Duke Nukem Forever, 10 Years Later – Part II: The DLC That Irked Me

Welcome to the second half of my Duke Nukem Forever retrospective, which is exactly two halves more than most people would want write about this game. Reminder, these articles took fewer years to develop than the game itself.

Did you miss me?

Last time we discussed the game’s single player campaign. A quick refresher: I had been lamenting an overly enthusiastic DNF review I posted a decade ago, but I discovered it’s less the gameplay and more Duke’s cringeworthy attitude that brings Forever down. If you haven’t yet, you might want to read it here.

Now on the 10^th anniversary of the game’s North American debut, what’s left to talk about? Well, what I didn’t do ten years ago was play Duke Nukem Forever’s DLC campaign, The Doctor Who Cloned Me. So in the name of science, I dropped ten bucks and set to work writing a detailed review of this ancient add-on for a blog no one reads. I guess I’m just that kind of guy.

The titular Dr. Proton.

Some reviewers have declared Cloned to be the superior single player offering. I wondered: had I missed the content that would have redeemed Forever? Had this DLC fixed some of the major gameplay issues of the main campaign? Did it finally deliver on some of the game’s potential?

 No. It somehow made it worse.

 

 We meet again, Dr. Proton

The Doctor Who Cloned Me starts with Duke captured by his former nemesis, Dr. Proton, and seconds away from being executed by a gang of Terminator-like robots. You’re shooting the bad guys in minutes, instead of taking a leak or signing some kid’s autograph book. We’re off to a good start!

He's not looking for Sarah Connor, that's for sure.

You’ll quickly notice that the visuals are dull and even more lifeless than the main DNF campaign. Cloned is reminiscent of the bland outer space episode of Duke 3D, with small, metallic corridors punctuated by vast, black skies. Get used to it, because this is what the majority of the DLC looks like. Well, except for the brothel/secret government science lab (of course), which looks like something Tim Allen would have built if he had been given a pallet of used popsicle sticks and plopped down in the middle of The Grapes of Wrath.

Scientist or hooker? Yes.

Anyway, Cloned quickly reintroduces players to the Expander weapon, which made its debut in the fourth episode of Duke Nukem 3D. Despite the name, the Expander doesn’t really expand enemies per se, so much as make them slightly plumper. In this state, they take four times damage, then explode. It’s got a low ammo cap and you’ll dump it the second you come across a shotgun.

New weapons and enemies aside, Cloned doesn’t feel all that different from Forever’s single player offering. There are unfunny jokes, pointless puzzles (menial warehouse labor should be in every action game), and the previously mentioned brothel, which just feels like a cut ‘n’ paste of the strip club from the main campaign with a new paint job.

 

The low point “joke” of this DLC is a short bus joke. (The abbreviation is T.A.R.D.) Not OK.

This time around, Duke occasionally has some help from companions. First up is Gen. Graves, the only likeable character in the entire game. Then, there’s Capt. Dylan of the Earth Defense Force, the walking hemorrhoid who somehow manages to play an even bigger role in Cloned than the main game. I got away with excluding Dylan, who manages to make Duke look like a Ph.D. holding feminist, from my review of the main game. And I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to talk about him here: he was supposed to dead. Duke even made it a point to tell the audience, “I guess he won’t be in the sequel.”

He’s in the sequel.

The only thing worse than Dylan is tiny Dylan. Shrinker sections are already grating at best, and adding Dylan just makes it that much worse. It’s like a midnight run to Walmart for Pepto-Bismol with a drunken Gilbert Gottfried as your copilot.  

Neither Graves nor Dylan are very good in battle. Both are more content to empty a full compliment of shotgun ammo into enemies from 6,000 paces than actually trying to help. They’re mostly there to drive the plot, such as it is, forward.

Heh, heh, what a mess

Duke Nukem Forever had a lot of problems, but bugs weren’t one of them. I’ve played the main campaign three full times in the last decade, and I’ve never encountered any kind of game-breaking glitches.

Meanwhile, The Doctor Who Cloned Me crashed more than once and required a hard reset. Then there was the time that a Duke clone enemy ran out of ammo, rushed and pinned Dylan against some sandbags, then proceeded to beat the hell out of him while the real Duke and Graves just watched. It looked kind of like this:

 

It’s another bug, I’m going to let it slide this time.

After unceremoniously killing Dr. Proton halfway through the game, Cloned decides that we need to go to the moon because who cares why. When Duke’s not running around on the surface of the moon without a space suit (he’s too manly for oxygen I guess), he’s driving a moon buggy. It’s in this vehicle that you’ll take on the final boss, the alien queen.

Space: The fatal frontier

It’s a long fight, and if you’re unlucky like me, the game bugs out one last time. After 10 minutes of wondering why I couldn’t land the final hit and finish her off, Cloned finally decided that it was done with me and played the ending.

