Duke's in his development Hell, all's right with the world

In news that seems almost aggressive in how utterly unsurprising it is, plans for a fan-made but officially authorized remake of Duke Nukem 3-D are now on indefinite hold.

This comes as sort of a relief. Not, I hasten to add, because of any antipathy towards the guys behind the Duke Nukem 3-D: Reloaded, or towards fans of the game that were hoping to play the remake, or- I should hope it goes without saying- towards His Grace personally. It's just that the universe is back in balance now.

Gearbox's success (for a certain value of “success”) in actually making and releasing Duke Nukem Forever shattered one of the fundamental law of  nature, without which a comprehensible or even coherent universe would become impossible. Nothing can travel faster than light. The combined internal angles of a triangle on a two-dimensional plane always equal 180°. The Chicago Cubs will not win the World Series. And, last but by no means least, the next first-person Duke Nukem game is always trapped in an endless series of production delays from which it is doomed to never escape, forever bound in unbreakable adamantine chains of iron and copper and abandoned code made unusable by engine changes. And yet, somehow, back in June, Duke Nukem Forever actually came out.

But now the natural order reasserts itself, and the world makes sense again.

Planned Duke Nukem game suffers unexpected setback; in other news, water still wet

It seems that the planned Duke Nukem game for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS, Duke Nukem: Critical Mass, isn't going to be happening after all. Gearbox, which acquired the rights to Duke Nukem from 3D Realms back in September, has apparently pulled the plug on the handheld system spin-off, which was being developed by Frontline Studios. Gearbox is reportedly still still going ahead with its plans to release Duke Nukem Forever next year, though if the 13-year history of Duke Nukem Forever's development is any guide there will soon be another indefinite delay when the head of the project decides to scrap everything to start over on a different engine, or the programmers are abducted for ransom by Columbian guerrillas, or a meteorite flattens Gearbox headquarters, or whatever.

What would have been Duke Nukem: Critical Mass will instead be released in modified, de-Duked form under the title Extraction Point: Alien Shootout, which has to be one of the most aggressively bland names for a video game since the days of Combat and Adventure on the Atari 2600. It sounds like it should be shelved alongside those generic boxes of cereal that characters on sitcoms eat when the network doesn't want to use a real brand name. They may as well have just called it Military Terminology: Science Fiction Violence.

Is anyone actually surprised by this turn of events? It's Duke Nukem, a subject I've had occasion to mention here before. If history teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that there will always be some sort of complication for anyone foolish enough to defy the natural order and actually attempt to release a new Duke Nukem game. We're talking about a franchise whose flagship sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, has been in development hell since 1997, roughly two-thirds of the character's entire existence. The franchise has spent those 13 years under nigh-perpetual siege, endlessly afflicted by legal battles, staff turnover, missed release dates, massive financial losses, wrathful angels with flaming swords leading plagues of locusts, etc.

I just wonder why the Duke Nukem series became this way, afflicted by enough misfortune to kill any other series several times over and yet seemingly unable to die. Did someone involved in the production of Duke Nukem 3D defile an ancient Egyptian tomb? Did 3D Realms raise the capital to make Duke Nukem Forever by selling bones looted from Indian burial grounds? Did the whole staff take take a trip to New Orleans, get drunk during Mardi Gras, and run into an old cemetary yelling, "Voodoo is total bullshit, and may the angry ghost of Marie Laveau afflict me with some sort of horrible voodoo curse if I'm wrong?" It must be something.

A gun-toting, steroid-addled boy's best friend is his mother...

Scott Miller, cofounder of 3D Realms, has said that the next few years will bring a “strong resurgence” in the Duke Nukem franchise, and insisted that Duke Nukem Forever is still not dead, despite the recent dismissal of the game's entire development team and the fact that the game has been in development hell since the McKinley administration.

You know, the way 3D Realms has spent the last 10+ years claiming that Duke Nukem Forever is still on its way used to be funny, but now it's just kind of sad. The level of denial being displayed here is starting to remind me of the way Norman Bates in the movie Psycho kept his mother's dessicated corpse in his house, dressed up in her clothes, and had imaginary conversations with himself in a raspy falsetto "old lady" voice so he could pretend she was still alive.

Best of luck to them, I suppose, even though at this point I expect the Daikatana franchise, the Confederate States of America, and the Serpent Men of Valusia to enjoy a resurgence long before Duke Nukem. Yes, I know it's impossible for the Serpent Men of Valusia to resurge, since they're fictional characters and never actually existed in the first place; they still have much better prospects.