Duke Nukem Forever carries fourteen years of baggage, packed with a gameplay ethos from a bygone era -- so very, very gone by. After playing through the first couple hours of Duke Nukem Forever, it's clear to me that this is a project ripped out of time; an amalgam of ideas that's difficult to separate into the new and the old. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford told me that finishing Forever is about completing the vision of the original design.

DNF is sort of like the movie A.I., where Steven Spielberg picked up an unfinished Stanley Kubrick project, and in the end you couldn't really tell where one's vision began and the other's ended. That's DNF, like a game of telephone, or a (really slow) relay race, or a dish prepared by a line of chefs, each adding an ingredient to the recipe along the way. The end result of DNF may be tasty, but it's visibly crowd-sourced by several eras of game design.

Somehow DNF still comes out an authentic followup, exuding the blatant -- and, by some accounts, even delightful -- immaturity of its predecessor. If you came of age with Duke Nukem 3D, then you're probably going to have to suspend some years of maturation to enjoy DNF. I'd say it could even be a sort of bonding experience if you've got your own teens now, but then they probably hate your guts, and even if they don't, it would be excruciatingly embarrassing to play DNF with them.