Mac/Windows games on Steam for one price, even if a porting house is involved?

As much as I want to support the Mac as a gaming platform, I'm a gamer first, a Mac user second. If a game exists on both platforms, I'll prefer and play the Mac one. However, I dislike the practice of not even announcing until after a Windows version has shipped (and I may have bought). I won't buy a game twice. If Aspyr did finally work something out to help fix this, cheers to them.

 

[buckers]

"It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum... and I'm all outta gum"

 

[LeakedDave]

Isn't it already available through onLive?

 

[lloyd709]

I was one of those guys checking the DN forums every month for the past 14 years looking for clues on what was going on with Duke Nukem forever - there weren't many people looking forward to it more than me!! And guess what, I love it!!! I'm actually playing it really slowly to enjoy it for as long as possible!!!

Crysis, CoD, Borderlands and a few other modern shooters I've tried simple bore me!!

So if you like the modern games I reckon you won't like it but if they bore you and you liked DN3 for it's crassness then you might just love DN Forever!

 

[Mac-Michael]

Looks like most people play games to be impressed. This is about babes and kicking alien butt.

Hail to the King

 

[Elijahg]

I wish they would spend their resources in learning how to port things. It is sad that after 4 updates Civ 5 is still 1000x better under boot camp.

Thank god blizzard will do their own Diablo III on Mac.

Totally agreed. Whilst Apple really could use some optimisations in their OpenGL implementation, absolutely everything Aspyr ports is a complete dog. Their games are so slow and laggy, the Windows version wrapped in Cider is always much, much faster. Valve has done well with the Source engine, it runs nicely (for me at least). Maybe Aspyr don't make enough profit to bother optimising their code at least a little bit.

 

[AJ1BostonMASS]

Can't beat it.

Duke Nukem 1 for the DOS. It's really the best...just downloaded it to play. 20 years old and still great.

 

[Kristenn]

Totally agreed. Whilst Apple really could use some optimizations in their OpenGL implementation, absolutely everything Aspyr ports is a complete dog. Their games are so slow and laggy, the Windows version wrapped in Cider is always much, much faster. Valve has done well with the Source engine, it runs nicely (for me at least). Maybe Aspyr don't make enough profit to bother optimizing their code at least a little bit.

DOOM 3 runs fine for me =/ then again maybe their code was better back then? Can't imagine anything being slower than a Windows game in a wrapper.

I am going to play the DNF demo at my friends house later. I never take game reviewers for their word or anyone else. I want to play it for myself and see if I like it. If I do I will get it.

EDIT:

Just got done playing through the demo on Let's Rock. Can't see what the heck people are complaining about, I had a blast and yes, I play Duke 1, 2 and 3D and don't care much for Halo beyond the first one and I can't stand CoD. Why am I bothering to say that? Because if I don't, people will most likely assume I never played the old Dukes and play all the new stuff when I say I actually LIKE DNF. To each their own I suppose. I am saving up to buy it for my Macintosh when it comes out.

 

[res1233]

Oh cool, another game for machines that can't run it worth a damn. Thank you for the port, Aspyr, but even properly coded games have hardly a chance of running smoothly.

Just wait till Lion, and for Apps to support the new OpenGL stack. Performance should increase dramatically, hell, it may even be on par with Windows. It's completely redesigned.

 

[decafjava]

Looks like most people play games to be impressed. This is about babes and kicking alien butt.

Hail to the King

The problem to me - from what I've read - is not the offensive content (though some make an issue of it) but the crap gameplay, mechanics, graphics. apparently the world consists of running down corrridors with no real possibilty of exploration to name one issue.

 

[diamond.g]

Just wait till Lion, and for Apps to support the new OpenGL stack. Performance should increase dramatically, hell, it may even be on par with Windows. It's completely redesigned.

Apple is using OGL 4.x in Lion?

 

[res1233]

Apple is using OGL 4.x in Lion?

Apple is using 3.2 in Lion, but it isn't enabled by default. Apps have to explicitly call the new stack because of various incompatibilities with the old OGL stack. The new stack was designed completely from scratch to work with newer GPUs, and should be easier for Apple to update in the future, so we may see 4.x in Lion's lifetime. Overall, the demos showed by Apple at WWDC were quite impressive. I think we can expect near-DX performance from macs in the near future.

I really don't understand how people can call Lion not worth it with a straight face. This one change may make gaming on the Mac on par with Windows performance-wise. I'd pay 30$ for that feature alone.

