Duke Nukem tried something fresh back in the day, 26 years ago to be precise. Zero Hour dropped on the Nintendo 64 in 1999 as a third person shooter – and not just any third person shooter, but one with time travel, Victorian London levels and a Wild West showdown, all wrapped up in one. Critics thought it was okay, while fans largely gave it a miss. The game just sort of vanished from sight, stuck in that cartridge age, trapped behind ancient hardware. Well now a small team has dug it out from the ashes and rebuilt it, and its performance is a surprise to just about everyone.
This remake uses static recompilation – which just means that the guys fed the original North American ROM into a tool that translated every single line of 1999 code into something that a Windows, Mac or Linux machine can understand today. As soon as you point the launcher at it – and that’s literally just a matter of dropping the file in – the game starts loading up your assets from the ROM and gets going in native res.
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And it performs beautifully – load it up and you’ll see frame rates as high as your monitor can handle – 60, 120, 144 – whatever your display can handle without breaking a sweat. The terrain, the enemies, the scrolling textures all keep up. If you’re running a widescreen monitor then the picture will stretch out to fit it perfectly – and if you prefer, you can have HUD elements slide to the edges or be centered in 16:9 mode, up to you. The cutscenes might get a bit stretched on some ultrawide TVs, but who cares, really? For now, the mouse isn’t supported, so you’ll need to use a controller or keyboard instead. But the latency is so low that every button press feels like it’s happening exactly when you press it.
You can mess around with menus, tweak a few settings – change deadzones, flip the axes, cap the frame rate, that sort of thing. The audio settings let you control the volume of music and effects separately, and saves are stored in nice neat folders on your computer – nothing gets lost if you move the folder, and you can even carry the whole shebang on a USB stick.
Zero hour throws Duke through time so he can stop the aliens from bugging the timeline. You start in a dark future, then move on to the foggy streets of London, a dusty saloon or two, and even a nuclear reactor or three – and you’ve got all kinds of wacky weapons at your disposal, from dual pistols to a plasma cannon that turns bad guys into green gunk. You’ll need to keep an eye on health stations and armour pickups as you go along – survival depends on how fast you can respond. The story is a simple one – shoot, move, shoot again – but the variety of environments keeps the levels feeling fresh.
Ray tracing will come in a future update using the same engine that’s powering the graphics now. You’ll get higher polygon models and all – any graphics card from the last 10 years should be able to handle it, even if it’s a pretty basic one. Intel integrated graphics from Skylake upwards work just fine on Windows – but if you’re on Linux with an Intel chip, you might run into some issues and need to try building from source. And hey, if none of that works but you’re playing on a Steam Deck, you can always extract the Linux build, install it and then play in handheld mode. Or, if that doesn’t work, you can just use Proton to run the Windows version instead.
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