You can treat this blog post as a placeholder for now, but yesterday James Brotheridge (friend to the Vigigames) and I were having a conversation about Duke Nukem Forever. I say this is a placeholder post because I haven't played it yet, but his question to me was, "how do game critics acknowledge the past in their reviews?" As he's a music/movie critic, he framed it to me like this: he wouldn't knock down a band's score just because they're heavily indebted to the 60s or anything, because endlessly pursuing modernism isn't really a requirement of music. In games, though, looking back (unless it's in an overtly retro way) is verboten. I'm guilty of this too, in some regards, though not in the same way most game critics are. If a game has solid design foundations, that's great – I don't care if they're retro or modern – but I'm also advocating for moving the genre forward.
Based on my own preconceptions, though, Duke Nukem Forever perhaps doesn't make for a great case study. It'd be like trying to glean some sort of overall impression of the entire history of music based solely on Chinese Democracy. Instead, what Duke Nukem Forever seems like is a game that shows the gears grinding every time its ancient design document rubs up against modern FPS contrivances. The FPS is most certainly not a timeless format, as concerned with spectacle as it is, but it was an interesting question that I didn't really have a good answer for. I hadn't had any inclination to play this game. Everything I've seen of it showed that the development team couldn't even capture what made Duke Nukem fun in the first place. Duke's one-liners weren't supposed to connect to any broader character, and basing a game around his boorish persona instead allowing him only enough time to say his pithy quips was a big mistake. Like I said, this is a game that was always going to be bad on its own merits. But that question of where gaming's past fits into its present is an interesting one.
Final note: James hit it on the head when he said that most video game reviewers are feature-obsessed, and if a game, like DNF, don't feature, um, features, they're liable to score far lower than feature rich games. I think we need quite a lot fewer product reviewers and a whole lot more game critics.