Star Wars: Dark Forces

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Star Wars: Dark Forces for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[Kinketsu]

In today's climate of over-saturation of Star Wars content is hard to cast our minds back to the times when things like a prequel trilogy seemed out of the question. A book here or a Dark Horse Comic there were all we had to sustain ourselves on. The games, especially the PC games, were a shining beacon in those days. Here were new Star Wars and they were moving, interactive even! Along side the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, Dark Forces ranked up there with the best and was my personal preference.

The sound of blasting stormtroopers, visuals and design of Imperial bases, even a hologram of the Death Star! All of this seems old-hat now and maybe done to death even. But at the time it was phenomenal in its sense of place, rooted right in there in the Star Wars universe. Add to that the theming of the missions. You weren't just flipping a switch, Kyle Katarn was disabling a shield generator. He wasn't just picking up a blue key, he needed the credentials of an Imperial officer. However I feel one of Dark Forces most outstanding features though is perhaps one of the game's biggest barriers to a replay.

At the time, the vast and labyrinthian levels were not only in keeping with the theme, but were unlike something many of us had seen in a game before. Now however, these truly maze-like areas often lead to more frustration than wonder. The feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do has lost a bit of its charm, especially combined with sometimes muddy and indistinct graphics. Despite playing through the game religiously, at least until Dark Forces II, in a recent play through a few years ago, I often found myself getting lost or turned around and started to realize that I was not having much fun anymore. It put me off replaying Jedi Knight, a game I loved even more and put much more time and effort into, developing mods and so on. I think I would like that one to remain a happy memory.

Nevertheless, I think Dark Forces was important, if nothing else than in its use of licensing, and continued the stream of great Star Wars games that seemed like it would never end. Like the Galactic Republic, we did not know how close that end was!

[AndrewElmore]

By the time I first played Dark Forces, it was at least a decade old. Even then, the game felt its age. But now, two additional decades later, the big FPS games of the mid-2000s are not broadly distinguishable from big FPS games of the 2020s--I don't know many who'd accuse Halo 3 of feeling ancient these days, etc. But when did I first encounter Dark Forces, it was by way of the PlayStation port, and I was very impressed (as you might expect). I knew it was a conversion of a PC game, and I was familiar with some of its sequels and antecedents, but I was expecting an experience more typical of console FPS games of the mid-90s; something creaky, awkward, lumbering, and clumsy. And that's more or less what I got! Though in some ways, it's about as refined an FPS experience as one could have hoped for on that hardware and in that time. The visuals were downgraded and the performance was--to put it charitably--abysmal, but even in this compromised state, there was a game here that I didn't want to put down. I recall feeling like I'd stumbled onto a missing link of sorts, between Doom and Quake. Here we had a game that looked on first blush like a "doom-clone" of the era, but we had vertical aiming, crouching, jumping(!), rooms above rooms, a limited selection of polygonal objects, and these vast labyrinthine setpiece levels that so expertly captured the mid-90s "expanded universe" era of Star Wars aesthetics that I remember being so culturally prevalent in my formative years. I haven't really been much of a "Star Wars Guy™" since the 90s, but Dark Forces felt right at home for me, nestled into a strange corner of my brain next to Shadows of the Empire and Rebel Assault II. Opening the game by having the player personally steal the Death Star plans is such a good move. Enemy count and placement could feel a bit sporadic at times, and occasionally the map design felt a bit too convoluted even for me, but the game still has a rhythm to combat and exploration that's irresistible to me. I would later play through it on PC, and these days of course, Nightdive has given the world a "best of all possible worlds" version across platforms, not unlike what they did for Powerslave/Exhumed. Actually, wait, did they ever fix that audio bug? The original cutscenes I knew as compressed video files on the PlayStation were of course (as I'm sure you covered) hand-drawn and animated pixel art sequences that were fully voiced and scored. Such presentational opulence was a rare and impressive thing for a PC game of the time, and really showcases how far ahead of the curve LucasArts was on some of these things. Not even a year and a half out from Doom, and Dark Forces is out there flexing its multimedia muscles. My persistent interest in playing games on their original hardware has led me to revisit this game in particular a number of times over the years. Within the last calendar year, I have at least twice revisited Star Wars: Dark Forces on a Pentium II machine in DOS off a retail disc, with a CRT monitor, an assortment of old MIDI sound hardware that I normally reserve for composition work, a big loud IBM keyboard, and a modern optical mouse because even I have my limits. Anyway, point is, I go through all that trouble because this game deserves it, and because it's more than an enjoyable enough experience to justify Getting A Bit Weird With It, as it were. There's a dungeon crawling element to Dark Forces that calls out to me sometimes, like the sea to a sailor. The game can be a bit crusty; the edges are frayed and the fabric might be a bit thinner than it seemed 30 years ago, but it has a special place in my heart regardless.



P.S.
Apologies for the sporadic, stream-of-consciousness nature of this correspondence. My thoughts on this game are quite messily entangled with memories and anecdotes, and I'm a bit rusty with my writing as of late, to say the least.

[Alex79]

Despite never having been a huge Star Wars fan I picked this up on PS1 back in the day and remember having fun with it, but generally getting lost in it's seemingly labyrinthine levels. Fast forward about 25 years and I recently bought the Nightdive remaster for Switch, and I've been really enjoying it. My own short attention span, which seems particularly bad at the moment, means I've not finished it yet, but I will go back to it. The remaster is really nicely done, and it seems to run very smoothly on Switch. The sound effects are all present and correct, and the levels don't seem nearly as confusing as I remember them! I've not looked in to it actually but I wonder if the PS1 version was slightly different to the PC game, as we got with Quake 2 - I'm sure this'll be discussed on the show if that's the case.