I recently obtained a copy of Duke Nukem 3D. It’s kind of odd to go from games that contain that throw around bloom lighting and shinny fully rendered graphics to a game that’s sprite based. It’s a good thing though that how fun a game is isn’t based on graphics.

And Duke Nukem is fun, as are the original doom games. It’s hard to explain why they are still fun given how old they are. You would think that given the amount of FPS I have played that use what made Doom and Nukem revolutionary as expected standard content I would have grown board of pretty quickly. But I haven’t. I was thinking about it pretty hard and I think the reason I still find the games difficult is that the level designs are hard to guess.

With most current games you just sort of run forward and the game tells you turn left or right, but in Doom and Nukem you have to have to choose which way in the forked road you are going to go first. Hell you need to find keys to open doors, I don’t know of FPS made in the last year that requires you to find a verity of colourful keys to progress in the game.

Once you know your way through each of the levels then it does become pretty easy, and rather boring and tiresome, but when you haven’t played the game in years and having been playing games that hold your hand throughout the whole game it can be pretty tricky. Some of the levels to wards the end of the game do get a little over the top frustrating, and once you have run around the map for the twentieth time it does get rather annoying.

So I think you have to have a very careful balance, you have to make the levels challenging yet logical enough that a player will be able to work out where they need to go/what they have to do in order to progress.