ExtraLife

Level Up (2011)

I’m one of those people who just love making gaming references in real life. Making remarks about leveling up, graphics… I’m there. When I accidentally found out about “Level Up”, a new series about to come out, that’s set on doing just that - merging real life and gaming - I was like “HELL YEAH!”, but after I’ve just seen the pilot episode I’m all like “HELL NO!”

Maybe you wonder why?

Acting is horrible. I’m pretty sure that this thing is targeted at younger kids, so young in fact, that they don’t even have “poor acting” in their everyday vocabularies. So there’s an excuse to hire poor actors. It’s for kids. I guess the same goes for the script.

<Character 1> (some stupid remark)
<Character 2> (gaming\pop culture reference)
<Character 3> (insult 1 and 2 for LULZ)

Characters are totally stereotypical. We have 3 guys, out of which one is a popular jock and hides the fact that he’s gaming because it would RUIN HIM. Games ruin lives! Remember that. It’s 2011. and you can’t be popular and\or have friends if you play games. There’s a positive message about gaming for all of you out there. Later on, somebody probably realized that they’re missing a female character so they add in a girl just to fill all of the requirements. Her weapon sucks monkey balls, by the way. All of them are, in fact, looking like cheap toys. Check out the visual aids to the right and see for yourself.

The game they’re playing is obviously an MMO, with “tens of thousands of players playing”. WHOA! Tens of thousands! It must be the biggest game out there! WOW currently has 10.3 MILLION people playing. I wouldn’t normally complain about the subscription count of a fictional video game, BUT THEY SHOW AN ENORMOUS SKYNET-LOOKING SERVER FARM IN THE FIRST EPISODE. And we’re meant to believe it’s only one of many. WHO ARE THEY FOR? All those countless tens of thousands of players? Come on…. We meet the programmer who made the game in the first episode as well. No surprise there - they portray him as a Peter Pan figure who refuses to grow up and acts like a spoiled brat with no sense of reality. SO MUCH LUV FOR GAMERZ! Thank you Level Up!

The monsters are lame. And inconsistent. Some of them are CG. Some of them are people playing dress up. You know what, Level Up? Either have all of the monsters CG or have NONE of them. This looks really stupid. Oh yeah, and the CG is awful, as expected.

But, all that aside, my biggest complaint is about the show itself. It’s about gaming. That’s cool. But it’s trying to be edgy about all the wrong things. Gaming is huge today. It’s not for “nerds” and “no life geeks”. Almost everybody I know plays games, at least once in a while. And they’re perfectly normal people. Why succumb to the stone age premise and make gamers look like total idiots? If this show is being made for gamers, shouldn’t it send a positive message about them? Big bang theory fucks this up occasionally, but this one is out of the box obnoxiously wrong about everything.

They are indeed making a show for gamers. Purely to take their money and give some neigh-sayers (hello everypony!) and parents more verbal ammo to shoot at gamers. Because games make you violent and prone to breaking law and the only use you’ll ever have from playing games is if, by any chance, games merge with real life and you have to kill a troll or two.

This series is totally unimaginative, lacks interesting characters and story, misses the point of gaming and sends an almost completely negative vibe about video games. Why? TO TAKE YOUR GOLDS! ALL YOUR GOLDS ARE… you get it….

ONE FINAL NOTE: THE DISCO BALL JOKE WAS HORRENDOUS. Somebody actually got paid to write that?

Don’t watch this shit.

Duke Nukem Forever review

I was probably in the minority, although not the only one, who thought that actually releasing DNF after such a long development cycle was a bad idea. The game can’t be awesome (as it should be), I thought to myself, after all those engine changes and postponements, no matter what kind of brilliant ideas Gearbox wanted to bring into the mix (and they brought very few, it seems).

And then it finally came out. The gaming community held its breath. Duke is here. It took FOREVER, but he’s here. However, the first battalion of reviews wasn’t really positive and I wasn’t surprised. But since I never trust reviews, I had also hoped. Not sure for what exactly, but hope was there, teasing me to give Duke a try.

I have just played through the game and… well, the game sucked. Let’s be honest, the game itself is NOT THAT BAD. But that’s all. Almost every aspect of the game can be described with NOT THAT BAD.

