Right then, as promised, ive got a particularly important one for - TopicsExpress

Right then, as promised, ive got a particularly important one for you in this weeks Star Wars Vintage. So important, in fact, that without it, the basis for this page would never have been able to have existed in the first place, and you wouldnt even be reading this. Oooh, chaos theory in action! Thats right, this week, we hit Dark Forces. The great grandad of the Jedi Knight series. Now, a very uncomfortable admission on my part before I continue: I never finished it. *Braces for inevitable and deserved backlash* In my defence, it came out in 1995 (I was 5, and capable of little more than getting through two days without eating PVA glue. I wish that was an exaggeration), a distant time when not everyone had a computer. In fact, I had to get it on Playstation once they had ported it over. And therein explains the problem. Dark Forces was Star Wars initial foray into the FPS (or First Person Shooter, for, like, the one person living in a mud hut who doesnt know what that means) genre, a field of electronic entertainment dominated at the time by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, wherein the player character rains hell upon their reams of foes from an immersive, eye-view perspective. Except Dark Forces, unlike its forebears, included the capacity for your player to look up and down, crouch, jump, explore multiple floors and solve rudimentary puzzles. Actions that we take for granted with modern games, but which all started here. Yes, thats right, Star Wars gaming was, once upon a time, living on the bleeding edge of innovation. And now we get little more than God Of War and Clash of Clans clones. Im looking at you TFU and Star Wars Commander. Not, that said, that Dark Forces was without its accusations of the most sincere form of flattery. Many branded the game a Doom-clone, so maybe that is just a legacy weve never really shaken off. The player fills the boots of everyones favourite Corellian gobshite (Han notwithstanding, because no one bests Han, especially not Greedo), Kyle Katarn, a snarky, badass Mercenary, with a bitter hatred for the Empire he once worked for, until learning that they killed his parents. At the beginning of the game, Kyle takes the iconic mission to steal the Death Star plans at Mon Mothmas behest, and soon becomes embroiled in a plot to roll out a new form of amplified and improved cybernetic Stormtrooper, the Darktrooper. This is, unfortunately, as far as I can comment on the story, because I never got further than the sewer level (without using cheats to skip levels, which definitely doesnt count). And the reason for this is that, though the game may have been exceptional on old MS-DOS or Macintosh machines, the Playstation port was not. It was glitchy, it had low pixel count, and the frame rate was appalling. And at the age of 7, with The Lost World, Micro Machines and Tombi to play, my attention was soon drawn elsewhere. So much so that I was not immediately bothered when Jedi Knight came out, to my eternal shame in hindsight. And I know that I should find the time to go back to it, find a way of playing such an old, but essential game on these newfangled high power computers we have today, but Im the sort of gamer who really struggles to play dated games, without nostalgic investment in the story. Shallow, I know, and I make my apologies. So, what do we think? To be a fan of this page, you must have an opinion on the series first step out of the primordial soup of games development. Id like to hear them in the comments. And if enough of you comment that I should get my shit together and finish Dark Forces, then I shall do my utmost. Might even see if I can record it, give you all running commentary. Whatever happens, make sure to keep your eyes peeled for next weeks installment, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II! Master Ash MTFBWU