In defence of Duke Nukem

[Vulvokunvrii]

Can all of you just shut it? You're filling this thread with more drama than what we hear on the news.

I was trying to "defend" Duke Nukem because he was such a popular character back in the day, and the franchise needs help after Duke Nukem Forever.

What you say here makes it sound like your advocating for suicide. Have you any idea how much crap has happened in real life because of that? We're not even sure if there's an afterlife, and you'd encourage something like letting people jump to their deaths? Wanting something is nothing compared to needing something.

Nobody NEEDS to die, it just happens anyway because we get too old or sick.

sorry for double posting, but who ever said anything about advocating suicide in here? I didnt....?

[Xortberg]

Can all of you just shut it? You're filling this thread with more drama than what we hear on the news.

HA HA HA. No. This is all legit discussion, bro. Sorry that not everyone's just going "ZOMG YOUR RIGHT BRO" and all, but that's not how the 'Point works.

I was trying to "defend" Duke Nukem because he was such a popular character back in the day, and the franchise needs help after Duke Nukem Forever.

And you still fail to give any evidence as to why we need to defend him. I've yet to see any big recent news stories about Duke Nukem being a woman-hating devil, so until you provide me with proof I'm just going to assume this topic is pointless.

What you say here makes it sound like your advocating for suicide. Have you any idea how much crap has happened in real life because of that? We're not even sure if there's an afterlife, and you'd encourage something like letting people jump to their deaths?

You know, I was pretty calm until I read this. WHERE THE FUCK. DO YOU GET OFF. PUTTING WORDS IN MY MOUTH?

You've been doing it in every exchange we've had, and I'm fucking sick of it. I didn't say I advocate suicide, I called you out on your utterly un-thought out bullshit claim that 'Nobody can want to die.' I proved that yes, someone can indeed want to die. I NEVER FUCKING SAID 'Hooray, suicide!'

Shut the fuck up. I know I just got on to someone in another 'Point topic for getting angry, but this is an insult directed at me, and I'm pissed and tired of your bullshit.

[Drasiana]

goodness gracious what happened

What, exactly, is this topic supposed to be about? All I got out of it was "Why do people think Duke Nukem is a misogynist?" That question was answered and I got a tactful response of a video saying "you need to shut the fuck up".

Glad to see we're making progress here.

[Redeemer]

Oh for christ's sake, calm down. Reynard, that was pretty damn rude of you, AC, your people skills need work. Telling everyone to "shut it" is just asking for trouble. Xort, let's take this to PM and not in this thread, yeah? I'ma start dishing out warnings next.

[Vulvokunvrii]

Sorry Redeemer, i didnt quite mean to make seem rude. I apologise to you and everyone perticpating in th topic.

[Vy'drach]

What you say here makes it sound like your advocating for suicide. Have you any idea how much crap has happened in real life because of that? We're not even sure if there's an afterlife, and you'd encourage something like letting people jump to their deaths? Wanting something is nothing compared to needing something.

Nobody NEEDS to die, it just happens anyway because we get too old or sick.

Xort didn't advocate suicide, and there's a difference between suicide and choosing a painful death over a faster, easier one.

Let's take the Chestburster from Alien. Thing grows up inside your chest, and when it gets large enough, it chews its way out, causing a slow, bloody, painful death. Now in the time when the movies take place, it's possible to cryogenically freeze the person, and remove the embryo through surgery, but that's then. In today's time, no such thing exists, though it would be possible I imagine to remove it from surgery, you'd have to get there soon enough, as it takes the embryo less than a day or so to develop, and there is a defense mechanism of causing amnesia about the impregnation, so you'd have to get there within a day without even knowing you need the surgery. But let's say you do know you've been impregnated by one, and there's no way to have it surgically removed. You can either die like this:

*WARNING* Very bloody.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuapyExYJBI

Or die in a less painful way, that potentially doesn't spawn an Alien that could kill everyone around you, if not the entire planet. Personally, I'd take my head off with a shotgun, as I can all but guarantee you won't feel that, and tell anyone around me to put a round or two in my chest to make sure the little fucker dies.

