Old Games: Encyclopedia Bombastica: Star Wars: Dark Forces

I had the demo for this game and played it CONSTANTLY. I should really just play through the whole game some day.

As much as Brad talked up all the awesome Star Wars guns you get to shoot in this game, it seems like most of them are just Doom-style crazy grenade launchers and shit the developers made up.

Which is to say, way better than Star Wars guns.

I don't know if I just like listening to people gush or what, but I don't think I'll ever tire of these Duders raving about how cool games like this were back in the day.

This game makes me wish my computer didn't shit itself.

It looks like GOG is having crazy Star Wars bundle sales right now, in case you want this, Dark Forces 2, KOTOR, alongside every other weird forgotten SW PC game from the 90s (including all the sequels to X-Wing and TIE Fighter that no one speaks about in the same reverential tones as X-Wing and TIE Fighter and that RTS that is basically just Age of Empires, but with Star Wars)

Yes I did watch the video, does that make my opinion invalid because it differs from Brad? It is still a Doom clone in my eyes - run at 1000mph through massive horizontal levels shooting enemy sprites with guns cloned directly from Doom style games, all while trying to find the right key. Yes, there was an iteration there with alt fire, and cutscenes, but the gameplay is the same.

Very few games from the 90's have aged well in terms of visuals, but DF2 is still better in virtually every other facet - that is my opinion, is this OK with you?

I cannot agree more. I bought the steam version with a star wars pack and after wrestling for hours to get it to work right i gave up and bought the GOG version.

I think by that logic 90% of shooters from those days are "Doom clones" with the exception of Hexen and Heretic which are some time folding, snake eating it's own tale, variety clones of each other.

Before mouselook a lot of those games played very similarly, and with good reason. Doom paved the way for that style and it's not surprising that a lot of developers decided to base large parts of their own creations on that very successful archetype.

i don't understand people who say these old FPS games are the BEST star wars games. they seem to me like stock standard 90s FPSs; this could be doom or wolfenstein or hexen for all i know (actually, hexen had more originality than any of those games). not to mention that Brad mentions this game's lack of force powers and lightsabers as a positive thing, when in reality they're only the main defining characteristics of the star wars universe. a game without them is...just a 90s FPS.

as far as i'm concerned, the KOTOR games are the best of Star Wars, full stop. the degree to which you can engage with the lore, learn about characters, use cool Star Wars-exclusive shit like force powers and lightsabers, and shape the story is unmatched by ANY other star wars game, period. it makes me a little crazy to see people say otherwise. i'll cut Brad some slack cause for some reason i can see him not having played either KOTOR, but actually factually? they're the best Star Wars games without a doubt,

I for one, do not miss the labyrinthine design of these older games. Dicking around in mazes, looking for keycards feels trite. I think part of it is that the level design goes for being tricky, rather than being something "realistic"... Like a buildings that make sense. Duke 3D was the first game to head in the right direction for me, with locales that looked like something. That first level is still the best.

That being said... How about some Dark Forces II live action cutscenes?

I concur. I bought Jedi Knight on Steam and could never, ever get the 3D accelerated mode working without a flickering border or the soundtrack to play (I know it doesn't come with the Steam version default, but none of the workarounds people proposed worked - using a cd image, some weird hooking program that fakes the existence of a drive and points the game to audio files, etc). I then re-bought it on GOG, and can confirm that their version works perfectly without any tweaking required.

on a side note, that blaster bobbing side to side as he walks is odd as fuck.

Bearded Kyle Katarn is best Kyle Katarn

Force powers & lightsabers aren't the only defining characteristics of Star Wars, there's also a heavy undercurrent of Smugglers, Bounty Hunters, and a whole seedy underbelly to the universe. The flavor of Star Wars comes from the two colliding; the original trilogy wouldn't be nearly as good if it wasn't Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and one of the prequels' biggest problems was it focused solely on the Jedi.

The sewer monsters freaked me out as a kid because they popped up out of nowhere and bypassed your shields entirely, so the Infinite Shields cheat wouldn't work on them.

Star wars themed breaking brad?

I'm not really sure if you are agreeing or disagreeing. The logic holds true though, 90% of shooters in those days were indeed Doom clones, however re-skinned, including DF1. This is not news.

yeah, @thiago123 you can have that opinion. It's just objectively wrong, along with your opinion that "very few games from the 90s have aged well in terms of visuals". I'm pretty sure everyone still loves a lot of 90's 2D pixel graphics, that's why there's like a trillion 8 and 16 bit-style indie games being made these days. @humanity is right. By your logic, every FPS is a Doom clone. I don't think your understanding of video games is deep enough to recognize the nuance that separates FPS's.

Aged really well, especially with Dark XL

Lol

Still holds up pretty well. Great sounds and animation for the time

totally true! admittedly i was being a bit reductive in my description.

i completely respect that aspect of the universe, but i still don't feel running and gunning 90s style captures anything but a tiny part of it.

If you weren't playing all of these FPS's when they were new (wolf, doom, dark forces, hexen, etc.), I can see how you might not be able to get into the mindset of how much more of an impact Dark Forces made on people. If you want to only look at technical aspects, story depth and gameplay, sure KOTOR is obviously a better game on paper, as it came out almost a decade later.

