If I must have a complaint it is this - the enemies are at times a little, shall we say, thick. Because everybody (including Duke) holds their weapon in their right hand, you can often position yourself at a corner so that your gun can fire around the corner and hit them, but they can only shoot harmlessly into the wall. I know it works in your favour, and it can be very useful indeed, but I found it irritating all the same. Especially when it happened with one of the usually fearsome mid-level bosses. And there's also the ever-so-slight flaw of not being able to see things properly when you look over a ledge or a bridge or something, but it's nothing to get worked up about, as all first person action games still suffer this problem.

What many people will get worked up about is the way Duke has been treated by our moral guardians - the Office of Film & Literature Classification. All copies of the game sold in the country will have the Parental Lock permanently ON. What this means is that, unlike the shareware version, the full game has no blood, no gore, no women tied to phallic objects or depicted half-naked on posters or film. What you see instead are nice explosions when the monsters die and little puffs of smoke when they get shot, while all the pictures of the girls are covered by black boxes. In fact, the game actually treats them as still being there - you can walk into the dancing girls and offer them money, for example, you just cannot see them. The exclusion of all this doesn't detract from your enjoyment of the game (the dying girls moaning "Kill me" was always slightly disturbing and pretty gratuitous), but it is hardly the point. Even more disturbing is the OFLC's, and others, attitude toward games and games-players, an subject we will address in another issue of PC Power Play.

Bearing all this in mind however, I think it would still be fair to say that Duke is the best straightforward 3D shoot 'em up you can get. Although I personally prefer Terminator's more thoughtful approach, I am sure I'll be loading Duke for many months to come just for that unbeatably intense and exhilarating kick it provides. Quake will undoubtedly be an even better, though a different sort of game but it isn't here yet. Duke Nukem 3D is - and it is fantastic.

DW