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| Another Video Game Review: Duke Nukem 3D by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 01/25/2013, 4:49pm PST | ||||
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| In the area of immersive first-person shooters, there was Wolfenstein 3D, which presented a 2D world you could walk around in, expressed as sprites. Then came DOOM. ("I never played games before, then came DOOM, a dooma, dooma dooma" to channel Dionne Warwick, 'cause that's what friends are for.) Other games such as Descent would expand this into ship combat, but one that expanded what could be done in the genre of "walk around and shoot anything else that moves," you have Duke Nukem 3D.
A sequel to some of the earlier versions, DN3D one went all out to create a fairly realistic 3D environment in which you can walk around anywhere you can reach, and even some places you could not otherwise reach, thanks to the addition of a jetpack. The game added a lot of special effects compared to the simple sideways door in Wolfenstein and the moving doors and ceilings in DOOM. You have floors that can spin, doors that can open up, down, split up and down, sideways, split sideways and open away and toward you like kitchen cabinets or regular doors between rooms in a real place. This also means effects like sliding curtains are possible (and are used in the game). There are also implementations of trains, shuttles, conveyors and even an earthquake. The gameplay is more-or-less the same as most FPS shooters, find all the enemies, kill all of them, find the exit of that level and go on to the next level, and eventually go on and defeat the dragon (second in line of the bad guys) and the big bad (the chief boss) in order to win the game. What made Duke Nukem 3D stand out was two things that were done by 3D realms in a similar fashion to what ID Software also did, but expanded. The game was done in three parts, the first part was given away to encourage people to buy the full game, and when you bought the full game, you found that it included the same tools the designers had when they built the game so that you could also design your own levels if you wanted to. This was a big difference between the ability to create new levels in DOOM, because while ID did not release tools for creating your own game maps for DOOM - these were all created by third parties who gave them away - the full game for Duke Nukem 3D included the same tools that the designers had to make the levels they did, plus you could expand the game by adding your own artwork, and the artwork file had spots reserved specifically for user-created art so that you didn't have to overwrite a texture or sprite that was normally used by the game. The creating of a game so that the game maps can be user-created changes the dynamics of the underlying game, because now it has more playability, not only do you have the original game, but you have the capability to run new maps that other people have made. DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D have tens of thousands of user-created maps. And if you don't like other people's maps, you can create your own, and if you have friends, invite them to play in your world. This capacity has gone even further, as Valve has done the same thing with Half Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, Portal and Portal 2, allowing you to build your own worlds and use the features of the game, a third-party program was developed called Garry's Mod, in which not only can you use the original maps or design your own in the Half-Life 2 and Portal platforms, the application allows you to play with the physics engine and objects in the game, using them to create things from structures, to tools, to devices, to weapons, and to explore further. The addition of user-creatable content has expanded the capacity of what can be done with a game, often to areas the designers never even imagined. The development of "Machinima," where a video game can be used to create an actual film, started because of the capacity to record what was happening. With the complete capability to rebuild the maps as one wishes, it is possible to create an entire feature-length film using games and programs with game engines like Blender. This is something that has been long recognized as part and parcel of development of inventions. A good tool, or device, or in this case, a computer program, gives you the capability to do things and to enhance what you are capable of doing. A great tool or program goes beyond this and allows you to expand what is possible. Web servers like the original CERN server gave the ability to deliver interesting information, and later developments into the Apache Server enhanced what could be done including catching errors in references, but add a programming language into the server like PHP (and other external languages) and it changes everything, because now what can be delivered to the user is now programmable, and can be changed at run-time, without having to rewrite the server system. It is this added capability to change a program at run time from what it originally was that expands dramatically the capability of what can be done. Some games even include scripting languages. Gary's Mod provides the LUA language, allowing the creation of component libraries that can manipulate the underlying program through programming instructions scripted at run time. Duke Nukem 3D started this with the inclusion of a stripped-down version of the C language which could add new functions including new weapons and also providing the ability to redefine the game at run time. |
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