Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball
Platform: Pinball M
Set: Death Save Bundle ($19.99)
Individual Price: $5.49
Designed by Grego “Rockger” Ezsias
Originally Released November 30, 2023
POLARIZING TABLE

Insert any Duke Nukem quip HERE. I’ll do it: “I’m an equal opportunity ass kicker.” Now just repeat that every time the ball touches something.

Right off the bat, I need to inform you, my beloved reader, that none of the Vice Family are Duke Nukem fans. That doesn’t mean we’re against the franchise. It just doesn’t interest us. Taking it further, Oscar and Angela have no experience at all with the games (Dad might have played 3D at some point but only briefly). Having been squirted into the world in 1989, I was born at the wrong time to really care about the IP. So, we all deferred to Dash, our resident Duke Nukem fanboy. He both enjoyed the pinball layout Grego Ezsias and the team at Zen Studios created AND he also believes that Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball canonically fits alongside the rest of the franchise. In other words, he could believe that this was an official release by Duke’s creators. Jordi, also familiar with Duke Nukem, agreed. From the theme integration to the call outs to the modes: this could be a legitimate stand-alone Duke Nukem release and it’s unlikely any fan of the series wouldn’t believe it. It’s a fitting tribute to Duke Nukem 3D and if you’re a big fan, what’s here should be authentic enough that you’ll feel at home. So, I’m just going to focus on the pinball stuff.

Unique among Zen’s pins is that Duke Nukem has no traditional driver. The Cinema shot is low-yielding as its own thing and has a mini-mode attached, but we were mostly using it as a dumper to safely gain control of wild balls. Lighting the D-A-M-N letters off the right ramp and shooting the toilet scoop starts modes, but you’re given so much freedom to explore the layout that it never really feels as if you’re being queued into the modes. Odd.

With the exception of Dash, the main issue we all took with Duke was the ball return. Whenever the ball transfers from the bumpers to the main playfield, it goes through a hidden habitrail before exiting out underneath the DAMN ramp. And it returns at an angle where the ball sort of lobbed carelessly. It’s so off-putting. It’s treating a pinball return the same way a slob wads up trash like hamburger wrappers and casually throws them in the general vicinity of a garbage can, unbothered by whether or not they actually go in the can. It never comes out at the same speed or trajectory, and since the ball inevitably hits the slingshot, the probability that any returned ball could become unplayable is higher than any made shot should be. The fact that the design specifically drops the ball into the highly lethal left slingshot is incredibly frustrating. There was no rational or logical benefit from any design perspective for having it do this besides punishing players for wanting to play the table in the first place. Hey, if Zen wants pins to be less fun than they can be, I suppose that’s their god given right, even if I don’t get it.

One of the three main modes (Kick Ass and Chew Bubble Gum) is a glorified video mode that pays homage to the Duke Nukem franchise. Aliens will pop-up in one of four stations, and you have to use the flippers to aim and the action button to fire three shots into each. In the main mode, you have to kill twenty aliens (8 in the first phase, 12 in the other). Not only does it take forever, but none of the Vices EVER failed at it. Not once. In fact, all three of us quickly reached the point where we didn’t even take damage. I should note that Oscar, normally the member of The Pinball Chick Team who whines about video modes, actually enjoyed Bubble Gum the most. Taking it further, he declared that this is what solidified his GREAT rating. Whatever floats your boat, Pops. But again, it’s a video mode that takes 60 total shots to finish. SIXTY. Holy crap. What is wrong with Zen’s new crop of designers? Did they not get enough attention as children? Did the cool kids dunk their heads in toilets and this is revenge?

The sad thing about the sloven ball return is that Duke Nukem would be a difficult enough table without it. Killer slingshots that spoon-feed the brutal outlanes are just the start of it. Duke Nukem is a brick-layer with high risk angles and cardboard targets that crowd the drain. Now granted: if any video game franchise’s theme lends itself to a design that feels like it’s trolling players, it’s Duke Nukem. But we put more time into this pin than any pin we’ve ever reviewed, and we still couldn’t really make any progress. Even after 50 combined hours and multiple world records set by the three of us, the amount of things we didn’t experience with Duke Nukem is staggering. As of this writing, I’m the arcade mode World Champion and we have three other first place standings on challenge leaderboards, but we were never able to complete all three modes in a single game. In fact, none of us defeated the second boss. We never opened Ready For Action multiball. My father and I never once earned a single extra ball (Angela earned two EBs over the course of 100 or so games). FIFTY HOURS. WORLD RECORDS. How is it even possible we didn’t come halfway to finishing the three main modes in a single game? Well, it’s because even if you clock the difficult angles and drill the shots into muscle memory, eventually the ball return WILL kill you. You can only get lucky so many times. When you reduce your table to dumb luck, it becomes impossible to finish or even come close. Duke is a table where random chance will ALWAYS supersede skill.

The radioactive symbol’s spin disc is the highlight of the table, in my opinion. It’s a clever idea. Balls that land in the black zones will be fed to VUK and count towards a random award. Balls that land in the yellow zones will instead be released into the bumper area of the table. Good idea. I sure wish it didn’t require six spins on the right zones to do anything.

The Vice Family is probably Zen Studios’ best case scenario for players. A family that shares a love of the sport and competes with each-other, all three of whom are capable of challenging for world records. We’re far removed from the best players, but we ain’t slouches. If we couldn’t do these things, who exactly are these tables designed for? Zen’s original tables these days rely on mind-numbing grinding combined with made shots still having the potential to kill you because the ball return is done in a way where it might be unplayable. Presumably their design team thinks this is the key to engagement, since mobile games are about mindless grinding and random odds. But, like.. it’s pinball, gang. I know I sound like a broken record, but your best sellers are adaptations of old Williams/Bally pins that might be hard (nobody can accuse Indiana Jones, Twilight Zone, or Addams Family of being too easy) but they don’t require players to practically earn a bachelor’s degree in that table just to experience everything.

After completing each mode, you have to charge up the left spinner and then shoot the toilet scoop to activate “boss fights” which feature cardboard targets, the big one of which takes roughly fifty billion hits to kill, give or take. It’s actually over a dozen hits combined for the minions and big boss. While it does have a ball save attached to it, the ball save is going to come out under the damned DAMN ramp, again reducing your survival to random chance. If Duke Nukem has a feature that COULD have been fun, you can bet your sweet ass the designer made it require so many hits that it becomes a joyless slog. You can also shoot the toilet scoop to use a gun, but this feature is incredibly confusing and frankly underwhelming. The targets are there, but we’re encouraged to shoot elsewhere? Huh?

I originally had Duke Nukem as GOOD, agreeing with everyone else that Duke has a fun, downright frisky layout with nice ramp placement, a unique and memorable skillshot, and genuinely thrilling side-targets. It’s a damn fine layout, besides the way the ball return is handled. It even incorporates zone-style design by having the bumpers being completely segregated from the rest of the table. Even more striking is that Duke Nukem doesn’t feel like it’s aping Williams or Stern. It’s the rare Zen original pin that feels genuinely original. Even though the flow is left-side heavy, it avoids having the feel of a table that’s been cut in half, like A Samurai’s Vengeance suffered from. And Oscar would disown me if I didn’t single-out the fine-tuned scoring balance, which my daddio was positively swooning over. It’s so precisely balanced that it would have made the late, great Lyman Sheats proud. Don’t take my rating to imply any lack of talent. They DO have talent. So much that the problems Zen has with forced grinding and dickhead ball returns are much more frustrating than they should be. If they had no clue what they were doing, it’d be excusable. They’re so good at making pins that the faults are inexcusable.

Yet another continuing problem with Zen’s originals is that they include mini-fields with gaps so wide you could drive a steamship through them. Seriously, it’s remarkable how they’ve gotten into these company-wide bad habits. Grindy modes. Harbor-sized flipper gaps. By the way, Zen, a drain pin doesn’t help when the physics of the mini-table make the ball feel limp. Duke being accused of having limp balls seems like the type of thing that would make him fly into a rage, but I’ll take my chances.

Saying that I know Zen is capable of better than this is an understatement. Duke Nukem’s Big Shot Pinball has a layout so awesome that it should have been a cinch for a GREAT rating from me, and really, MASTERPIECE should have been in play. It has everything I like in a layout. It’s telling that none of us even considered MASTERPIECE. That was ruled out really early. I don’t know why anyone would make such a great creation and then destroy it by discouraging table exploration like Duke does. The multiball modes seem fun. I wish I could justify going for them, but activating them takes so many hits and requires you hold your breath and hope the ball return doesn’t screw you over that it’s not worth attempting. Grind. Grind. Grind. Why on Earth do you want people to have to shoot targets so many times to accomplish ANYTHING? I don’t get it. Imagine you were golfing and you sank a long putt, but instead of that being a good thing by itself, you then had to spin a wheel where there’s a 20% chance the hole would fire the ball into the closest water hazard and force you to start over. That’s how Zen’s original tables have been lately, and I’m sick of it.

Duke Nukem is left-side dominant. In 50+ hours of playing, to the best of my knowledge, none of us got the random award from hitting the targets behind the spinner 100 times. Yes, ONE HUNDRED HITS. The bumpers were equally bad. They’re laid out in a way where the ball just goes dead and rolls lifelessly to the lethal ball return hole under the DAMN ramp. Zen, seriously, it would be so easy to salvage this. Sure, the ball return is busted and you can’t fix that, but just cut the requirements for modes and hits the bosses need by at least half. Don’t want ANYONE to finish this shit? One or two players in the entire world see the wizard modes on any given Zen original, and you think that’s a good thing? Because it seems to me average or casual players would consider it so far out of reach that it’s not even worth exploring. How likely do you think they are to recommend your pinball games to other people? Probably not very likely.

I’m done rewarding these grindy tables with positive reviews. Enough with modes requiring so many shots to finish that it’s practically sarcastic. Enough with requiring an entire lifetime of devotion just to see everything a table has to offer. Do you want to unlock one of the multiballs? Well you have to shoot the spinners a couple dozen or so times AND light the C-O-O-L targets and.. oh you already drained out? Too bad. Want a random reward? Well you have to shoot the toilet scoop ten times (without starting any other modes) and then shoot the.. oh, you already drained out? Too bad. Want to start “I’m the Cure” mini mode? Well you have to shoot the black colors on the spin disk 6 times then hope the wall randomly wiggles enough to get 60 hits on the NEST targets to light the.. oh you already drained out? Too bad. Enough is enough. Look at the leaderboards. Those scores are pretty low. Clearly you didn’t want anyone unlocking much, so hey, you didn’t unlock a positive score from me. I’m rating it BAD.

As of this writing, this is the highest score ever recorded for Arcade mode, one of two primary play modes. The previous high was Angela, using an entirely different strategy. That’s reassuring. The best thing I can say about Duke Nukem is it offers enough flexibility that multiple different strategies are viable. Angela chose to charge-up the two-ball multiball and just repeat it over and over. Of course, the score Angela put up that I beat required an absurd amount of grinding that, by her own admission, was the least fun way to play. “Hey, I’m the world champion though so HAH.” She’s going to wake up to find that’s not even the case anymore, as I literally just put this up before publication.

Again, I’m the lone hold-out here. Everyone else, despite their frustration with the same stuff I’m whining about, had fun. A really good theme, excellent layout, satisfying shots, and fine-tuned balance really do make Duke stand out in a crowded field. For all the bitching you just sat through, even I had fun. I mean, up to a point, but every time I started really enjoying the table, Duke went back to obnoxious grinding and random chance deaths. I just had one of my best games. I was hitting my shots. I couldn’t miss, really. I set a new world record. But all three balls drained from the ball return hitting the left slingshot, which sent the ball into the right slingshot, which sent the ball directly down the left outlane. It wasn’t just three times, either. IT WAS FIVE TIMES. Twice I had protected the left out lane with a kickback. It didn’t matter, because eventually you have to give up skill and simply cross your fingers. When I did, the result was predictable: ball return, left slingshot, right slingshot, left outlane, dead ball. I’m done. Five outlanes in one game where I couldn’t have shot better. Duke Nukem pinball doesn’t want to be fun. It wants to be a troll. One of the best layouts Zen has ever done and the final product is more obsessed with being a prick than it is being fun. Zen, if you want your original pins to require a marathon of shots to make anything happen, that’s your prerogative, and I’ll never understand it. This isn’t pinball. It’s a war of attrition.
Cathy: BAD (2/5)
Angela: GOOD (3/5)
Oscar: GREAT (4/5)
Jordi: GOOD (3/5)
Dash: GREAT (4/5)