In order for it to rise above the crap, it will need word of mouth. In order for it to get word of mouth, someone needs to notice it before the rise. See the problem?

Life will find a way.

I'm familiar with a similar story, though it's about Nasreddin Hodja.

Wonder which came first.

I'm going to reserve judgment until I see the review in the print version (yup, I still subscribe.) The online reviews are written by different people.

Meanwhile they talk about "realism" yet I can be standing there with a fucking bazooka and I STILL CAN'T BLOW A FUCKING WOODEN DOOR DOWN! WTF?

Reminds me of my second "Holy Shit" moment in Crysis. On the second level, I took cover inside a wooden hut from a machine gun nest, and watched the place get taken apart around me in a storm of bullets.

For the record, the first moment was seeing the sunrise over the beach in the first level at 2am IRL and it messing with my circadian rhythm.

It's a far cry from Duke Nukem 3D, which gave a third of the game away as its demo. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake also gave a third away, but of course it's not the mid 90s any more and the old rules no longer seem to apply.

Yeah, the Shareware episode model is dead, long live Demos.

Though to be fair, every single game you mentioned had a direct sequel which had demo levels instead of shareware episode. Doom 2, Spear of Destiny, Quake 2. Also Hexen as a sequel to Heretic.

You want a fun game? TOO BAD, HAVE SOME RESTRICTIVE NOFUN GAMES INSTEAD.

So why does Duke try so hard to be as restrictive as the modern shooters? 2 weapons at a time? Checkpoints where you only have access to your most recent checkpoint save? Not too crazy about health regeneration either.

The only thing that's Duke about DNF is the humour and interactive environments.

Alt=fire? You must have some strange, deformed hands. Clearly Ctrl should be fire.

I'm guessing he meant L-Alt and L-Shift, so the right hand would be delegated to just the arrow keys. Firing with the pinky just seems wrong.

No one has an excuse for not knowing the local laws.

What's your excuse for not reading the summary? You know, the one that states that he wrote the blog post when he was in the United States.

This is like getting your hand cut off in Saudi Arabia because you shoplifted in New York.

Well, actually I meant "aspect correct full screen without black bars (as in 16:9 image on 16:9 TV) is better than aspect correct full screen with black bars (4:3 image on 16:9 TV) and both are far better than stretched full screen (4:3 image stretched to 16:9)." I wasn't even thinking about 4:3 screens displaying 16:9 images, cropped or otherwise, when I wrote that :)

I leave the correction of typos as an exercise for the reader.

Aspect correct full screen without black bars is better than aspect correct full screen without black bars. Both are far better than stretched fullscreen.

At least the wired version does. Whenever I see a post about gamers complaining that their Xbox 360 controller is not working for some game, 90% of the time it's the wireless version.

The other 10% of the time they're trying to play a PS2 / PS1 / Xbox 1 port.

Well THERE'S your problem.

Yes. Do not worry though, Sony is on top of the issue. I hear they are already deploying their most expensive lawyers to go after those irresponsible individuals who leaked information about the unsecured servers, so that this type of thing never happens again.

Honestly, it's the class action lawyers' fault. They're the ones you need to sue.