The Hive - One of the Worst Things Ever?

I just started playing Duke Nukem Forever yesterday. Yeah, I know, I'm way behind everyone else. I refused to pay any more than $5 for this game (and achieved this goal thanks to the Steam sale going on now) but I knew that I needed to play through it, knowing its long and storied history. I decided to throw it into my Steam Roundup because it managed to fit in alphabetical order as I was proceeding.

Now, I've seen bit and pieces of this game before, mostly from one of Giant Bomb's well-known Quick Looks. It is one of the areas that I saw in this gameplay video that I want to talk about today - The Hive. Yes, some of you may remember the comments about this section of the game back around its release and I'm finally getting my two cents in. I didn't want to say anything until I had actually played through the section.

Watching The Hive level being played by someone else was enough to make me disgusted and I was dreading my own play of it. I can't really say it was any worse than what I had already seen but remembering just how bad it is is enough. For those of you who don't know, Duke Nukem is all about saving the babes from the alien threat. That's what he did in Duke 3D and that's what he's doing now. Now, it's been taken to a gross, unseemly place in Duke Nukem Forever.

In this level, you find the women that have been kidnapped and see what has become of them. They have been impregnated with alien seed and are left stuck to the ground in some sort of half-cocoon things, topless. Throughout the level, you can hear them crying for help and begging to go home. Some of them start to burst apart with their alien babies later in the level.

Now, so far, you may be wondering why this is such a bad thing. In fact, if this had been the extent of the level, I might have felt alright about the whole thing or my disgusted feelings would have been justified. The problem lies within Duke Nukem himself.

As he walks through the level, he comments on what he's saying. Sure, some of his lines are sorrowful (or as sorrowful as Duke Nukem ever sounds). It is the others that made me entirely angry with the developers for writing such godawful and demeaning lines. The two I can recall are "Why do they always take the hot ones?" and the egregious "You're fucked." Upon hearing these lines, I felt a sharp lance of fury for the developers' seeming inability to let the gravity of the situation fall into place. Without Duke's smarm, it would have been a good moment or at least a decent one. It's his comments that make the whole thing disgusting.

I'm going to keep playing through as I feel that I have to at this point. I just hope that The Hive was the worst part and that it is now behind me...