 

Game over

The final scene does nothing to wrap up the story, nor is it satisfying in any way. Duke implies that he’s going to open the first-ever strip club in space, and Dylan bangs a chick in a trailer park. Then Dylan gets the last line ever uttered in franchise proper and the game abruptly dumps you back to the main menu. We never find out how Dr. Proton was resurrected in the first place, or what becomes of Duke’s presidential campaign, or even how Dylan managed to survive his scrape with death in the main game.

If Duke Forever was Triptych slapping together a game from 14 years of random assets and ideas, The Doctor Who Cloned Me feels like the scraps of that effort thrown in a blender. It’s like the main game, but shorter. It’s like the main game, but less creative. It’s like the main game, but worse.

At about 3 or 4 hours of playtime, The Doctor Who Cloned Me isn’t long enough to outstay its welcome. But they didn’t learn a thing from the mistakes of the first campaign and instead just made more of it. The same gameplay problems that were present in DNF are here too, as is the same garbage humor.

I have a teeny soft spot for Duke Nukem Forever since sometimes I can see flashes of that old Duke 3D spirit. DNF disappointed me, made me angry, made me cringe. It also made me smile once or twice, made me celebrate little victories in its game design, and, for brief moments, it made me have fun.

The Doctor Who Cloned Me just left me feeling empty. This is probably the last time we’ll ever see a proper Duke game, and the series ended like this.

If Duke Nukem Forever is a 6.5/10, then Cloned is a 5/10. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s just… nothing. After some excitement in the initial levels, the only thing I felt by the time the credits rolled was numb.

But ask me again in 2031. We’ll see how I feel then.

 

No time to play with oneself

And that was almost it for this review. I very nearly switched off the PlayStation and put Duke Nukem Forever back up on my shelf for another 10 years. After all, there’s no way the multiplayer is still working, right?

Wrong!

Shockingly, Duke Nukem Forever’s multiplayer is indeed functional at the time of this writing – at least on PlayStation 3. But not so shockingly, nobody’s playing it anymore.

In Duke 3D, I used to play tons of Duke Match levels in single player mode, walking around and appreciating the weapon placement, architecture, and creative ideas employed by an army of user maps. Even without other players, there was still the joy of exploration and a sense of adventure.

But as I loaded up all 16 multiplayer maps in DNF by myself – because literally no one else in the whole world was playing Duke Nukem Forever – I was confronted with barebones battlefields and smaller, uninteresting versions of existing single player maps. Of note was a recreation of Duke 3D’s first level as a paintball arena. I remember it being reasonably entertaining as a multiplayer level back in 2011, but it pales in comparison to the original.

Near the end, I came across a map based on a popular Halo level; it was included in Hail to the Icons Parody Pack of four multiplayer maps. The level is a giant kids’ sandbox littered with massive toys and a simple set of sand castles that Duke can hide in. Thinking about the work that must have gone into this level and marveling at the design, I felt a touch of that awe that I used to get as a Duke 3D devoté in my teens.

This looks awesome!

As I lollygagged in that oversized sandbox – not once encountering another player – I reflected on my last foray into the world of Duke Nukem Forever. If 3D Realms had released the game as it appeared in the 1998 or 2001 trailer, it would have blown everyone’s minds. But as it stands, DNF is just a shell of what it could have been, like playing a Duke Match by yourself.

The reality is, Duke Nukem Forever was a disappointment 14 years in the making. But getting bogged down in the should and the could haves isn’t going to change anything. Overall, DNF is probably better than you remember. It was fun and frustrating to revisit, and it’s time to put it back and let go. 

Instead, I’d rather think back to the summer of 1996 when Duke Nukem 3D was the hottest PC game around. There were always more adventures to explore, more aliens to take down, more cities to save. That’s the real Duke Nukem and nothing DNF did can take that away.

Hail to the king, baby.

There's only one Duke Nukem!

Duke Nukem Forever, 10 years later

As bad as you remember?

After a staggering 14-year development cycle, numerous engine changes, and even a handful of lawsuits, Duke Nukem Forever finally released worldwide on June 10, 2011 and in North America four days later, on June 14, 2011.

I’ve been a giant fan of Duke Nukem 3D fan since 1996, when my buddy Tom installed the shareware version on my family’s brand new, first-ever Windows machine. As one of the Duke faithful, I got my copy of DNF on release day, and I didn’t go in halfheartedly, either.

As you can see, I’ve still got Balls of Steel.

$100 in 2011 money is like $50,000 today. Always bet on Duke!

As soon as I could, I posted a review of the game on this blog, which you can read here. I didn’t give it a rating per se, but on GameFAQs, I awarded Duke Nukem Forever a 7/10.

