In the first few moments of Duke Nukem Forever, your character pees in a urinal and then earns an achievement for reaching into a toilet and extracting a piece of human excrement. Why does the game reward you for doing this? I have no idea. It’s not part of a joke or important to the story; the designers of the game apparently feel that you the player would miss out by not holding some poo in your virtual hand.
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And that’s before you come to the really offensive bits. Just in case you didn’t feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)
The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is a living example of the games industry living down to the expectations Tory rent-a-gob MPs had in the mid-1990s of mindlessly stereotypical, tastelessly puerile, ultra-violent horseshit designed solely to appeal to the lowest common denominator of teenage wannabe-alpha-male loser.
All yours for the low, low price of £49.99. And let’s not forget that during Duke Nukem Forever‘s fourteen-year development cycle, we’ve seen Half-Life (and Half-Life 2 and its episodes, along with tie-ins such as Portal), all of the Call of Duty games, the Fable series, the Halo series, Mass Effect and its sequel… yeah, you get the idea.
Basically, Duke Nukem Forever invites you to pay £50 of your hard-earned cash for a game that was technically outdated and socially backwards in the mid-nineties, with issues chiefly surrounding poor framerate, and the simple fact that in 2011, it considers this to be funny:
In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.
This does seem to have been mostly done before the release of Portal 2, with one reference (or earth-shattering coincidence) inserted at the last minute. On the other hand, it’s an excellent concept that’s executed beautifully, with exquisite production design, direction and acting (Nicole Leigh injects tremendous volumes of character into Chell without uttering a word.)
Unlike the similar, more bombastic, but ultimately flawed Beyond Black Mesa, Outside Aperture moves the assets from the game into the real world whilst retaining the game’s humour, charm and bleak sweetness. It makes the former seem positively brackish.
An example of the cavernous environments you can expect to find in Portal 2
I finally got to play (and finished) the single-player mode yesterday, and here’s a quick collection of my thoughts on it while I wait for Windows backup to finish, before I head off back to things I should be doing (coursework, perchance?)
The game itself: exquisite. Magnificent. A very different beast from the original Portal, though, so don’t expect more of the same.
Performance: wonderful, given the relative weakness of my graphics processor (an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3200, inside a ThinkPad X100e.) The game was perfectly playable on higher settings: here’s a recording, made using Source Recorder, of the kind of gameplay I was getting. (Sadly, it’s very short, because I lost patience, and there are a few artefacts that seem to have crept in during the recording process, mostly to do with environmental movement.)
Story and voice acting: superb. Story has always been one of Valve’s strong points, and the hilarious script only serves to build on that pedigree. Never taking itself too seriously, it nevertheless runs high with emotion and action at all the right points, and can never resist offering an Adams-esque nerd joke.
The same applies to the cast, who all give exquisite performances. Ellen McLain continues to steal the show as the seductively evil GLaDOS, while Stephen Merchant puts in a memorable offering as the charmingly stupid Wheatley. J. K. Simmons’s bleak performance as the pre-recorded messages of Aperture Science’s deceased founder, Cave Johnson, is similarly excellent, and assisted in no small measure by the deft script.
The addition of new gameplay mechanics is well-executed, and the final boss sequence is perfectly-pitched. The solutions to the puzzles in this sequence, in hindsight, are glaringly obvious, yet I don’t doubt that many players (myself included) will stumble across them by accident. I won’t spoil it, but it’s perfectly-timed, well-set up, and shows an excellent understanding of how people play the game.
Design: Unremittingly dark in comparison to its predecessor, but nonetheless astonishingly impressive. Occasionally, the bleak harshness of some of the environments along with the seemingly fierce complexity of the puzzles can become overbearing—rest assured, though, that one “eureka” moment will make all of that vanish.
Music: Occasionally, the soundtrack became a touch overbearing—the minimalistic sound of previous Valve games has been discarded for a more lush, omnipresent score that can feel a bit like unnecessary noise during the puzzle sequences. On the other hand, if you turn it down to half its usual level, it becomes substantially more manageable.
The music during the action scenes, however, is excellent, adding suitable pace and gravitas to the entertainingly funny running commentary. The radios also make an appearance early on: these provide a moody piece by American band The National entitled Exile Vilify, and the welcome reappearance of the instrumental version of Still Alive from the original Portal.
The ending sequence, as always with Valve’s games, is an absolute corker. Again, I shan’t spoil it, but let’s just say Ellen McLain really gets an opportunity to showcase her talents and vocal versatility.
The Source Engine: It’s astonishing to think that all of the sumptuously depressing visuals and the stunningly original mechanics are capable in what is, at its core, a heavily-modified version of the Quake I engine. Half-Life 2 and its episodes, released over four years ago, still look good by today’s standards. Portal 2, using the 2011 version of the Source engine, takes this up a notch again, with cavernous environments, liquid blobs, and—at last—a new, and much-improved, menu UI that resembles something you’d find on a console.
Of course, given the evolution-not-revolution nature of Source, and the modularity resulting from its distant origins, it’s still capable of running on a wide variety of hardware. Certainly, it doesn’t have a problem running on my Radeon HD 3200 with its pitiful complement of 2GB of RAM and a 1.6GHz dual-core CPU. The game is very playable on “medium” quality settings running at 800×600, and if you have more powerful hardware you’ll probably be able to easily max out the settings at full screen resolution.
In summary: Portal 2 is a magnificent achievement. A sprawling, funny, compellingly mind-bending physics puzzle-cum-sci-fi mystery that doesn’t feel in any way like an attempt to cash in on the tremendous success of its predecessor, it deserves the hype and the critical acclaim 100%. Definitely buy it, if only for the single-player mode.
And I haven’t even tried the co-op mode yet.
CORRECTION: It was stated in the original version of this article that The National was a Canadian band. It is not. They formed in Ohio and are based in New York.
