Making Duke Nukem 3D Last Longer

Some people might question my choices for what I consider 'classic games'. Indeed, I am not really trying to show what the truly classic games are, just that some of the ones that I grew up with are worthy of being replayed. However, I imagine that the most controversial game I could include in a list of 'classic games' that deserve to be experienced by a new generation would be Duke Nukem 3D.

My memories of Duke Nukem 3D are not as strong in my mind as the other games on my list. I was really too young to be playing Duke Nukem at the time. If I recall correctly, the game was rated “18” in the United Kingdom. I don't think I could have been older than 12. From what I can recall, I found Duke Nukem 3D to be a much more realistic game than Doom. That wasn't entirely due to technical improvements with the graphics (which were a little better than Doom in some respects). A large part of it came from it being based on Earth, rather than Mars. With Doom, the basic story was that a human base on Mars had been taken over by aliens after an experiment with bending space had gone wrong (or something like that). You were on Mars and there were aliens to be killed. Nothing much else mattered for the story in Doom. But having Duke Nukem be based on Earth (initially at least) was a surprisingly interesting idea. Somehow, walking round Los Angeles with aliens everywhere made it seem a little more easy to relate to. That in turn made it feel more real. The environments were very human.

The second aspect of realism came from the more humorous game play in Duke Nukem. In Doom, the character you played had no character, but in Duke Nukem you were playing a very tongue in cheek, chauvinist, military dude. Perhaps one of the most heavily criticised aspects of Duke Nukem 3D (and secretly one of the prime reasons for me and my friends to play it) was the way that women were portrayed in the game. I'm not implying that my friends and I were all chauvinists, but we were hitting puberty and starting to realise that girls were not quite as bad as we'd previously believed. Almost all of the women in Duke Nukem 3D were prostitutes, exotic dancers, pornographic film stars or glamour models. The only exceptions I can think of were cocooned women asking you to kill them and cheerleaders. Not exactly equalising the balance there.

In any case, my friends and I found the extremely pixelated nudity quite entertaining. But in some senses, mixing that with the down right scary alien encounters may have produced a pavlovian response to pornography in general.

In any case, Duke Nukem 3D is an amusing game, genuinely entertaining, has great gameplay and it pretty scary. It came out at a time when almost all games were innovative in some way, and I'm sure a lot of gamers still think about it.

The on-going mythology surrounding the sequel, titled “Duke Nukem Forever”, must be one of the weirdest in gaming history. For around ten years now, the developers of Duke Nukem have been working on a sequel. No one is quite sure whether or not they really are. From this aspect alone, Duke Nukem deserves to be in modern consciousness.

Dukem Nukem 3D is pretty hard to get hold of these days. However, you can get a third of the game pretty easily for free and that is what we will be doing. It is also the easiest game to set up in my list because it requires one single download and install. So lets get going.

The only thing really wrong with Duke is the graphics. In particular, we could really do with higher resolution textures and lighting. I'm inclined to say there isn't that much more we can do really.

This is very easy. First get a hold of the shareware version of Duke from here. Extract the files somewhere and run the install program. You pretty much just have to press enter every time it asks you something.

Now download the Windows installer (assuming you run Windows of course) of the Duke Nukem 3D High Resolution Pack. You can get it here.

Once you have that, install it. Make sure that during the install you select “1.3d map hacks” and not “Atomic map hacks”. Make sure you select everything else. When asked to search for the GRP file, say yes. Select “Search this location”, browse to “C:\DUKE3D” and then click “Begin”. Now select “Shareware 1.3d” from the list and click copy. When asked about texture caching, I'd say yes because it will speed up the game a fair bit. Now you just have to launch EDuke32 and configure it to the graphics specs that you want and you're done. You have a high resolution version of the shareware edition of Duke Nukem 3D with engine improvements.

Considering how easy it is to enjoy Duke today, you'd be silly not to give it a go. Although very controversial and pretty chauvinistic, Duke Nukem 3D has strong memories for me and will always be in my game consciousness. One thing you cannot deny is that Duke had great influence and deserves to be remembered, whether for good or bad.