Here’s the final paragraph of that review:

“Occasionally Forever goes beyond self-awareness and reaches the point of unintentional self-parody, but I’m pleased to report that much of that old Duke magic has managed to survive three engine changes, 14 years and the efforts of countless programmers and artists. Even though it took forever, everybody’s favorite foulmouthed alien asskicker has once again delivered a dandy dose of old school, irreverent entertainment.”

If you’re reading this, you probably know that happened next: Duke Forever was slammed with a ton of 1-star reviews and has become known as one of the worst games of all time. Over the last decade, I’ve found myself wondering: was my original review too enthusiastic? Is Duke Nukem Forever as bad as everyone says?

With DNF’s 10^th anniversary upon us, there’s no better time for me to finally find out. So I fired up DNF on my aging PlayStation 3 with the goal of not only re-reviewing the game, but also reviewing my original review.

That’s pretty meta. The Duke would approve.

 

Damn, I’m looking mediocre

From the opening level to the ending credits, I was consistently underwhelmed by Duke Forever’s graphics. It looks fine for a PS3/Xbox 360-era game I guess, but sometimes DNF starts to feel like a GameCube and a PS3 had some kind of unholy lovechild and this game is the missing link between the generations. Everyone aside from Duke looks distinctly low-poly, a fact my younger self noted in the original review as well. Even the Dukester himself has some issues, particularly his stiff jumping animation where his legs move, but his arms stay put. Thankfully, the monsters all look pretty good. The environments, like Duke’s casino and the war-ravaged streets of Las Vegas, are nothing to write home about, but get the job done.

I'm so great I don't need to move my arms to take out the alien scum!

The controls are good for the most part. Moving around, shooting, driving, and switching between a whopping two guns are all easy enough. But some of the minigames don’t control all that well, though. You like air hockey? You won’t here, as Duke’s arm flails wildly, knocking the puck into his own goal more often that his opponent’s.

As for the audio, the music and sound do an excellent job of bringing the world of Duke Nukem Forever to life. Duke’s vocals are great quality, though what he’s actually saying is often a different story. (We’ll get to that.) The rockin’ music gets you pumped to kick alien butt, and explosions and gunfire are all rich and on-point. It’s nothing memorable to be sure, but it all sounds professional and gave my speakers a good workout.

Ready for more action…?

If you’re looking to dust off DNF and give it another shot, or if you just want to check out a trainwreck from the past, take my advice: Play this on easy. It’s not that DNF is hard, but the more frustrated you get with this game, the less likely you are to come back to it.

From stopping a freefalling elevator (with no indication of how) to long sections where Duke is shrunk to the size of an action figure and solving boring puzzles, Duke Forever is littered with a ton of stuff that just doesn’t belong in a shooter. Sometimes it feels like you’re getting a good rhythm going, finally taking out the bad guys like in Duke 3D. Then you get stopped in your tracks by a walking simulator level or the god-awful platforming sections. More than once, I found myself screaming, “I just want to shoot something!”

But then it dawns on you about half-way though the game: Duke Nukem Forever is absolutely frontloaded with trash. When Duke takes control of the Mighty Foot monster truck and fights through the ghost town to the top of the dam, Duke Nukem Forever becomes a fairly fun game. Blasting the bad guys in the old west and running over pig cops in a mine cart harkens back to the bombastic DNF trailers of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Despite some pointless puzzles in the last quarter of the game, Duke Forever really picks up in the second half.

Oh my God, they killed David Boreanaz!

So what happened? As the story goes, whenever Duke creator George Broussard saw something cool in another video game, he’d demand that it be put into Duke Nukem Forever. DNF is so bogged down with 14 years of feature creep and mismanagement, it’s a miracle that the team at Gearbox Software was able to piece this into anything remotely cohesive.

What we wound up with is massively uneven game that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a first-person shooter or some kind of bizarre puzzle-action-walking sim. Frankly, if DNF had been half as long and dumped the all the strip clubs and interactive background garbage, it would have been a much more enjoyable experience.

But unfortunately, the gameplay isn’t the worst part of Duke Nukem Forever. What is? Well… it’s Duke himself.

Fail to the king, baby

The humor that punctuated Duke Nukem 3D so perfectly was apparently stored next to radioactive waste for the years they were developing Forever, and Duke has mutated into a grotesque parody of himself. It’s like the writers ran the original wit and charm of the character though Google Translate to Wingdings, then back to English again. The atmosphere that was Duke 3D’s greatest strength has gone from seedy to slutty, from gritty to crass.

Near the beginning of the game, while the aliens are just beginning their attack, the player is huddled in the “Duke Cave” speaking with Gen. Graves and the President of the United States. The president angrily barks, “Duke, you’re a relic from a different era!”

