The year was 1997, and I'd just begun writing about video games professionally. Like most of my fellow gamers, I was pretty excited when 3D Realms announced that it was working on a sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, the runaway PC hit that it had released just a year before. At my first E3, a year later, I saw the game running for the first time. Now, just as my 14th E3 has come and gone, I'm sitting at my computer having finally played the finished Duke Nukem Forever. Yet it feels like I'm still in 1998.

That's because DNF is, for better but mostly worse, perpetually stuck in the late 1990s. For all the delaying, the stalling, the drama surrounding the game, it's tough to say if any part of it has actually benefitted from the more than a decade of development. What has, at long last, been committed to a disc and placed into a box might have been alright a dozen years ago, but by today's standards it simply doesn't hold up.