Play Session One
After the first hour of play I’ve completed the first two missions. The great news is it’s exactly as I remember it. The bad news is it’s exactly as I remember it. The game was originally made for DOS, so the resolution is VGA at best, which means it was designed with a 640x480 screen resolution. Blown up to 1080p makes everything look like a blocky mess, I found myself running through the levels just shooting at anything that was animated because those were almost guaranteed to be Imperial Officers and Stormtroopers.The control is just like DOOM though mouse rotation is on by default instead of using the arrow keys. There is no true mouselook, so like in DOOM when you have an enemy above or below your plane of movement your gun magically shoots up or down as necessary. You can use Page Up and Page Down to tilt the viewing angle to make it seem like you’re looking up and down but since those keys are above the arrow keys there’s no way you’re regularly reaching for them with one hand on WASD and the other on the mouse. The controls feel like you’re skating over the floors’ surface rather than running/walking and that’s a relic of the technology at the time. The music is MIDI and it’s… all right. It’s very emotive, but DOSBOX--which is what emulates the game--doesn’t have a good MIDI synth built into it. The voices and SFX are PCM sound clips and are compressed heavily.
Story-wise the game starts with Kyle Katarn stealing the Death Star plans prior to and during ANH, which I understand is now being rewritten into the story of the upcoming Rogue One movie. The second level introduces the story of the game, where a new Imperial Admiral is introduced who is running an “Enhanced Stormtrooper” project called the Dark Trooper which is a bionically enhanced Stormtrooper with extra armor and heavier weapons. The full arc of the story is reconnaissance about the project, infiltrating the project, and destroying the project thus eliminating this threat entirely outside of the film canon. Much like the book Shadows of the Empire except Kyle Katarn lived through the story and was able to star in 3 more games and one expansion with Mara Jade.
At one point I was aware of a fan-written engine refresh project named DarkXL for Dark Forces much like the Doomsday Engine for id Software’s DOOM and Hexen games. The DarkXL project hasn’t progressed as quickly because the source code for the Dark Forces engine hasn’t been released like the DOOM engine’s source code was, and from the release notes it looks like there’s been some feature creep in the DarkXL project, it’s now called the XL Engine and supports Dark Forces, TES: Daggerfall, Blood, and Outlaws and is as of April 2016 almost out of alpha. I downloaded the most recent release and was unable to get it up and running, I will investigate it further the next time I play Dark Forces.
Play Session Two
I only have an hour to play right now, so let’s move on to Mission 3.Mission 3 was a maze in the sewers consisting of a bunch of corridors of brown sludge infested with Diadongas leading to various switches that opened doors to further corridors. It took me a while because there’s one section of sewage rapids where you have to fight the current to go left instead of right or else you get washed back to the central hub and I missed that fork several times. The other enemies are probe droids and interrogation droids. The droids levitation made it really hard to get a mark on them with the auto aiming up and down, free mouselook would be really nice.
Mission 4 tasks Kyle/me with infiltrating an Imperial base embedded in a mountain where the front entrance is heavily guarded. I was only able to get a little bit into this before my hour was up, this level has Imperial troopers as enemies again and introduces ceiling turrets that kill you very quickly. One thing of note is that nearly three years before Half-Life introduced us to Crouch-Jumping there was a part of this level’s ductwork that I had to jump back up into while in a crouched position. Quite the innovators, LucasArts.
As you might have inferred, I haven’t had any time to investigate the XL Engine further so I don’t have anything to report at the moment. I did some quick searches for DOSBox tweaks, however, and it looks like you can just overwrite the version that comes with the game with the latest version. DF installed with 0.73 and the most recent is 0.74 so I’m not sure if that gave any significant performance boosts, but there are several guides on SteamCommunity.com for tweaking the settings in the Dosbox.conf configuration file in the <SteamApps\Common\Dark Forces\> folder. I changed the aspect ratio to 4:3 and the fullscreen resolution to 1920x1080 so it’s no longer stretching horizontally, and I set the CPU cycles to maximum which seems to have given the game a performance boost. The movement is smoother and more responsive, I no longer feel like I’m ice skating along the ground anymore, and I realized that previously there was some input lag on shooting as well because after the config edits that’s much faster too.
Play Session Three
For my final hour I gave up on playing regularly and began using cheat codes. I tried to play through the fourth mission normally but I used up all my lives and got booted back to the mission screen, starting the mission over when I had lost my final life about ⅔ of the way through. The biggest challenge was the ceiling-mounted turrets, they would just eat up my shield and health and required a thermal detonator explosion to take them out quickly.After restarting the mission with cheat codes like invulnerability and all weapons it went much faster as I was no longer concerned about getting shot. The final section of the level--where you find a sample of the metal used in the Dark Trooper armor--is a giant spire with a spiral staircase around the outside and you have to go all the way to the top and move a walkway between the staircase and the spire to access four switches to unlock the door to the metal sample. Anyway this seems to be a design choice that follows the “Imperial Design uses ridiculously tall cylinders for everything” style established with the interior shots of the Death Stars in the original trilogy.
The fifth mission, and the last one I completed in my requisite three hours, is in a mining station that the Empire is using to source the mystery metal Kyle found in the previous mission. My task was to disable it by placing a timed explosive in the central boring shaft deep underground. After a maze of mining tunnels and several jumping puzzles I found the bore and found myself pitted against a Dark Trooper once I had placed the explosives. At least I think it was, Kyle relayed to his pilot, Jan Ors, that he fought a Dark Trooper but the sprite looked awfully spindly for something that’s supposed to be an upgrade to the human troopers seen in the movies, more like it was an armored droid of some sort, not exactly chilling to behold.
So that was my experience replaying Dark Forces. While it was entertaining to play a game that I’ve owned since I was 16, I don’t think I’m going to play through to the end. It hasn’t aged well since the screen resolution it was designed for is about 1/8th of the screen real estate on a 1080p monitor. The MIDI music is repetitive when it transitions out of the recognizable John Williams themes and into the generic action background music. Not having mouse freelook is aggravating because the levels are designed for multi-level firefights, there are numerous times when there are stormtroopers who are on a ledge above you shooting down on you and it’s next to impossible to return fire because you keep hitting the wall face below their feet due to the in-engine mechanics of shooting. To be fair, though, the level design is pretty spectacular for an early ‘90s FPS; the buildings are twisty and dense, not like the huge interior atriums of the DOOM games.
My recommendation for other people is, sadly, not to bother playing it unless you’ve played it before and really want to play it again. As I said it hasn’t aged well at all; if the XL Engine can get itself into Beta it might breathe some new life into it with a fully 3D-rendered world and enemies. If it does I hope there can be a community of modelers and texture artists to help create the art assets for the port. The adventures of Kyle Katarn are at best relegated to the Star Wars Legends or whatever they’re calling the EU these days, and at worst being ignored. If you want to follow his story I would suggest starting with Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 because he is developed much more deeply as a character in that game and his actions there have impacts in the other Jedi Knight games, but I don’t remember anyone referencing his destruction of the Dark Trooper project outside of the first Dark Forces.
NB: No screenshots this week, as I could only play an hour at a time I forgot to take any while I was playing. Sorry about that.
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