That’s how a lot of people feel about Duke Nukem as a character, but I have to I disagree. Duke could have transitioned gracefully from DN3D to Forever. There could still be critically acclaimed Duke Nukem games coming out to this day. But this game right here is what made him obsolete. Duke wasn’t a detestable character in 1996, he was an ‘80s action hero homage who liked women, beer, and killing alien scumbags. He was a little full of himself, cocky, and a tad on the misogynistic side. But instead of toning down Duke’s outdated qualities, the writers turned the worst parts of Duke’s attitude up to an 11. Now he’s now he’s self-obsessed and vile. In DN3D, Duke asked strippers to dance. In Forever, he owns an entire strip club and nearly every woman in the game is falling all over herself to sleep with him. In DN3D, Duke was out to save women from the evil aliens. In Forever, he tells captive women – his girlfriends nonetheless – “Looks like you’re f*cked.”

The subtitle reads, "Duke, We'll get the weight off in like a week... we swear!"

A lot of reviews have said that the true low point of the game is “The Hive,” wherein captured, impregnated women cry out for their parents and die slowly while Duke slaps “wall boobs,” makes sodomy jokes, and walks though doors that resemble buttholes. But for me, the rock bottom of Duke Forever is far more subtle. Scattered throughout the game are cigarette machines filled with various gag brands of smokes. One of these is “F*ggs” brand cigarettes, with an illustration of a stereotypical male leather fetishist on the package. It crossed the line from bad taste to hateful, and the Duke I grew up with wouldn’t have stood for it.

With the proper attitude adjustment, Duke could have been updated for the 2010s – a wisecracking antithesis to the bland Halo or Call of Duty offerings of the time. Instead, Duke is no longer the cool uncle with the corvette and the sunglasses, but the fat, sexist uncle who ruins Christmas by passing out drunk under the tree and farting by all the presents. The Duke Nukem series might have been able to recover from a late, mediocre, old-fashioned game. But people are much less forgiving of the toxic, reprehensible idiot that Duke has become.

All Outta Gum

So, to answer the question I posed at the start, is DNF as bad as everyone says?

Do me a favor. For just a minute, forget the delays, forget Duke’s cringy attitude, and forget the disappointment. Look at the game with an open mind. When it gets the hell out of its own way, Duke Nukem Forever can be a competent if unimpressive shooter with glimmers of what made Duke Nukem 3D so special. But at its worst, DNF is a painful chore that’s attitude is far more embarrassing than is ho-hum gameplay.

In all honestly, DNF gets much more crap than it deserves. And that’s because its biggest sin isn’t even in the game. It’s the fact that Duke Forever took so long to get released and was so underwhelming. Duke said it himself: “After 12…years, it should be” a good game. It’s not.

So yes – to answer the question that’s lived rent-free in my head for the last decade, my Duke Nukem Forever review from 10 years ago was indeed too forgiving. But even with a glut of flowery language and the excitement of a playing a new Duke game after 14 long years, my original review doesn’t deny that DNF as “serious issues.” A rating of 7/10 wasn’t that far off the mark. After 1,800 words and ten years to ponder it, I’m rerating DNF a 6.5/10.

I’m not really sure why I tortured myself for a decade over what amounts to a half-point score adjustment and a bit too much enthusiasm, but I guess that’s just the kind of guy I am.

And that’s really all there is to say about Duke Forever… or is it? What about multiplayer, you ask? And how about the game’s DLC campaign, The Doctor Who Cloned Me? Isn’t that supposed to be better than the main game?

Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered: Tune in on Monday, June 14 – DNF’s North American anniversary – for part 2 of Duke Nukem Forever, 10 Years Later!

The ending is uncomfortably reminiscent of the 2016 election. 

Metal Gear Solid and the Twilight of the PlayStation 3

About a year ago, Sony told us that they’d be discontinuing PlayStation 3 and Vita support for their online service PlayStation Plus, which up until now had featured free games each month for their three most current gaming platforms. And the time has finally come. After March 8, the PlayStation 4 will stand alone – at least when it comes to PS Plus.

There hasn’t been a ton of notable Vita content for Plus members in the last year, and predictably, the handheld is ending its Plus tenure with another pair of unremarkable games. However, anyone who’s still rocking their PS3 this month can enjoy one of the console’s greatest exclusives: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. 

When it came out in 2008, MGS4 showed off the power of the PlayStation 3 beautifully, giving players an experience that simply wasn’t possible on the last generation’s hardware. It’s fitting that the final Plus offering for the PS3 is a title that, for many, was the first truly must-have exclusive for the system. And more than ten years later, it’s STILL only on the PS3, baby.

