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seem to have this little problem. Manhattan has been overrun by aliens intent on causing absolute mayhem! All our forces are in disarray! Only you can strike fear into the blood pumps of those twisted beings that seem to be trapping all our scantily clad women! So the story of Duke Nukem Manhattan project goes! You are dropped onto the skyscraper rooftops of manhattan to blast out the alien scum that has taken up residence there. You ready your golden eagle handgun (Duke's default weapon) and charge into some furious butt kicking mayhem!
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project (DNMP) is indeed a sidescroller. But you've NEVER seen a sidescroller like THIS before. DNMP is made with a fully 3D engine. Except you don't view the action from Duke's point of view, you are off to the side viewing the action from a safe distance away. As Duke moves, the camera moves with him. This means that you never lose sight of what Duke is getting up to. The demo includes rooftops, several rooms inside buildings and window-cleaning walkways, plus exhaust fans that you can jump up on top of to get a boost up into the air. You might remember from DUKE NUKEM 3-D those cracks on some walls that indicated you could blow them up to reveal a hidden entrance to a room on the other side. So it is the case with DNMP. Find a wall with cracks in it and you can blow it to hell to see whats hidden on the other side. But, with some dread I must also mention that the imfamous Keycard phenomenon is in full swing in DNMP. Yeap! You heard right! You must go searching for the correctly coloured keycard to pass through doors that are blocked by a forcefield. I can imagine this wearing EXTREMELY thin after the initial newness of the game wears off. Duke, however shares your same attitude towards keycards and lets you know about it with some unsavoury remarks made about E#%$#@%$@ keycards!!! In fact, Duke is his usual self with an impressive array of one liners and quips that ring true from the duke of old. My favourite HAS to be "Don't get your panties all in a BUNCH!" That particular line comes out when you set free one of the many trapped babes in the game. You set her free and she stretches her aching limbs, causing her chest to wobble as it gets shoved in Duke's face. She'll then say something like, "Ohhh DUKE! What can I do to repay you!" all in a breathy voice. You get the undertones. Then duke delivers his panty line. Not for the little ones eh? Apart from the Babes the Pigcops make a return, starring as Duke's main enemy in the demo. Coming in two flavours, the blue guys with handguns and the black dude's with shotguns. They are easy to dispatch with a few shots of your Golden Eagle. Also making an appearance was a whip wielding babe in a G-string that left no room for mercy. Taste my bullets you underclothed Vixens!
So! In the demo you get to play with Duke's Golden Eagle Handgun which is capable of firing prettey much as fast as you can press the FIRE button on your keyboard. You'll also find some pipebombs along the way that were so handy in DN3D! Same deal. You drop a pipebomb from above, down into a knot of vile scum pigcops and press the remote. BOOM! Pigcop Soup! You also find duke's trusty old pump action shotty that was a staple diet for people playing the ogiginal DN3D. Slower firing but damage galore! You might also remember the MIGHTY FOOT in DN3D! That was where you could KICK the living daylights out of any baddass that happened to get in your way. FEAR NOT! The MIGHTY FOOT returns in all it's glory. You can deliver a deadly karate kick to enemies in the game by pressing the KICK key on you keyboard. Looks good, feels good. You badass you! So! Do you just run around SHOOTING the hell out of everything?? Well, plenty of that to be sure! But there are also some puzzle's to nut out as well. Mostly these seemed to be of the jumping variety where you need to jump from this to that while killing the poor fool on the thingy you want to jump to. Miss the thingy.. and you fall to your death with a yell. There was one puzzle where this room had water in it with wooden crates floating in the water. You have to jump from crate to crate to get to the generator and switch it off before you can get in the water and reach a ladder to climb to the next part of the level. Well, electrified water isn't anything new but at least it adds variety to the game. You also might have to jump between window washing platorms that are moving up and down against the side of a skyscraper. Or jump into the airflow coming out of an exhaust vent, and get shot up into the air to reach a higher platform. Plenty to keep you occupied!
As far as side scrolling games go, DNMP has to be the most technically advanced one that I've seen so far. You might remember a game called HUNTER HUNTED! HH was a side scrolling game that featured side movement as well as a number of planes heading into and out of the screen. What this meant was that you could go through a doorway heading INTO or OUT OF the screen and arrive in a new area. This is also the case with DNMP, but I only ever came across doors heading INTO the screen, never out of. PLUS when you moves planes like that, you often get a loading screen. Well, no big deal there I suppose. loading screens are just a part of gaming. Unless you play Dungeon Siege. You'll also have areas in the game where Duke will go through a doorway, to the left or right. When duke enters such a room the wall will disappear a la Dungeon Siege so you can see what in the bejeezuz is going on. Never at any point did I find Duke to be obscured by a wall or pillar or something of the like. The game has been designed in such a way as to always have duke visible. Everything is 3D. Duke is a 3D model, as are all the baddies and babes. The environment is fully 3D and you can clearly see that this is so. Because of this, you need to have a 3D accelerator card installed to run the game. You can choose between Direct 3D or OpenGL. I could see NO discernable difference in texture quality or game performance with either being used. The game is colourful, and the textures more detailed than you might think. Most textures appear crisp and well defined rather than those blurry textures we all know so well. So the texturing used does the job nicely but won't stress your 3D card out at all. No pixel shaders needed, nothing special needed at all! just your plain run of the mill 3D accelerator will run DNMP in all it's fine glory. Geometry is simple. Most things are blocks of some type, as you would expect in skyscraperville. But don't let that put you off. The texturing is vibrant and really brings life to the environs depicted. Plus, viewing from a distance you don't get close enough to really study things in detail as you could in a FPS. You will notice the pointy and vertexed arms on the characters in the game meaning the developers have scrimped on the polygon count. But trully! They look fine for the job they have to do. There is no point adding detail to models and textures if you aren't going to be able to get close enough to enjoy it.
Another interesting feature of the game is the ability of the game to scroll around corners. Imagine you are in a square room looking into the corner. Now imagine that duke and his baddies are at play along the back wall. The action scrolls along as duke moves along that wall. But, Duke can also move across the corner of the room and continue along the the next wall. Groovy! This 90 degree turn threw me at first as I didn't know what do with the controls, in order to make Duke move. Simple! Just keep walking sideways. Just another aspect of the 3D engine used to make the game. Although many people argue that DNMP is a 2 D game because you only have a 2D plane on which to move. That is true, but the ENVIRONMENT is 3D. Making the game kind of a mix between the genre's of 2D and 3D. You might also know of a mod for Quake 3 Arena that basically used the Q3 engine to create a side scrolling game. Maps were long and thin if you loaded them in the normal game. The camera went along one wall while the action happened along the other. Groovy stuff. So basicalliy, a 3D engine used to make a 2D game. While DNMP is NOT the long awaited DUKE NUKEM FOREVER. It is a trip back to the Duke universe with all the babes and pigcops you came to love so much in Duke 3D. The game has been well made and deserves a look in by you. The demo is only 50.3 megabytes which is NOTHING in todays world of 180mb+ demo's. The same rockin Duke Theme song which has I guess Become Dukes theme song. Get it for a laugh. Get it for a light hearted game you play for 10 minutes before bed. It's Duke for GOD'S sake!!! And he's ALL OUTTA GUM!! |
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