Duke Nukem 3D

Graphically, the game has aged fairly well. You can smooth out the pixels if you like playing through a smear of Vaseline, but apart from some disorientating quirks of perspective when you look up or down while moving, it still looks solid and free from any major visual snags. The sprites look odd, essentially 2D characters in a polygon world that rotate to face you at all times. The effect can be distracting, but for a game caught between the old and the new, evolving the genre as it went, some technical mismatching was unavoidable.

The good news is that it still plays as well as it did in 1996, with the deliberately puerile attitude and humour doing much to make up for any creaky moments. It's notable that of all the games that tried to copy Nukem's approach - games like Postal and Redneck Rampage - none were able to compete on gameplay. They all had to become more scatological to compensate. Levels often boast several paths to success, and the addition of a jetpack and scuba gear to your inventory frees you up to explore in ways that other shooters could never offer. Some levels fall into the old FPS trap of poor signposting, leaving you dashing around empty areas, looking for the door or button you've somehow missed along the way, but for the most part the level design is still worthy of praise for its ideas and execution.

New to this version is the option to respawn at any point in your game. Unlike Prince of Persia, or other time-rewinding games, this isn't an ability you can call upon at will. It only kicks in when you die, and the game suggests a restart point based on your performance. You can take control and drop back into the game at any moment from when you started, however, so if you feel you need more health and ammo to get past a troublesome section, you can head further back and play more carefully.

It sounds like a cop-out, and it's certainly true that progress now relies more heavily on perseverance than pure skill. It's also a necessary evil, because Duke Nukem 3D is often a horribly unfair game, with a sadistic habit of dropping enemies silently behind you, or triggering massive deadly explosions when you innocently stroll past a certain point. Trial and error is key to survival, so the rewind function ends up acting more like a surrogate quicksave than a built-in cheat system.

There's also online play, which hasn't aged as well as the solo game. Dukematch is the multiplayer fragfest mode, supporting up to eight players, but I've been unable to find any matches that weren't reduced to the level of farce by lag and an archaic deathmatch system. Circle-strafing around flickering, disappearing sprites, shooting wildly in the hope of earning a kill, is just not much fun. The co-op mode fares slightly better, allowing eight players to rampage around the levels in story mode, against a constantly respawning army of enemies. It's not really a co-operative experience - the game doesn't have the strategic depth to justify such manoeuvres - so you really just rush about killing dozens of bad guys until someone reaches the end of the level. Fun, but not something worth returning to that often.