MGS4 introduces players to Old Snake, an aging and ailing version of the hero from Metal Gear Solid 1. Thanks to his exposure to the FOXDIE virus (and probably nanomachines somehow), Snake’s body has deteriorated, leaving him struggling to keep up with younger, more agile soldiers on the battlefield. On the surface, he’s become a relic. But as the game shows us, Snake is still capable of downright amazing things. As Dr. Thomas Oliver might say, “[he] might be old, but [he] can still pull it off.”

PlayStation 3 hit the shelves in November of 2006 and has survived far longer than anyone might have imagined, overcoming an awkward launch to outlive its popular rival, the once-mighty Xbox 360. Much like Old Snake, PS3 just keeps chugging along, despite more powerful gaming machines having taken over five years ago. Sony stopped churning out PlayStation 3 units in May 2017 in Japan, the last holdout of PS3 production worldwide. And yet, after a staggering dozen-plus years on the market, there’s still a trickle of new content for the system, and many game servers are still running. Wanna play a few online rounds of Ultra Street Fighter IV, the final version of Capcom’s fighting masterpiece? Go ahead, it’s still up. What’s more surprising is that original Street Fighter IV is still kicking too, now ten years after the first of its Hadokens, Sonic Booms, and Tiger Uppercuts graced our screens.

Old syle, "fat" PS3, 80 gigs

 But also like Old Snake, the writing’s on the wall for Sony’s first Blu-Ray console. As times goes on, game servers are being shut down, blocking the multiplayer functionality of some PS3 games and making others entirely unplayable. The loss of PlayStation Home, Tekken Revolution, and the Resistance trilogy come to mind, and Warhawk, an online only game from 2007, finally called it quits on January 31, 2019. (That’s yesterday, if you’re reading this the day I post it.) More heartbreaks are inevitably on the way.

The end of PlayStation Plus support is a big nail in the PS3’s coffin, but what denotes a console’s death? I can still play lots of the system’s best games online. I can still walk into a Gamestop and purchase used PS3 games. The PlayStation Store is still happy to sell me a wealth of PS3 content, and New Rocksmith songs were still being released as of January 29, 2019. (That’s only three days before the publication of this article.)  

So how DO we determine when the system is fully in the past? I don’t really know yet.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was billed as the final Metal Gear Solid game, the epic conclusion to a series that, in 2008, had already spanned more than 20 years. It gave us Old Snake, showed us what a hero was like when his best days were far behind him, and hinted heavily that the Legendary Hero of Shadow Moses wouldn’t survive to see the credits. But you know something? At the bitter end of MGS4, Old Snake is still alive, despite being shot, sickened, and microwaved. With all that behind him, he’s ready to live whatever life he’s got left, and no longer cares about the whens and hows of his inevitable passing.

That’s what it’s like right now to be a PS3 owner who still values his console. We all know the end is coming, sooner than later, but the PlayStation 3 has surpassed literally every expectation I’ve had for its lifespan. Now it’s time to re-download the greatest games of the console’s past and get ready for the PS3’s retirement – starting with Metal Gear Solid 4.

They said MGS4 would be the last, but of course there WAS another Metal Gear Solid game about eight years later in late 2015. Having pumped more than 200 hours into Metal Gear Solid V a few years back, I recently found myself wanting an excuse to play it again. On a whim, I got a new copy for PS3 on Amazon for about 10 bucks. I guess I could have played my PS4 copy, but I wanted to experience it all again from the very beginning.

And now on the eve of PlayStation Plus PS3 support fading away forever, I’m suddenly sitting on one of the system’s first killer apps, and what might be the console’s last triple A game worth playing. The first and the last. The Alpha and the Omega. The Liquid and the Solid. How apropos.

I won’t pretend that the PlayStation 3 is my main gaming system anymore, or that I even turn it on more than a few hours a week. But it’s always been there for me, always ready for one more Street Fighter match, or more more trip to the African jungles of Far Cry, or one more look at the rise and demise of history’s greatest assassin, Ezio Auditore. Up until now, I’ve been kinda bummed about PS Plus support ending and what that means for the future of the PS3. But I think it’s time to stop thinking about the end, and start considering the future. Like Old Snake, there’s not a whole lot of fight left in the PS3, but there’s still a whole lot of heart.

“I’ll remember everything you were. And stick with you to the end.”  

- Otacon, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Gaming Memories: The Sega Sonic Summer of '94

There wasn’t a whole lot to do during the summer for an 11-year-old suburbanite with no money, so I spent my days the best way I could imagine: finishing Sonic 3 on every save file the game offered. Sonic 3 wasn’t my favorite Genesis game, but I had already played Streets of Rage 2, Moonwalker, and Castlevania Bloodlines to death. Sonic 3 had some fun secrets to discover and a snappy, oddly familiar soundtrack. And best of all, I had a copy on-hand and ready to go.

