Forums > Submission Feedback > Suskie's Duke Nukem Forever review

In just a few hours, this review has already received more hits than my latest one. YOWZA! And well deserved, too! Great review, Suskie!

The only thing my milkshake brings to the yard is a subpoena.

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it.

You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.

But then we see naked women, covered in slime, pinned to the walls and hanging from the ceilings, moaning as they’re being raped and impregnated by the aliens. They sob realistically – it is, in fact, the only convincing sample of voice work in the entire game.

Videos or it didn't happen.

Note to gamers: when someone shoots you in the face, they aren't "gay." They are "psychopathic."

You don't want to see video of it, Zipp. It plays out exactly as the review describes.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

But since you asked.

You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.

Man, only an epically bad game could make tentacle sex boring.

Note to gamers: when someone shoots you in the face, they aren't "gay." They are "psychopathic."

I am not entertained, amused or captivated by tentacle sex in any context.

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I guess it's a good thing then that Duke Nukem Forever doesn't have any.

Two of the girls (the ones who are first introduced to the game as fellating Duke) admit to having consensual sex with aliens. The strong implication is that the aliens use human women to breed -- if people don't like that sci-fi trope, fine, all up to taste. It's not a tentacle rape level (I think the Destructoid review is the one that called it that). By the time Duke arrives, everyone has already been transformed into aliens. There's no reason to think there are any tentacles doing naughty stuff, or that there ever were any tentacles; people are too fixated on Japanese porn.

It's a level where you run around inside a gooey, slimy area and see (topless) women who have been transformed into aliens, and see cocooned men. Smaller aliens burst from the alien womens' stomachs; I'd moan, too, if I had one of those inside me (that's the player's cue to be on alert). As for the men, shoot their cocooned bodies to score some sweet loot.

The video looks boring because it is boring -- the offensive thing about that level is its dull design, not the topless aliens.

//Zig

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To be fair, Zig, Duke Nukem makes numerous comments about tentacles throughout the proceedings.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

I threw the phrase "tentacle rape" in there because that's the impression I walked away with. The level's depiction of it skirts around the details (and wisely so, as otherwise it would have risked falling into AO territory), and I said "tentacle" because, given that the game's alien biology is slimy and slithery and rife with tentacles anyway, that's how I pictured it happening without wanting to devote the level of thought and analysis to the subject that I'm about to give it. It's certainly no more baseless than the claim that the Holsom twins admit to having consensual sex with the aliens. I've just gone back and watched the video, and here's their entire conversation:

"Duke, what's happening to us?"

"Looks like you're... fucked."

"Duke, it was our first time... with an alien."

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

[The twins then scream and die as the aliens burst out of them.]

Being as I am a fan of the Aliens movies (well, the first two, anyway) and that the game had already pulled at least one quote from that series by the time I got to the Hive level, I likened what I was seeing with the process used in that fiction, in which a human host is penetrated and impreganted (through the mouth, in that case), after which the hatchling breaks free of its host, who dies. I missed any implication that what the game depicts isn't at least a variation of that (as opposed to the women actually being turned into aliens). Couple that with Duke's one-liners ("You're fucked," shouting "You've been aborted" after he kills a hatchling) and the fact that the level's most noteworthy image is naked women being held down as they sob, and that's how I came to that conclusion.

But seeing as how, as we've covered, the game skirts around the details, let's just examine it at surface level: These women are naked and being humiliated and obviously in great pain or despair, the aliens are violating (or have violated) them in some form or another, hatchlings burst out of them violently as a result of whatever is happening to them, and Duke uses the situation to drop a "you're fucked" pun. Lo and behold, the point that I was trying to make doesn't change. It's disgusting and overblown, and the writers seemed to be using the scenario to make a stiflingly unfunny joke.

And now I pray that's the last contribution I have to make to this conversation.

You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.

Shouting "you've been aborted" after punching an alien hatchling out of the air is pretty awesome. The other line, yeah, not so much.

//Zig

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