Al jaren lang zijn er games die de titel Vaporware mogen dragen, titels die zo genaamd super moesten worden en na vele malen te zijn uitgesteld dan eindelijk verschijnen en fookin crap zijn. De website Topless Robot was zo aardig om deze lijst met vijf van deze titels te maken en de daar staat TERECHT ook de onderstaande game op:

3) Duke Nukem Forever

It's amazing to think that the recently released, and much maligned title, Duke Nukem Forever was in development for so long. First announced in 1997, back when most of us had just upgraded to the first Pentium computer processor and 3-D graphics card were in their infancy, 3D Realms (the original developer) promised more of the mayhem, massacres, and misogyny that the first 3-D Duke game delivered. After a few setback and missed release dates, 3D Realms gave its customers the exact answer they did NOT want to hear: The game will be done when it is done. That was in 2001, and that was the last word gamers got regarding Duke until late 2007 when a new teaser trailer was released. Of course, this digital cocktease was all that we got for six years of silence, and Duke quickly went underground again, with no further updates until 2009 when the Duke Nukem development team was downsized.

Legal battles ensued between 3D Realms and Take-Two Interactive, the company who held distribution rights for the game, until finally, in September of 2010, 2K Games announced that Duke Nukem Forever was back on the drawing boards, now being developed by Gearbox Studios. It was then announced that the game would be released in May of 2011. As we got closer to May though, a special announcement video was released from Gearbox. As the president of the company talked about the impending shipment of the game that people thought was never going to be completed, someone walks behind him and yet again changes the date, delaying the game for another month, obviously poking fun at the development history of the title, and letting everyone know that "Duke never comes early."

Of course, Duke eventually did come, and 14 years of development paid off with a very lackluster game. The gameplay felt dated, very similar to Duke Nukem 3D from a decade past, complete with crappy controls and numerous jumping puzzles. Its attempts at humor are both juvenile and misogynistic, and while I don't mind juvenile humor, the entire script seems like it was written by 6th grade boys. While Duke is not particularly a sympathetic character in any incarnation, scenes of him mercy-killing topless, alien-impregnated strippers isn't so wrong it's funny, it's just wrong. Nudity abounds, and while I generally don't shy away from that, the nudity is presented without any purpose or direction, like the "wall boobs" decorating the hall ways of dungeons. It seems that a level designer decided to randomly throw breasts in the scenery as filler.

To be fair though, the odds were stacked against the final developers. The expectations the gaming public had were astronomical, with Duke being almost a digital Messiah, when in fact the original Duke 3D was a pretty much average game, with an above average amount of humor for its time. It's doubtful that anything Gearbox put out would have satisfied the appetites of Duke fans, but one thing is for certain, the taste it left in the mouths of most gamers was bittersweet.