Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project

Playing Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project is like digging up a time capsule with buried treasures only to find out what people in the past considered valuable is now garbage. Labyrinthine

Unlike the popular Duke Nukem 3D, Manhattan Project is not a FPS. Instead what you get for your hard-earned cash is a poorly-aged side-scrolling shooter originally released in 2002, with all the mediocre 3D graphics we used to kind of think were awesome. Even worse are Duke’s animations , which give off the vague implication that Duke’s been shoving his foot up his own ass instead of those of his foes.

Yeah, Manhattan Project is ugly, but that wouldn’t be a big deal if it were fun. It’s not. Each level of the game boils down to finding a bomb (wrapped, of course, around a woman with gigantic breasts), finding a key, and shooting a few enemies along the way. Combat is boring, usually boiling down to just firing periodically at the edge of the screen (though you can’t fire at angles , only horizontally and vertically). The only real exceptions to this are boss fights, which occur after every few stages and mostly require you to simply fire at one weak spot a lot. How exciting. Maybe this repetitive level design was passable at the turn of the millennia, but it’s downright mind-numbing now.

Duke’s personality has also grown tiring. The chauvinistic , all-things-manly dialogue of Duke occasionally elicited a smile, but what was hilarious a decade ago sounds mostly idiotic now. Duke’s jokes are stale, delivered poorly, and immature in a way that even someone like me, who still laughs at farts, can no longer appreciate .