Video games - Star Wars: Dark Forces

Home > Listing Index > Video games > Star Wars: Dark Forces

	Video games - Star Wars: Dark Forces

Star Wars: Dark Forces is a video game produced by the LucasArts Entertainment Company. It was released in 1995. The game is a first-person shooter for the PC, Macintosh, and PlayStation. It was the first officially produced Star Wars first-person shooter.

Description

Often labeled a "Doom clone", it is believed that Dark Forces was created to counter the many unofficial Star Wars-themed WADs for Doom
, and rumored that LucasArts reverse-engineered the Doom engine to find out how to build their own. The "Jedi Engine," as it was called, was in the end more advanced than the Doom engine, containing features such as rooms over rooms, polygonal objects, haze and fog and the ability to look up and down. The engine was by no means perfect however, with the view being badly distorted when looking up and down due to the lack of perspective correction.

The game was successful and was followed by novelisations and a sequel, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II
. Jedi Knight spawned an entire series of games which includes the expansion, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith
, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
, and most recently, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
. This series, with the exception of Jedi Academy, focuses on the continuing exploits of Kyle Katarn, which take place after the events of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and the fall of Palpatine. After the first Jedi Knight title, the name Dark Forces was dropped from the series.

Gameplay

Overall, the game is a standard First Person Shooter that controls similarly to the original Doom series. One major gameplay difference from Doom is that the majority of enemies are humans (mainly Imperial Stormtroopers) who can be dispatched with a few shots, in contrast to the powerful Demons that players fight in Doom. While the game does feature some "superhuman" opponents (such as the Dark Troopers and Boba Fett), they only appear infrequently as mini-bosses.

Notably, Dark Forces is one of the first FPS game to implement alt-fire modes for the game's weaponry. Oddly, many of the weapons have not shown up elsewhere in the Star Wars universe; game designer Justin Fisher admitted that weapons like the Bryar laser pistol and Packard mortar gun were named after his personal favorites, such as 1950's Packard automobiles. Although there is no lightsaber in Dark Forces (since Kyle Katarn was not a Jedi yet), much discussion over the lightsaber may have shifted the direction of the sequel to chronicle Katarn's rise as a Jedi.

Unlike many other Doom-based games, Dark Forces attempted a realistic approach: The missions followed a certain storyline, sometimes interrupted by videos to progress the tale. Each mission had its own briefing and objective, such as retrieve items or place explosives, instead of simply killing enemies and making it to the exit; some levels were intentionally designed not to be completed quickly and also included puzzles. The levels were designed to represent actual bases, mines, facilities and other known places from the Star Wars universe, like Star Destroyer interiors, Jabba the Hutt's space yacht, Coruscant, and several other planets. This exotic variety was a refreshing change from Doom's often criticized recycling of textures and tilesets.

The enemy sprites were Imperial Stormtroopers, Gamorreans, Kell dragons and other Star Wars creatures.

While Dark Forces got quite favorable reviews, the game was lacking in a few areas. The most notable flaw was the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode, in light of Doom's pioneering of deathmatch. Gamers had dreamed of competing with one another for years in a first-person Star Wars environment (Star Wars Doom), but it was not to happen until the Dark Forces sequel, Jedi Knight. An additional "flaw" was the game designers' choice to allow saving only at the completion of each (often long and tedious) mission, although there were mid-level checkpoints that the player could restart from as long as he had extra lives. This design decision in games has always been a controversial one, and this was no less so for Dark Forces.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Star Wars: Dark Forces ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Star Wars: Dark Forces; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay