Duke Nukem Forever

At one point he has to hop out and negotiate stacks of chips, bouncy cushions (SiN! Lest we forget!) and roulette tables ("Always bet on Duke...") to get to the release switch for a metal shutter door.

Having reached safety and a particle device that returns him to his normal stature, aliens descend through the glass ceiling and - following a hairy encounter and the expenditure of a lot of shotgun shells - make off with the Holsom Twins.

Duke, as you can imagine, is incensed. "Not my babes! Not in my town!" He fights his way back through the casino (giving you a normal-sized take on the sections he ravaged in his toy car) and rendezvouses with Graves, who tells him the aliens are heading for the Hoover dam. "Screw the dam. Where are they taking our chicks?"

The EDF forces furnish Duke with a Ripper (the three-barrelled machinegun from Duke Nukem 3D) and some power armour ("Power armour is for pussies," Duke explains as he walks past the Master Chief's unmistakeable green and black helmet).

From here it's a battle through streets heaped with abandoned cars and buses (abandoned, perhaps, due to their low detail levels) and onto a showdown with the Battlelord - a three-storey armoured Rancor impersonator with a machinegun and a mortar cannon.

Having decimated its health bar with RPGs, Duke finishes the Battlelord by ripping a spike out of its head and shoving it through its eye, before dropping to the ground and speed-bagging the monster's testicles for a final humiliation. Fade to black.

Before we sit down with the game, Randy Pitchford tells us that it's nearly finished, but that around 3500 issues are still lurking in the database waiting to be solved. Unless one of them is "overhaul graphics engine", I'm afraid none of them is going to make Duke Nukem Forever feel like a modern videogame.

(It is worth noting that when I speak to him afterwards, Pitchford is incensed when I say I think the game looks outdated, and makes a good defence of its visuals and the trade-offs the studio has made to ensure the experience delivers what 3D Realms intended. Look out for that interview soon for more.)

It's also possible that the playable demo promised to buyers of the Borderlands Game of the Year Edition will backfire, as it reveals to uneducated gamers curious about this impossibly long-awaited first-person shooter that the impossibly long wait has been for something sired by and locked into a 13-year-old design mentality.

Duke Nukem Forever's release will not be a Half-Life 2 moment - when the majesty of Valve's creation suddenly justified the endless delays and broken promises. But while it is old fashioned, unashamedly brash and ridiculous, and full of comically daft one-liners, it also emerges at a convenient time: as an entire genre of unwitting dinosaurs stomps around in gigantic footsteps left by Call of Duty and Halo, Duke's lewd, unapologetic one-dimensionality and lowbrow thrills are points of distinction.

You may laugh uncomfortably at the borderline sexism, and you may log onto a forum occasionally to make fun of the graphics, but the ageing ideas and references that date the game also give it a sense of history and belonging.

And when your morbid curiosity about this 13-year-old game eventually dissipates, the chances are you will look back on the experience with amusement and a certain amount of affection. And if not? It is safe to say the Duke will not lose sleep - although whether he will be back is another story.