PixlBit

Weird month for me. My weekend is Tuesday and Thursday, so I added a half day after work today in anticipation of Thursday. I played one game for Microsoft rewards points, a second for Game Pass rewards points and then another randomly chosen game. I'm really enjoying the randomly rolled games. I love not knowing what's going to be next. 

Skul: The Hero Slayer: MS Rewards sometimes has a top ten game list challenge. They want you to play one of the ten games listed and get an achievement. I chose Skul because it looked graphically interesting. It's a Metroidvania. You are a skeleton that swings a bone and throws his skull. You traverse platforms in 2D and fight enemies. The story is humorous and the gameplay challenging but not unfair. It reminds me of a Genesis game called Decap Attack I played once. Anyway, I played until an achievement unlocked and then until I got tired of being killed, which was once, because I don't like game-over screens. In any case, it is pretty good. 

Injustice 2: A monthly Game Pass Rewards game. I played it several times before for Game Pass Rewards. Microsoft seems to like using this game for Game Pass Rewards a lot. However, fighting games aren't my thing. I like to explore game worlds, not stay in one place fighting, but this game is pretty fantastic. It looks great, the DC heroes have crazy super moves and play really fast, and have complex actions. I am always seriously tempted to play longer than the 3 victories the challenge asked of me, but I'd rather explore. 

Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour: I randomly rolled a console and got Sega Saturn. Then I rolled a 23 on GamesRadar's top 25 Saturn games list and got Duke Nukem 3D.

Back in the day, I knew of this Saturn port of Duke Nukem. The console ports to PS1 and N64 had some changes from the PC version like edits to reduce cut scenes, tone down the violence, and remove sexy content. The Saturn version, however, was pretty much unedited, which made my friend and I want it. I believe we did eventually acquire a Saturn and play it but we mostly played Duke Nukem on PS1 and N64 back then.

Rather than get a Saturn again, I downloaded the 20th anniversary edition I already owned on my Xbox Series S. I played through the first two scenarios. There were quite a lot of levels in each and it took me a good long while because I wanted to see everything again in detail. I remember the game being shorter but I'm sure that's not the case. I was surprised to find I remembered all the combinations for several doors I needed to unlock. I remembered quite a lot of the secrets too. The fighting got quite fierce and challenging, which made it really engaging.

I think the level design is quite good. The game is so similar to Doom in every way, but the level design stands out as maybe even better than Doom. Even though the levels are pretty complex in Duke Nukem, I rarely got lost like I sometimes do in Doom where areas in the game sometimes look a little too similar. 

It's odd, there is actually surprisingly little dialog in Duke Nukem. But everything Duke said was etched into my mind and has been repeated at game sessions every week for upwards of twenty years now.

I also remember the novelty of interacting with the environment back in the 90s in Duke Nukem. Flushing a toilet, interacting with a mirror, handing money to a dancer, shooting pool balls, these were all kind of new back then. How far we've come.