Outside the pavement radiated heat and we didn’t have air conditioning, so as Sonic splashed through HyrdoCity, I swam in a pool of my own sweat. But as the day wore on, black clouds overtook the sunny summer sky. I paused the game and watched as the heavens burst. Rain cascaded down my streets as relief came in the form of an earthy scent and cool breeze.

It was one of those moments that defined the joy of childhood for me. Back then, there was magic in video game a controller, and a hot day, and an unexpected storm.

An Assassin’s Creed Retrospective, Part V: Pandemonium and a Pint in Jolly Old England

Today is Friday, October 27, 2017, and that means Assassin’s Creed Origins has been released worldwide! I hope you enjoy your new game while people in the storm ravaged areas of Puerto Rico, Texas, Florida, and beyond search for missing pets/grandmas, struggle with crippling depression, and fight to put the pieces of their shattered lives back together. I wonder how many bottles of clean drinking water $65 could buy?

Also, if you preordered Origins, you get the bonus mission “Secrets of the First Pyramids.” Fun!

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Release Date: 10/2015. Available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Syndicate is basically Unity in England with the game set to “fun” in the options screen. Oh, and also a sweet grappling hook.

The game looks and plays much like its older, buggier brother, but introduces a pair of main characters that the player can switch between on the fly. Meet brother and sister duo Jacob and Evie Frye, who bring slightly different skills to the table. Jacob, who specializes in combat efficiency, is probably the most charismatic and likable murderous psychopath since Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed II. Evie, who specializes in stealth, is more of a generic by-the-book assassin we’ve come to expect at this point. There’s a few Odd Couple-style interactions between the pair, but their relationship is mostly played for drama.

While Jacob has the better personality, it soon becomes apparent that Evie’s skillset is more useful. That’s why it’s so infuriating that most important missions are exclusive to her asshat brother. I’d suggest that Jacob is favored by the game developers simply because he’s a man, but the Jack the Ripper DLC (see below) is almost exclusively Evie’s show. Chalk it up to making a more challenging game, I guess.

Anyway, the Frye twins spend the game building up their own gang, the Rooks, and trying to reestablish the waning assassin presence in London. It’s yet another situation in Assassin’s Creed where the storyline is neither memorable nor what you’d call “good,” but the Fryes are surrounded by a gaggle of excellent supporting characters to spice things up. From a pair of Chareses (Dickens and Darwin) to transgender businessman Ned Wynert and badass Indian prince Duleep Singh, it’s the endearing characters that keep cut scenes from dragging, not the lukewarm tale of… whatever’s going on in London. And mercifully, the present day interruptions are kept to a bare minimum this time around. Anything that lets me get back murdering random people on the streets because I don’t like their hat, or their horse is ugly, is much welcome.

Speaking of horses, buggies (no, not like Unity’s levitating townspeople) are a big part of Syndicate. It’s a fast way to get from point A to B, but it also leads to some of the dullest missions around. (Doesn’t every gamer want to drive slowly to protect their passengers?) Other highlights include recruiting gang members to do your brutalizing for you, the aforementioned grappling hook that makes climbing easier but only works when it feels like it, and shooting civilians off their rowboats on the Thames River and into a death’s icy, wet embrace.

In true AC fashion, here’s literally hundreds of things scattered around the industrial slums to collect and immediately forget about. It’s not good game design, but it appeals to the completionist in me, so it gets a pass. Other returning annoyances include paying real-world cash for in-game currency, missions where you slowly follow some rando around until the game remembers it’s an action title again, and load times that afford the player a convent break to stop and make themselves a grilled cheese.

Overall, Syndicate is the game Unity should have been. Industrial Revolution London is a lot of fun to explore, and there’s even a brief section focusing on World War I for variety. Strangely, Syndicate’s biggest problem is that there’s too much content on offer: the game was still giving me new missions after I earned the platinum trophy. Had the more tedious aspects had been lessened and some sleep inducing-missions cut, Syndicate could have been a classic. But even as it stands, the game stands head-and-shoulders over most of its AC brethren, stabbing its way nearly to the top of a long line of bestselling, iconic games and also AC Revelations.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: Jack the Ripper. Release Date: 12/2015. Available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Oh, I say, BRRR!

Set 20 years after the main events of Syndicate, the Jack the Ripper features a bite-sized chunk of Creedy goodness wrapped in a familiar package.

Continuing the Assassin’s Creed tradition of underwhelming DLC, JtR takes place entirely in sections of the game we’ve already seen in Syndicate… or does it? In fact, there are several episodes in this ten mission arc that take place in entirely new locations. Of particular interest is Lady O’s mansion, which is an excellent playground for destruction. With underpowered enemies, no place for them to escape, and plenty of dark nooks in which to lurk, this mission starts feeling less like Assassin’s Creed and more like a movie in the Halloween series.

