Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

Its hard to trust a humorless judgement of humor.

While I haven't played the game myself, I'd like to point out to the author of the article that if attempting to describe why a something isn't funny, the best weapon in your arsenal would be humor, not simply sticking up your nose in disgust (though one could mix that in).

That said, a lot of the jokes in the game sound pretty straightforwardly shitty and weird. However I'm trying to imagine the author describing a Louis CK comedy set, a dirty comic I find hilarious, and I'm fairly sure he could ruin that in short order, so I'll hold off on my judgements.

View on HN

There's a difference between witty but offensive, and just offensive for offensive sake. Just being offensive is juvenile humor, and isn't all that funny. I can watch some comedians stand on stage and say a bunch of things that make me think, 'I can't believe he just said that', but I'll be laughing the entire time. Or I can watch a movie that just plays one poop joke after another and not laugh once. His review sounds like he thinks the game is the latter. I don't see how you can extropolate from that to 'the reviewer has no sense of humor'.

What gives me the impression of "humourlessness" is that he condemns jokes based on what they're about rather than whether they're funny.

For instance, he tells us that Duke blows up some pregnant women and then makes a joke about abortion. And I agree, that's pretty darn offensive. But is it funny? We don't know, the reviewer doesn't tell us the punchline.

I've watched a couple of videos and it looks like there's a few funny bits. Heck, even Duke signing a copy of his book "Why I'm So Great" to get extra health seems like it could be chuckle-worthy.

Maybe I don't 'Get' this game either, but the examples he cites just don't sound funny. The label on a carton of cigarettes is 'faggs'? That's not funny, it's not original, and it's not creative.

Sure, that is an offensive word, but that's not my problem with it. I was practically in tears laughing at a Tosh.0 skit the other night that was basically a 5 minute long gay joke. But it was witty and original. Just saying the word hasn't been edgy or made me laugh since about the 6th grade.

I'm not saying we should ban this game. But I do think there is a very big difference between the reviewer not liking this kind of comedy and the reviewer being humorless. I love comedy, I pay to see live standup all the time, practically the only things on my DVR are comedy, but I would never buy this game. Their 'funny' and my 'funny' are two entirely different things.

Have you played it?

Well said. Matt Stone and Trey Parker have mastered this offensive-yet-witty thing (this last season of South Park, notwithstanding). They should've taken a cue from those two on how to put together the humor.

I think that people who played Duke3d remember one of two things: badass non-stop action and a lack of bubblegum, or fantastically misogynistic humor. He clearly falls into the former category. However, even with this I fail to see how he can think it's that far off Duke3d in its humor. It was always toilet humor, we're all just older now...

I am currently playing Duke3D and no, it is not a game reduced to that. It has varied explorative(!) levels with humor tacked on, eg a poster here, a monster on the toilet there, a vocal sample by Duke later. There were strippers in the first map but not anymore so far (5th map now).

> we're all just older now

This is it. I think people don't realize they've grown up and what they found funny when playing DN as a child is simply not funny anymore. After all kids are easily amused.

That and the fact that the racy humor was more of a novelty in 1996, when most FPS were in the Doom sci-fi vein of 'stoic hero shoots his way through alien/monster/etc wasteland'. Ten GTA games later, nothing really shocks us anymore.

I totally agree with this. The article really put me off by beginning with outright moralizing. By all means, tell me the game isn't fun to play. Tell me it's all corridors and cutscenes. Tell me it's slow and buggy. Those are things I care about. I definitely don't need to hear anybody's opinion about whether the tasteless humor is the acceptable kind of tasteless humor, or the unacceptable kind that makes fans of it "wrong". And you can clearly see that the author knows he shouldn't be doing this, since he doth spend an entire paragraph protesting too much about how it's totally his place to do this.

Speaking of the morality in DNF this strip sums it up nicely. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/3/23/

I'd suggest you play the demo before sticking with how you're describing the article.

I'm a fan of nearly all types of comedy and don't mind the mindless, 'tasteless' humor types. That said, the demo was tasteless AND unfunny. Considering Gearbox and 2K's recent track record, it's not too surprising -- they've been relatively mediocre at best lately.

Hey, I can believe that the game sucks in a painfully humorless way, never said it didn't. I'm just talking about the writing style of the article. If it was that unfunny, there should have been plenty of material in the article for the author to riff on.

As is, he sounds like a straight laced bore.

Agreed such a terrible review.

I mean his first reaction was to kill the women - and then shout down the game for it - considering they explode exactly 5 seconds after the dialogue ends, so yeah, really tried to avoid that huh..

http://youtu.be/bbGihyEoOy8

How the hell did he miss that? It actually takes three seconds from "we'll get the weight off, we swear" to them screaming end exploding.

Also, my favorite bit:

"Duke, what's happening to us?"

"Looks like you're... awkward pause fucked."

If that's any indication, I completely sympathize with the reviewer.

Yeah, because we need more over-the-top game "writing".

Criticizing a game review primarily because it's not funny seems like a non-sequiter to me.

Gearbox didn't make the game, just took the existing almost-finished version that 3D Realms abandoned and polished it as much as they could.

The "Quick"look on Giant Bomb is a nice overview over some of the levels for people who want to see more than the demo. http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-duke-nukem-forever/17-43...

For those who don't have the 50min to watch it. Both of the guys commentating don't like the game at all. It's supposed to be boring and archaic, and then there's the lazy humor...

Considering Gearbox and 2K's recent track record, it's not too surprising -- they've been relatively mediocre at best lately

I thought Borderlands was fantastic. It can be a grind at times, but it's a really well done FPS-as-RPG. The four-player co-op was icing on the cake.

I'm waiting for Yahtzee to rip into it. He has a knack for separating the merely pedestrian from the truly terrible. If he can't laugh at DNF, there's a good chance I won't be able to, either.

There's nothing to laugh at. It's just bad. Offensive is besides the point, that's how bad it is. Humour used to be ancillary, now the shooting is so bad, the design feels haphazard and the whole thing is so linear that self-references and unfunny shit are front and center. It's rather embarrassing.

Yeah, as I was reading the review, I was willing to give the game a rent despite Kuchera's complaints about the comedy.

But when he started going on about the checkpoints, health, shooting, chopping, loading and level design... my willingness evaporated.

Quite. My reaction to reading the Ars Tech article was 'I need a second opinion' followed by checking Zero Punctuation to see if a video was up yet.

If you are looking for a ZP review a genuine one isn't up as of this exact minute - there is a review of DNF on the site but it's a 'tribute' of sorts from September 2010. I look forward to Yahtzee's take on the real thing.

The DNF review was done as a "viewer's choice" piece, and was, ironically, released shortly before it was announced that Gearbox would finish DNF.

How about this?

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/reviews/3541-Top...

The game has a 50% on Metacritic, so I'm personally reluctant to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I still like it. I think that authors were a bit too "politically correct) if anything. I actually like the scripted nature of the game and on PC its atmosphere is awesome (to me OFC).

I also liked the fact that this is one of few FPS's that actually got me killed a couple of times lately.

Most judgements of humor are humorless. You don't say something isn't funny to get a laugh.

I think you're really missing out the second paragraph from that review.

Ugh, I hate it when people ignore their comedic ineptitude just because they happen to be discussing involving comedy. I much rather this article over an unintentional cringe-fest because they author decided to venture into comedy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com