Virtual 100 – Game 28
Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered released back in February and to be honest, I never really intended for this game to end up in the backlog. I bought it day one with every intent on playing it through right then and there. But, let’s just say the rose colored glasses were quite rosy on this one. I fondly remembered this game. I played through multiple times on my… oh man, was it my Packard Bell? Do you kids even know what a Packard Bell was?
Anyways, back in the day it was quite a game. The synthesized Star Wars theme was on point, the settings were great, and there were voices! Dark Forces was quintessential Star Wars, in a time when we weren’t quite so sick of Star Wars. It introduced new characters, places that we had never seen before, and provided key backstory on the original Star Wars Episode IV. It was pretty epic. It was in the era of the Doom clone, which it very much was, but a first-person shooter set in the SW universe was something we didn’t even know we wanted. And man it was soooo good.
But that was in 1995. And times change. Especially when it’s been practically… ugh… 30 years. So even though I booted the remaster up with much enthusiasm, it wasn’t long before the glasses came off, and I struggled to get through it.
There were a couple of reasons for this. Some of them were fundamental, some of them were weird glitches, and some of there were based on decisions for the remaster. First of all, I think they did an excellent job re-creating the art for the cut-scenes. And they re-rendered old footage for the CGI. Kudos to the team for that, because it all looked great.
But one of the differences I noticed (and I still have the PC version of the original) is that they updated the control scheme for the remaster, giving the player a full 360-degree camera view. This allows the player to shoot up or down at enemies at different elevations. The original only rotated on the X-axis, and the blaster lasers would automatically go up or down to target enemies, as long as you were pointed at them. There was an auto-aim at play to make up for the fact that this was a keyboard-only game at the time. This doesn’t break the game, but it does allow you to miss more. The wildly inaccurate blaster is true to the lore; blasters aren’t exactly the most efficient tool in any case. But it also held true with some of the other guns as well. I found myself running out of ammo quite often.
Another issue that the Y-axis movement introduced were perspective issues. The geometry for the most part was fine, but it was never meant to be looked up at, or down at. It was meant to be viewed from straight on. It’s not a huge deal in a lot of the corridor stages, but when you get to Nar-Shadaa, those cool skyscrapers looked horrendously funky because they were only ever intended to be viewed the X-axis, and the developers never bothered to change that. I am not a developer, and I don’t pretend to know exactly how shit works, but if I had to imagine the way it was handled in the game, I assume the city-scape texture is on the inside of a cylinder that’s wrapped around the stage. As long as you spin around in a circle, it looks fine, but the second you look up or down, the illusion is broken. This is opposed to a skybox that was in used in, say, Unreal, where the sky is mapped on the inside of a sphere that encompasses the entire stage. These textures were distorted on purpose so that when they were wrapped around the sphere, they would look accurate no matter which direction you viewed it. Again, not a huge deal, but definitely immersion-breaking (and to an extent, a little bit stomach-churning).
Another thing that kinda bugged me, no pun intended, was that there were textures that just didn’t load. Especially on the ship that Kyle Katarn and Jan use to get from place to place. Sometimes Jan would swoop in, and the ship would be lacking any textures whatsoever. Or there would be random environmental objects that would be completely blank. This isn’t something that should happen on a PC from 2023 playing a game from 1995. It’s shoddy emulation plain and simple.
Even that stuff can be ignored for the most part. But the biggest gripe I have with the game, and the one that really kept me from enjoying the game in the manner I did when I was (again, ugh) 16. That is the horrendous level design. This isn’t the fault of the remaster developers, they were just re-creating the game. No, this level design has been in place since the very first time I loaded up that CD-ROM. It’s just that, back then, well we just didn’t know anything else. We were used to the endless DOOM mazes and the Wolfenstein corridors. But booting this game up in the modern era was rough.
I got lost so, so many times. I spent the better part of an hour on each mission, and most of that was wandering around trying to figure out where to go. When I was younger, not only did I have more patience, and infinitely more time on my hands, but we were eager and excited and we liked wandering around getting lost in these environments. But I’m old and impatient now and holy shit did it get on my nerves.
One of the things I really don’t like having to do is play a game with a map overlay. And this game, even though it was a wireframe map that was relatively un-intrusive, rarely had the map off of the screen. Keep in mind, I’m relatively fresh off of playing Fatal Frame: Maiden of Dark Water, where I had to load up the map screen every 20 steps or so because the hallways and doors looked so similar, so to say I was a bit impatient with maps is an understatement.
But it’s also why it took me so long to finish up. After each stage, I was done. I don’t think I ever played two stages back-to-back. It was so exhausting getting through one stage, wandering around, pressing switches, running down corridors, staring more at the map overlay than the action on the screen. And I just couldn’t do it for long. And the environments don’t really resemble anything. An Imperial Starcruiser being made up of long, winding hallways and dead-ends just doesn’t make much sense. Again, things I never thought about when I was younger, but just made me scratch my head now.
I was so happy to be done with this game, for all the wrong reasons. And that sucks, because I had such fond memories of the game. But I think it’s just one of those that you can’t go back to. Even DOOM, for as much as I love that one as well, lost me in the later episodes because of the convoluted level designs.
I have three more games to get through in this series. Fortunately, I think the last two in the series, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, are much closer to “proper” adventure titles as opposed to corridor mazes. We’ll see what Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II has to offer pretty soon I guess. I’m in the process of looking up some mods for that one to get it running better on a modern PC. I can get it to load but the hardware acceleration on it is too old, and it has a hard time recognizing modern controls, not to mention running it at modern resolutions. I have installed a launcher mod that seems to work well enough, so hopefully that’s all I need.
It looks like I’m closing in on my 30th game. Only two more to go, and I have several irons in the fire so hopefully they’ll be checked off pretty soon. Crazy to think it’s already been a year since I’ve started this. Things aren’t going quite as quickly as I had hoped, but that’s mainly due to my gamer ADD and not being able to play only one game at a time. Perhaps if I focused on one and only one I might get through them quicker. But what’s the fun in that?