But as Brad mentions, Dark Forces was the first of its kind, a Star Wars FPS. Not only that, but a damn good one at a time when the only established FPS's around were basically Wolf 3D, Doom, Doom II, and Heretic. Truly a brand-new genre, and I think for that gets extra points. KOTOR is such a played-out RPG style that I would even compare it more to pre-video game tabletop RPG's. Also, I think people who only or mostly love Star Wars through the original trilogy are more drawn to the fan service of Dark Forces. It doesn't add a lot of extended universe stuff the average fan wouldn't recognize.

I loved Dark Forces. I actually played the Playstation version, since I didn't get a home PC until 1998. I remember that I would play everyday and get a little bit further. On the Playstation version, you had passwords to save progress, so I had a list sitting on a table near the console. One day, the list was gone, probably a victim of some house cleaning. I could never get back to where I was, and I ended up giving up.

I actually have the Steam version and am now thinking I may try again now that I have been inspired by this Bombastica! :D

@thiago123: glad we cleared that up

@darkbeatdk: I feel the opposite way. Older FPS games had levels designed purely for gameplay reasons. I feel that level design in newer shooters can suffer sometimes because of a need to look realistic or make sense in terms of the real world. That said, the sewer level in Dark Forces is bullshit.

I never got to play this growing up, but I do have it on Steam. I only played a few minutes of it a year or two ago, and felt kinda 'eh' about it since my first experience with the Dark Forces series was Jedi Knight (which is still an amazing game). I'll probably give it another shot since it does look pretty cool for a Doom-era FPS.

I played through the Steam version of Jedi Knight a while back, and don't recall having any issues getting it running in Windows 7. I dunno how it is in Windows 10 since I haven't upgraded to it yet, though...

I feel that a lot of people don't take in account what the FPS genre was in those days. Yes this has similarities to Doom. Does that mean that it's invalid to credit Dark Forces for what it added to the formula? Brad isn't arguing that this is a more important game than Doom.

Should we not praise Shadows of Mordor for the things it added to the Asssassins Creed formula?

@panpipe: Are those any good? was wondering about getting myself one

Fuck yeah, Brad!

Seeing that blaster in Battlefront gave me the same type of chills. I hope that we get a wide variety of star wars games if we're about to be inundated with them again.

I love early FPS games so much. So much.

Some heavy nostalgia going on here, the interior in that first level for my modern eyes did not look like it was an Empire ship or whatever. Also Jedi Academy is the best SW game.

At the time, it captured more of it than any game that came before it. This, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter were the Holy Trinity of Star Wars games back in the early 3D days, technically amazing & good games for the time. As Brad said, in an era of Doom clones, this stood out for having good cutscenes & unique in-game assets like the wireframe Death Star.

KotOR's also a good game, but it came out 8 years (2003) after Dark Forces did (1995). For a frame of reference, Baldur's Gate didn't revolutionize CRPGs and put Bioware on the map until 1998, three years after Dark Forces was released.

nice hat Brad.

That ship is proper 3D! Not just raycasting and sprites! =)

@mikelemmer: Brad said this is the best Star Wars game. he didn't say "the best for its time, subsequently surpassed by more recent games," he said it was the best. absolutely, in 1995 this probably was the best star wars game, but in 2015 it isn't. the argument you're making is different from the one he made; like i said, i agree it probably was the best for 1995, but it's been FAR surpassed by its own sequels, spinoffs, KOTOR, and probably even TFU 1.

Finding the Death Star plans, wasn't that supposed to be the plot to the Star Wars movie Gary Whitta was working on?

@oopprraahh: yes it is. Star Wars Rogue One is what it is called and it comes out next year

Kyle Don't Care

So many Bombasticas! I love it!

At the beginning he calls it "one of the best Star Wars games ever made, in [his] opinion". Then at the end he says it's a neat piece of Star Wars video game history and "man it was cool back then, like, holy crap."

I think those statements are pretty clear. What is there to even argue about?

I always thought that a cool concept would be an "open world action adventure" game where the whole Deathstar was available to walk around. The whole meta discussion in Clerks about there just being other civilians in the Death Star was also sort of interesting to me. That would be the side I would want to see.

It's also the plot of 137 different Star Wars novels, comic books, radio plays, advertising campaigns, trading cards, backs of toy packaging, slash-fictions, zoetropes, some sky writing...

Great choice for "Bombastica".

Thanks for this, Brad!

Man, this game really did age well. The shooting still looks super satisfying, and that Vader turn animation was pretty rad.

Bungie's Marathon was the first FPS game with looking up and down (release date two days before Heretic) and also the first one with mouselook.

And though I have enjoyed most Star Wars games from that first arcade game (and its black and white Macintosh port!) to Super Star Wars, Tie Fighter, Jedi Knight, Pod Racer, Rogue Squadron, and this current Battlefront game (I didn't really enjoy KOTOR or previous Battelfront games) this first Dark Forces game is probably the only Star Wars game I would still enjoy playing even if it weren't Star Wars themed.

Please make EB a weekly thing. These are my favorite videos even if I know zero about the game.

Hope they play Shadows of the Empire for the N64 one day...