 

[kingtj]

re: Aspyr and wrappers

I was going to say, yeah... that's one of the few things I really respect about Aspyr. When they do a Mac release, it's actually coded to run on the native machine -- not some emulation or wrapper around a PC version of the code.

Unfortunately, they have a pretty poor track record of making Mac ports of their titles that work really well. (I remember, for example, paying full price for "True Crime: Streets of L.A." for my Mac, and discovering it drew big white boxes over everything.... totally unplayable with my particular graphics card and configuration. Later, I put it on another Mac where I got it to run but performance was lousy -- nearly unplayable, really.)

It seems like when you go back and try to play older titles of theirs like that on newer Macs with recent versions of OS X and newer video chipsets? They *often* refuse to run. Aspyr doesn't make much effort to release patches to keep their older programs going ....

Actually, Aspyr doesn't use any wrappers (especially Cider).

 

[morespce54]

Porting L.A. Noire would be great. But I hope they don't take as long as the GTA series.

What? GTA is on Mac???

 

[diamond.g]

Apple is using 3.2 in Lion, but it isn't enabled by default. Apps have to explicitly call the new stack because of various incompatibilities with the old OGL stack. The new stack was designed completely from scratch to work with newer GPUs, and should be easier for Apple to update in the future, so we may see 4.x in Lion's lifetime. Overall, the demos showed by Apple at WWDC were quite impressive. I think we can expect near-DX performance from macs in the near future.

I really don't understand how people can call Lion not worth it with a straight face. This one change may make gaming on the Mac on par with Windows performance-wise. I'd pay 30$ for that feature alone.

That is interesting, I was under the impression that 3.x was created because it was to be compatible with the older versions (so to speak). 4.x was supposed to be the departure that wasn't compatible. 3.2 or 3.3 is supposed to be the same feature for feature as 4.x.

I am excited for any potential performance improvements.

 

[Elijahg]

DOOM 3 runs fine for me =/ then again maybe their code was better back then? Can't imagine anything being slower than a Windows game in a wrapper.

I think (not 100% sure though) that Doom 3 is coded by ID. John Carmack loves Macs, and so I'm pretty sure they coded the Mac version in-house. Perhaps Aspyr published it, but never coded the port themselves.

I was going to say, yeah... that's one of the few things I really respect about Aspyr. When they do a Mac release, it's actually coded to run on the native machine -- not some emulation or wrapper around a PC version of the code.

I agree, proper, native ports are much better. Blizzard manages to do it, so I'm sure other companies can.

However, you should give SimCity 4 a try... Geez. It's coded by Aspyr, and even on my '06 Mac Pro with a 5770 it's not exactly snappy. Everything's sluggish and scrolling is like walking through soft tar. Aspyr's games have always been slow, on PPC and Intel. Feral Interactive do a good job of porting it seems, though lately they seem to have gotten attached to using Cider wrappers. All EA games use Cider, but even so, Cider's faster than anything Aspyr can come up with.

Apple is using 3.2 in Lion, but it isn't enabled by default. Apps have to explicitly call the new stack because of various incompatibilities with the old OGL stack. The new stack was designed completely from scratch to work with newer GPUs, and should be easier for Apple to update in the future, so we may see 4.x in Lion's lifetime.

That's pretty cool, seems Apple's seen what games have done for iOS, and they're starting to fix things up on the OS X side. I suspect Steam helped that along, as Valve push Apple to fix things, and have much more clout than someone like Aspyr. It'd be great to get similar frame rates and detail as Windoze users do on the same hardware. It'd fix one of the last sticking points people use against the Mac. I ran some kind of OpenGL 4 benchmark in Windows the other day, and it was most impressive, it clocked in about 4 fps slower than DX11. The cobbled road in the benchmark had each cobble individually shaped with a shadow applied, it looked really great. Certainly not something OpenGL 2.x/3.0 can handle.

 

[holmesf]

That is interesting, I was under the impression that 3.x was created because it was to be compatible with the older versions (so to speak). 4.x was supposed to be the departure that wasn't compatible. 3.2 or 3.3 is supposed to be the same feature for feature as 4.x.

I am excited for any potential performance improvements.

3.x is backwards compatible if you put up a compatibility context. 10.7 does not support the compatibility context -- if you want OpenGL 3.x you'll have to make a clean break from legacy code.

In my opinion it shouldn't provide much performance improvement if an application is already coded using best practices. An OpenGL application coded under 2.x that uses best practices and all useful available extensions should be able to take advantage of all important 3.x features.

 

[andreiru]

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Because of that game, my eyesight had dropped from being "amazing", to 1.5, &, eventually, all the way down to -4.5. Thanks, Duke.