Duke Nukem: Zero Hour

About Duke Nukem: Zero Hour

Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (1999) is Eurocom's third-person Nintendo 64 shooter in which Duke travels through time, from Victorian London to the Old West, to stop aliens killing his ancestors.

Duke Nukem: Zero Hour in Depth

Aliens land again, and the government calls in Duke, who fights through New York with the Marines to the Statue of Liberty, where he discovers their plan: to travel back in time and change history so Earth becomes easy to conquer. During the fight he is thrown into a future where the aliens have won and humanity is near extinction, battling new alien breeds and zombified fallout victims until he meets resistance fighters in the ruins of the US Army's New York headquarters. They send him back through time to restore history, first to the Old West, where the aliens plan to detonate a bomb in the Earth's core and technical problems force him to rely mostly on period weapons, though allies send back some modern ones.

Locations, weapons, items and clothing match each period Duke visits. Compared with the series' usual over-the-top comedy, it includes more mature elements, such as meeting Jack the Ripper near the fresh murder scene of Mary Jane Kelly in Victorian England and a serious depiction of a New York devastated by atomic war. It uses a large 32-megabyte cartridge and can use the Expansion Pak for better graphics at the cost of frame rate, and its four-player split-screen multiplayer switches to a first-person view.

Making Duke Nukem: Zero Hour

Eurocom developed it and GT Interactive published it for the Nintendo 64 in 1999. It received moderate scores on release.