The creepy atmosphere is enhanced by a wicked (like the witch, not Boston) soundtrack, the cold, unforgiving landscape of London in wintertime, and Jack himself, who looks like a cross between Charles Dickens and Jason from Friday the 13^th Part II, what with his burlap sack mask and penchant for stabbing.

The new fear-based combat system rounds out the spookiness by letting the player terrorize enemies. Unlike its parent game, the focus in Jack the Ripper isn’t to kill the bad guys, so much as it is to brutalize them physically and mentally. Sometimes, you feel more like Batman than Evie Frye. The difference is, Batman never left criminals to die pinned down to the middle of a busy road or scared them into shooting each other in face.

Some of the side missions are eye-meltingly boring, but on the whole, staking around London in Jack the Ripper is great fun. Too bad this one isn’t a standalone like Freedom Cry, or I’d have recommended it to people who don’t feel like plunging into Syndicate’s plethora of content but still want to take a short trip to Jolly Old England.

An Arbitrary ranking of all main Assassin’s Creed Games

All right, folks. You had to know this was coming. You can’t do a proper retrospective without a list of the author’s favorite and least favorite titles.

Only entries into the main 3D series will be considered for this list, so any handheld or 2D Creed games will not appear. Liberation is not an exception to this rule since we’ll be reviewing the HD version on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, not the PS Vita original.

Expansions and spinoffs such as The Tyranny of King Washington and Freedom Cry are considered part of their originator game and thus will not be ranked separately.

All games are ranked as they stand today, with all stability patches installed. Basically, imagine a new copy of each game purchased and played on October 27, 2017 with all updates applied.

The higher up on the list within the tier, the better the game.

Now, without further ado:

LEGENDARY TIER – Great games worth playing for all gamers.

-          Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

-          Assassin’s Creed II

EXCELLENT TIER – Great games worth playing for fans of Assassin’s Creed and maybe other gamers too.

-          Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

-          Assassin’s Creed III

-          Assassin’s Creed Rogue

GOOD TIER – Fun games, but nothing special. Worth a play for AC fans, or if you get ‘em cheap.

-          Assassin’s Creed Unity

-          Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD

-          Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

MEH TIER – Not bad, but you’re not missing much if you skip it.

-          Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

AWFUL TIER – One of the worst games ever made.

-          Assassin’s Creed I

Brotherhood ranks so “low” because it’s basically just ACII again, but note that it’s still in a tier of recommended titles. Assassin’s Creed III is aided by its expansion, The Tyranny of King Washington, helping it to pull ahead of Rogue. Black Flag is unhindered by the shrug-worthy Freedom Cry expansion and the Jack the Ripper DLC made the choice between Syndicate and ACIII much easier.  

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So there you have it, folks. Now you should be all ready for Origins! Or if you’re so inclined, take a look at the earlier entries in the Assassin’s Creed series in Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of the retrospective. Happy stabbing! 

(And seriously, why not donate a few bucks to the Red Cross?)

An Assassin’s Creed Retrospective, Part IV: Goodbye New York, Hello Glitches

Assassin’s Creed Origins, the latest entry in Ubisoft’s much milked beloved franchise, is set to hit the shelves on Friday, October 27. It puts players in the excessively lacey sandals of Bayek, one of the first assassins, as he roams around ancient Egypt, presumably hanging out with pre-embalmed mummies and building pyramids by stabbing them.

The release marks the 10^th anniversary of the first Assassin’s Creed title, the fourth anniversary of when Ubisoft should probably have stopped making AC games, and the first anniversary of that time Russia assassinated a major American election just for the lulz.

American Election 2016

Last time on Dragon Creed Z, the series’ first female assassin, Aveline, played deadly dress-up in New Orleans in AC: Liberation; Capt. Kenway went trollin’ for treasure in Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, and slave turned assassin Adéwalé served up an afternoon’s worth of forgettable fun in Freedom Cry.

Today, we wrap things up in America with Assassin’s Creed Rogue before heading to France for the biggest and buggiest Assassin’s Creed game yet!

Assassin’s Creed Rogue. Release Date: 11/2014. Available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC

Rogue is what college kids eat at the end of the semester when they’ve got a sack of leftover take out, a lone package of shrimp ramen, an a half-eaten can of frosting from freshman year.

Using story and game assets shamelessly ripped from Assassin’s Creed 3 and 4, Rogue acts both as a farewell to the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 era and a semi-sequel to Capt. Kenway’s questionable adventures on the high seas. Released the same day as Assassin’s Creed Unity, which was the series’ first outing on then-next generation consoles PS4 and Xbone, few expected this stopgap title to be anything more than a cash grab for starving AC fans stuck with last gen tech.

