SMG DNF

Supermechagodzilla posted:

    I think the change in atmosphere from previous Duke games makes sense when you realize that the people who are making Duke Nukem Forever and the people who are buying Duke Nukem forever are the same exact people who bought and played the first games, almost a decade and a half later. DNF is quite literally a mid-life crisis.

    It’s been fourteen years since the last time Duke did anything. He can’t run as fast or as far as he used to. He can’t carry as many guns as he used to. He can’t take a bullet as well as he used to. The frat-boy sensibility about women from the previous games has darkened to a sense of fear and no small resentment (the pregnancy motif in the Alien level is important here - regretting having children, Duke?) The game’s willingness to make fun of its protagonist even as it supports him is completely gone, because its desperate clawing after virility cannot tolerate that.

    For a game sold as a comedy, it takes the fight to preserve the masculinity and youth of its main character incredibly seriously, not realizing that the fight is already lost. When a vehicle breaks down on Duke Nukem, he responds “Aw, and it got such good gas mileage.” That is not a thing Schwarzenegger or Van Damme or Bruce Campbell would say in the films Duke Nukem is supposed to be parodying. That is a thing your dad says when the Volvo is beyond repair.

    Duke Nukem Forever is a game about an aging sexually insecure man, made by an aging sexually insecure man, sold to an audience of aging sexually insecure men, which perfectly captures their anxieties. Duke Nukem Forever is art.


Supermechagodzilla posted:

    Duke 3D homaged/parodied 80s/early 90s action films by making the villains such ridiculous villain caricatures that Duke was an acceptable protagonist by comparison.

    Roddy Piper and Snake Plissken are goddamn psychopaths in They Live and Escape from NY, but the point of the films is that society is so broken that these guys can thrive. It’s a deliberate part of the films, presenting extreme cynicism (Snake ignores a rape-in-progress because he’s that desensitized and amoral) with a smattering of dark humor (Snake’s nickname apparently comes from his dick tattoo).

    Duke 3D’s pig cops were in a context where the Rodney King beating and the LA riots were still fresh in people’s minds. Not only that, but the villains behind the pigs were basically rapists - the cheesy “mars needs women” premise getting a gruesome subversion with the Aliens-referencing outcome. Duke 3D didn’t joke about the rape. It treated rape as a serious problem equivalent to racism and class warfare, to which Duke was a source of catharsis if not any actual social change. (Duke is was a parodic figure specifically because, despite being a working-class shmoe, he’s so unenlightened that he’s exclusively driven by basic urges to fuck and kill.)

    The women and civilians in Duke 3D were just “normal” people doing their jobs, even if they are strippers or whatever. In other words, they’re us. They’re the folks feeling oppressed by the government corruption and other social ills, who are crying out for a populist hero to save them. That Duke is ultimately an idiot gave the game a measure of honest-to-god complexity.

    DNF treats these “normal” characters with relentless and utter contempt.

    Any pretense that Duke was a working-class hero have been dropped, as now he’s a apparently a billionaire in a solid-gold penthouse with a loving throne. The aliens no longer represent police corruption or the patriarchy, but rather, “foreign cultures” (see: the WMD joke). And, obviously, they joke about the rape now because the people being raped are no longer audience stand-ins, but rather a bunch of semi-conscious inhuman inferiors.

    (What makes the Olsen twins so objectionable that they need to get taken down several pegs anyways? Besides that they’re female, of course. Since when did they represent “wholesomeness” and why is wholesomeness the enemy now?)

    The aliens are basically now equivalent to Duke. The line separating him from the baddies is altogether erased. He’s not defending anything good, even accidentally, because instead of reacting against the status quo (however clumsily) Duke is the status quo now. And it’s fucking unbearable.


Supermechagodzilla posted:

    An actual Duke’s Bro would know from the level “XXX-Stacy” in the Atomic Edition of DN3D that the real Duke was never a misogynist, but is simply into light S&M and even some femdom action on the side to mix things up.

    On encountering two lipstick lesbians being spanked by a butch dominatrix on the set of Sister Act V, Duke exclaims “my kind of party!” This dominatrix actually insults and degrades him - yet, despite the character’s reputation as an uncompromisingly brutish individual, this is Duke’s kind of party. Not a fetch quest for a dildo in a tiny strip club. Strip clubs are small-time. They’re the first level. Duke’s fantasy is to spank a submissive woman while simultaneously being called pathetic by a leather-clad gal with a whip.

    The dominatrix actually looks a lot like Duke, as folks have noted, giving the whole thing a mildly homoerotic vibe, but what this also demonstrates is that being Duke is a gendered fantasy that transcends biological sex. Not only is a female Duke possible, she’s desirable to the Duke himself - as a relative equal, even. This understated intelligence is leagues outside the grasp of whoever made DNF what it is.

    DN3D was offensive in valuable ways. You didn’t need to invoke regressive anti-intellectualism and incuriousity to justify it, because DN3D was much more than just a fecal simulation.