[ARWINGCOMMANDER 3987]

That still doesn't justify burning my head off for misinterpreting what somebody else said.

[Redeemer]

If we want to discuss suicide and assisted suicide, make another topic about it, okay?

[Vy'drach]

That still doesn't justify burning my head off for misinterpreting what somebody else said.

Who is that directed towards, because I didn't "burn anyone's head off."

And it's a bit relevant to this because it started with Duke killing girls that wanted to die, and would of killed themselves if they could, because they had been raped by aliens and were going to die a painful death giving birth to alien spores or some such.

Granted you could also kill girls just standing there, but it made that a very bad idea when you turned around after that, and saw that it spawned five pig cops per girl you killed.

[ARWINGCOMMANDER 3987]

If we want to discuss suicide and assisted suicide, make another topic about it, okay?

I normally wouldn't make a thread about suicide anyway because it makes me too uncomfortable.

[Xortberg]

That still doesn't justify burning my head off for misinterpreting what somebody else said.

How the fuck could you misinterpret "Yes, it's possible to want to die" with "GO SUICIDE! KILL YOURSELF, EVERYONE!" You've put words in my mouth in every single exchange we've had, and every time it's been so you could make me look like the bad guy. There's no way you're that stupid that it's just happening accidentally, and I'm sick of it.

I don't even give a fuck if I get warned for this. I'm sick of your crap.

[Redeemer]

Last time, calm down or I lock this.

[Vy'drach]

OT, but I just noticed your slightly different avatar as I read your post, Red, and the expression went with the message perfectly.

[Redeemer]

OT, but I just noticed your slightly different avatar as I read your post, Red, and the expression went with the message perfectly.

OT again, but yeah, haha. It already made someone double take, hehe. And I think it's a good mod face! :D

[Vy'drach]

Definitely looks like a face you don't want to mess with.

[Redeemer]

:3

[ARWINGCOMMANDER 3987]

^

Just like Nukem.

Duke: *rips off an alien's head and shits down the throat* I'm a man of my word. *opens up a newspaper*

[Vy'drach]

That scene is what cemented him in my list of favourite and most bad-ass characters ever.

[ARWINGCOMMANDER 3987]

I was drawn to Duke Nukem by the theme song introduced in Duke Nukem 3D.

[Faisul]

What's funny about this, is that the idea of bikini-clad women getting violated and impregnated by aliens who then beg for deliverance from an unimaginably painful and gory death from a wise-cracking, gun-toting walking steroid stereotype seems to me to be completely out of place in the kind of videogame the developers were trying to make.

I mean, sure, it's the 90's, Doom came out five or six years previous, and Duke Nukem fills a niche in that it's not only filled with oodles of violence and 3-D action like Doom, it also has the advantage of being full of scatological and endearingly juvenile humour to draw a crowd. There's aliens getting their heads kicked off through a football goal, Duke heals himself by pissing in a pissoir, hilarious and manly stuff. There's also scantily clad women to be rescued, which is par for the course for this kind of game.

Where Duke Nukem really starts to disturb me is the lengths which the developers went to put girls in what can only be described as brutal situations. There's the aforementioned alien impregnation, being eaten alive in some sort of alien bird's nest, and all along they are completely at the mercy of Duke's whims, or the player, or whatever. From a narrative standpoint, the body-horror and gore would make a great Carpenter movie, but what really puts it out of place is the fact that the Duke Nukem games are for dudes that likes fart jokes and boobs and shooting aliens, and if there was just fart jokes and boobs and shooting aliens in the games, that'd be entirely okay - but there's also women being raped and tortured in them. It may not be explicitly displayed, but it is excplicitly implied, and it just doesn't fit the overall tone of the games. It's just really, really nasty.