And in a way, they were right: Rogue offers up a scant six memory sequences in waters we’ve traveled before. Back are many of the characters from AC3, as well as Black Flag’s seafaring combat, albeit in a colder climate than its topical cousin. At first glance, Rogue is AC4 in a parka, but then a funny thing happened: Compared to Unity’s buggy release (see below), fans began heralding this side project as the better game.

It would seem that by lifting the burden of creating all new assets and focusing on a side story entrenched in established AC lore, programmers were free to come up with a fun game in short amount of time. Shay Cormac is a good lead, especially by Assassin’s Creed’s low standards, and his transformation from Assassin to Templar – a first for the series – is dark and fraught with personal turmoil. It’s almost interesting, until the stupid present day scenes disrupt the gameplay like always. At least we don’t have to hear from that twit Desmond Miles anymore.  (Spoiler: HE DEAD)

Rogue serves as a nice lead-in to Unity and a satisfying wrap-up to the “Americas” trilogy, but not much else. It was a cheap attempt to milk one last payday from the PS3 and Xbox 360 to be sure, but it hits the AC sweet spot just long enough to keep players from caring about the reused locations and déjà vu combat.  

Assassin’s Creed Unity. Release Date: 11/2014. Available on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Despite a pretty good (if generic) Assassin’s Creed title at its core, Unity was never able to recover from its infamously botched launch.

By the time I played it, Unity had been patched like a pack-a-day smoker looking to quit by sundown – and it was STILL a ramshackle mess. I got stuck in walls, characters’ body parts would disappear but they’d keep walking around like everything was hunky-dory, NPCs would casually start hovering three feet above the ground showing me their invisible crotches – the list goes on and on. I can only imagine the injustices that early Unity adopters were accosted with. So bad was the blunder that Ubisoft claimed sales of the subsequent Assassin’s Creed game, Syndicate, had been throttled by Unity’s horrendous reception.

So here’s where I should talk about the storyline. But even though I played it long enough to get the platinum trophy, I can’t remember what the game’s protagonist, Arno, looks like, sounds like, or even what his motivations were. I’ve heard him described as a less charismatic version of Ezio, beloved star of Assassin’s Creed II, but that’s an insult to understatements. The best part about Arno is that his name sounds like Marno, which is very nearly Mario, as in Super Mario. Too bad Arno doesn’t eat mushrooms or jump on Goombas or have a shred of personality whatsoever.

The only thing I remember about Unity’s storyline, aside from the fact that the game is set in France and Arno wants to bone some chick, is that Arno’s dad was assassinated by Rogue protagonist Shay Cormic. Oh, and there was a stupid companion app that took hours to play and awarded the diligent with in-game garbage every so often. I guess that doesn’t have much to do with plot, unless Unity was really going for that classic “forgettable game” story everyone digs so much.

There was also a pay-to-win mechanic where players could buy in-game currency, “time-saver” maps, and other shit that that drains away all of the remaining challenge and charm from Unity’s single player experience. So if you just want to finish Unity quickly and have the least amount of fun possible, get 100 bucks worth of helix credits, buy a bunch of stab-proof armor, and waltz though Paris murdering whomever you please until you run out of story missions.  

I’ve been pretty down on it so far, but Unity wasn’t all bad. What I do like is the multiplayer. While pervious Creeds focused on a ho-hum player vs. player system, the co-op multiplayer found in Unity lives up to the game’s title. Up to four players can tackle exclusive missions, share treasure, and generally wreck the Templars’ Saturday nights. There was also a great looking sequence featuring hot air balloons zooming over Paris, and a “glitch” that sent players barreling forward in time to World War II for some variety.

In the end, Unity is a good looking, decently entertaining, and mostly forgettable title marred by poor quality standards. Let me put it to you like this: I was introduced to the Assassin’s Creed series when AC4 and Unity came with my Xbox One. I decided to play AC4 first, and thank God I did – if I had started with Unity, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now.

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Next time, the Assassin’s Creed series will stop for a pint in jolly old England before taking on the legendary Jack the Ripper.

Tekken 7 and the "Death" of Geese Howard

Evolution 2017, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world, brought with it a lot of surprises - but not all of them involved major players getting sent home early, untimely technical issues, or come from behind victories on the main stage.

It was announced that Fatal Fury antagonist Geese Howard, famously kicked out of the top floor of a high-rise by all American pugilist Terry Bogard (twice), will be making his return to the ring by way of Tekken 7, Namco's newest entry in the long-running fighting franchise. Howard joins Street Fighter's Akuma as the second guest character to appear in the game since its release several months ago.

While most people are speculating on how dear ol' Geese is going to make the transition to the fake 3D world, all I can think about is this: