Duke Nukem 3D was another one of those games where I only played the shareware episode since I couldn’t afford the full game at the time, but it just got an XBLA release, and since the Doom one worked out fairly well, I figured I’d give this one a shot, too.
And it is…hard. Even on the default difficulty level I’m constantly scrounging for health and ammo, and getting killed around every other corner. Pig cops in particular can take you down quickly with their shotgun blasts. Fortunately they included a ‘rewind’ mechanism in the 360 version, that lets you revert back to any previous point in the level upon dying, and that helps out a lot.
So far I’ve done the first three levels of the first episode, and they’ve taken quite a while, since it’s not always obvious what to do next. DN3D isn’t afraid to hide necessary stuff away in obscure locations, whereas Doom was much more straightforward.