So, the plug finally got pulled.
Duke Nukem Forever is dead. Gone. Kaput. Will never see the light of day.
Yahoo! had an article on their front page, about a gamer who had an eight-year old pre-order on the game.
It doesn’t surprise me. The EB Games I managed outside Philadelphia had four or five pre-orders on the game when I left there in 2002. I have no doubt that one or two might still be active in the system there.
There are stores that probably still have pre-orders on StarCraft: Ghost. And that game is deader than Marley’s Ghost.
Unfortunately, the way GameStop ranks its stores, it’s unlikely that anyone who pre-ordered a game that will never come out will ever be called and told that they can get a refund. Stores take hits on their company rankings for cancelled pre-orders. Dicking the customer makes the store look better on the numbers, basically.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are still orphaned pre-orders in their systems. Especially for Duke Nukem Forever.
For reasons that pass even beyond my understanding, I watched Dollhouse until the bitter end.
Let me get something out of the way. I’m not a Joss Whedon fanboy. Nor do I find Eliza Dushku any sort of compelling as an actress.
So why did I watch it?
I wanted to see if it would crash and burn.
The thing about Dollhouse is that when it dealt with anything except Dushku’s Echo, it could be strangely compelling. There was a dark phildickian undercurrent to the series — if identity is something that can be swapped out like a hard drive, then who is anyone really?
Last week’s episode was amazing. Not the best episode in the series — that would have been the episode that focused on Paul Ballard, the disgraced FBI agent trying to crack the mystery of the urban legend of the Dollhouse earlier in the season — but it was strong. Ballard found the designer of the Dollhouse’s ecological systems, he found his way into the Dollhouse, and he attempted to rescue Echo — formerly known as Caroline — and then the shit hit the fan.
By comparison, last night’s finale was anything but interesting.
It was actually outright boring.
And I didn’t like where it ended. It ended the only way it really could, but it wasn’t the right ending. If this show comes back for a second season, I don’t know that I will watch it.
And even though there’s one more episode left unaired, I doubt I’ll buy the DVD boxset just to get it.