Sure, you can rescue the babes, or blow their heads off. It's the same kind of do or don't thing that was present in the infamous airport level of MW2, which was interesting and certainly made you think about, you know, something else than killing russians and arabs for about ten minutes. But the bottom line is that if you have a goofy game about a muscular dude being a dude and doing totally dudular stuff, something is inherently wrong if the girls in this radically whimsical dudular adventure are actually being violated in manners even a raptor would be ashamed of. What I'm trying to say is that the Duke may not be a misogynist, but the series itself most certainly is, or was. While the disturbing rape and maim stuff was only a minor part of these games, it was still there, and it represented an attitude towards the female sex that can only be described as misogynist. I completely neglected to mention the fact that guys were being smashed, eaten, raped and beaten to a pulp in the same games, but I like disagreeing with people so I will ignore that part just to construct a complex straw man argument that will lead to nowhere but further impenetrable walls of text with no punctuation for you to wind through with no end in sight. Yes, that was a sentence. No, I'm not drunk.

I like Duke, he's a fun character, it's just a shame that the babes are brainless trophies noodling about with no purpose other than to be saved or suffer an unimaginably gruesome death because hey, the player doesn't like redheads or something. I don't think Duke needs defending, but the old games certainly don't deserve a defense. They're just bad, and not in the Michael Jackson cool kind of way. I have no idea about the recent game, only that it's mediocre. Whatever misogynist content there is there, I haven't seen any, nor have I heard much ruckus about it, so I guess it isn't present. Which is a huge improvement. Too bad it's still not a good game.

[ARWINGCOMMANDER 3987]

^

Thank you very much for your input, and welcome to Star Fox-Online. ^^

[Faisul]

Christ, is this Star Fox Online? I thought I was posting on the Post-Dadaist Pop Culture Commentaries forum.

[Vy'drach]

Well in Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes, Duke was dead, as was every other man on Earth, and it was the babes kicking ass, until they decided to go back in time and get the one man who has kicked the most alien bastard ass, Duke Nukem (probably didn't hurt that he was apparently the manliest hunk of man to ever exist, either).

And there's lots of games that sound worse than they actually are if you analyze them to such a level. Let's take Mario, for example. You're stomping on creatures in an effort to get your girlfriend back from the clutches of an evil dragonturtle who is hell-bent on making her his wife, and you drop him in a pit of lava multiple times through that. In Super Mario 2, you have to deal with a transsexual creature named Birdo, that is a male that wears a pretty pink bow, and spits eggs out of his "mouth" at you. In Super Mario World, you have to drop Bowser's children (one of them being Birdo it turns out), in pits of lava, then demolishing their castle on top of their charred bodies.

[Faisul]

I'm actually fairly convinced that beneath the thin veneer of colourful, playful adventure, Super Mario is in reality the story of the Mushroom Kingdom's demented, drug-addled totalitarian ruler's cruel and random acts of murder, kidnapping, and vicious intruige. /fakepost

I actually don't disagree with you on that videogames can be analyzed to a ridiculous extent, and I've heard people make the above interpretation many times. Which is kind of silly, I mean, Super Mario? Really? I do think that it isn't a stretch to say what I did about the old Duke games though, you may not see much of the nastiness on-screen, but it was pretty heavily implied in a really creepy off-hand manner. Land of the Babes was hilarious and a pretty cool exception to the rule though, kind of like a Heavy Metal adventure with chainmail bikinis and mountains of cheesecake.

Birdo terrifies me though.

[Vy'drach]

Perhaps, but it's not the worst, take the DOOM 64 game, for example. I imagine there are women on that station you start out on, or were, rather. You don't see any other humans, closest thing is the zombified marines, and yet there are often hunks of meat in various states of damage. One of the most common to see is what appears to be a human torso, still alive somehow, with a bite out of the side of its ribcage, attempting to flail a stump of an arm. But honestly, I have no idea what it actually is, past a hunk of what is supposed to be a human, still attempting to move, and there's other ones like it.

Granted it doesn't explicitly state that those are women, but it's not much of a stretch to assume they are, and as for Duke, he seems to value women a lot more than he would a man, so the aliens messing with his babes as much more likely to get him seeking vengeance more than harming men. Granted I'm sure he'd still kill the aliens if they invaded and harmed only the men, but not as spectacularly.

And the original Splatterhouse had something similar, as on one level you walk down a hallway strewn with bodies, usually torn apart or impaled on sharp instruments, most of them women.