LameDuke

Welcome to Duke City from 1997, where everything went wrong. LameDuke is actually the precursor to Duke Nukem 3D — a prototype released by 3D Realms' creator before the legendary action shooter became a cult classic. And it's such a strange hybrid: you've got the already familiar surface of the famous game, but everything is unfinished, dilapidated, often just plain terrible.

In a nutshell, it's a first-person shooter in the style of Doom, but even back then they were tackling it with greater ambition in content and atmosphere. You're a mutated Duke moving through a futuristic city and some alien-infested locations. The goal is familiar: shoot everything that moves, collect health and ammo, try to survive. The game covers the basic genre requirements — it's an old-school proper shooter in the mid-nineties spirit.

But gameplay? That you'll have to excuse. The controls are stiff, movement across the map is sluggish and slow, shooting isn't satisfying. The weapons fire with barely a spark, enemies behave stupidly and predictably, and worst of all — the levels are bland and chaotically designed. You can feel this is a working draft, a hack of code where the creator was testing ideas and visibly searching for what it should look like. The graphics are rough, devoid of the spirit that Shadow later brought out.

Today I play it mainly out of historical curiosity — I want to see how far removed the first attempt was from the finished Duke Nukem 3D. It's an enlightening comparison. This game clearly shows you how much work went into the classic, how much was fine-tuned, reworked, and improved. Play it for fun? Don't bother. It's more of a museum piece — a relic you'll load up in the browser for a moment, take a look at how it used to be, then return to the Duke that's actually worth your time.