I have no doubt that stuff like that goes on in the game review business. Having said that, I do think that it suddenly became overly popular to hate on Duke for being Duke. It seems like sometimes the gaming press does this.

What's odd about Duke is that you had this huge amount of hype surrounding the demo and how great that was, and there were lots of articles talking about how cool that demo was...

With the game coming out, suddenly journalists are complaining about the same stuff that they were saying was so great earlier. The demo opens with Duke taking a pee. Okay, that was the same demo at PAX, where apparently that was really funny. Oh, the game is chlidish because you can pick up the poop and throw it around? Hello, welcome to Duke Nukem, where you could have him do weird stuff in the earlier games too. Don't like it? Unless I'm mistaken, at no point are you forced to pick up the poop and throw it around, so don't do it.

I canceled my pre-order on the game right before it came out because I had got the Ball of Steel edition when they were making a total of 6000 of them, and I saw a certificate that was over 83000. It doesn't make me any less interested in the game though, and I do feel like everyone decided to punish Duke more because it took so long to come out than for anything else.