Level Design

Levels are NOT THAT BAD. The developers avoided the whole FPS “generic factory and/or warehouse” look so levels do shine from time to time. The dam level (SPOILER: there is a dam level) actually looks pretty inspired and the mission built around it is pretty exciting. But for the most part, levels are just there for you to run through them, in one linear way, with little or no available sidetracks for you to explore. Textures sometimes look a bit low-res, but I’m not really big on graphics so I didn’t care. As long as I can differentiate the enemies from the background, I’m fine. But I can’t ignore the linear fashion in which the levels are designed. I know they went for the old-school design, but they did it wrong. Duke 3D had much better levels.

Sound and Music

Sounds and music are NOT THAT BAD. Both heavily aim for the nostalgia factor, so there are a lot of references to the good old Duke 3D. The Duke theme can be heard in elevators, Duke’s casino and many more places. In the end the theme gets overused to the point where you think that’s all this game has going on - nostalgia. And you’re right.

Characters

One of the bigger selling points of Duke 3D was the main character - Arnold macho type with a healthy, even somewhat sexist, sense of humor. I can still hear quotes and jokes from the first game and laugh. They were good. They were fresh and inspired. The new Duke, however… well, he sounds like an idiot. The only good things he says are actually ripped off from Duke 3D, the rest is just sad. I don’t find quotes like “More equipment means more ass kicking” very funny or adrenaline-rushy. They sound like poor filler material. The game is much more sexist than the first one, but not funnier. It’s counterproductive. Fails to deliver. I guess it could be worse, but I cannot say that it’s NOT THAT BAD, since it is. The game occasionally gives the impression that it’s painfully aware of where it belongs (there is one instance in the game where the president calls Duke “a relic from the past”, which is exactly what this game is). That also reminded me of one more thing why I thought Duke sounds like an idiot - there is a lot more talking in this game, characters actually communicate and talk among themselves or to you. Duke fails to say anything meaningful, he ends up sounding like a random punchline delivery service, if there is such a thing. In the first game, all the talking he did was mostly to himself, so it worked and it wasn’t so obvious he’s an empty minded squid.

The enemies are also pretty unimaginative and clearly just shadows of the ones in the first game. Perhaps you’ll remember how obvious it was that the pig aliens were actually dressed as cops? Not in this game, it’s not. The graphics are blurry as shit (a lot of post processing effects going on, probably to hide the shitty overall quality) and you can’t see shit. A lot of shit in one sentence, I know.

Gameplay and interactivity

If the character was one huge selling point of the original, interactivity was the other. At that time, there were some much better looking games on the horizon (Quake 1, for example, with the full 3d engine), but Duke 3D gave us interactivity. Almost everything in the game was destructable or interactive. You could interact with pinball machines, pool tables, chicks, sing… the list is pretty impressive. It was one of the first games to bring such a strong immersion with the game world. Duke Nukem Forever, on the other hand, brings NOTHING NEW, but rather a bucketful of old. I can see why a game from 1996. narrowed interactivity down to “walk to an object, press “use”, something funny happens”, but we’re in 2011. now and Duke still operates that way. It’s not impressive anymore. I don’t want to see scripted events, I want to interact. Red Faction allows us to destroy the entire level, Crysis gives us a realistic, almost sandboxy levels, Half Life/Portal gave us interesting puzzles, a strong story and great characters. Duke gives us a chance to occasionally play a poorly executed game of pinball, pick up a rat and squish it (sooo not funny), pick up shit from the toilet (oh yes, literal toilet humor) and listen to his sexist drivel or childish insults aimed at other games. IT’S THAT BAD.

Even though they were going for the old school FPS feel, you can only carry two weapons at a time. I know, right? The weapons list isn’t really that big anyway, and it offers almost nothing new compared to the original. Shrink ray is here, freeze ray is here. The mighty foot, unfortunately, is not. It’s been replaced by fists. The foot does appear, but as a scripted event when you look down at a shrunk enemy. You can carry pipe bombs and a couple of mines, some boosts (beer and steroids) and that’s pretty much it. The health bar was replaced with an ego bar, which is clever, you might think. When you get shot, your ego goes down. But why would Duke’s ego drop when he’s been underwater for too long? Makes no fucking sense.

Oh yes, and there’s driving in the game, but it’s annoying for the most part. There are games where you think “FUCK YEAH, DRIVING”. This is not one of those.

So, the final rating is… 4 out of 10. I would have probably rated it much better if this wasn’t a Duke game. But at the same time, I would have probably rated it much worse if this wasn’t a Duke game, since nostalgia factor is the best thing about it.