Nostalgia - Dark Forces

In my revitalized interest in the first-person shooter genre, I've thought back about the first few that I'd played, and those I hold a special place for. While just about everyone who's ever played the genre recognizes Doom as the king-hell granddaddy of the genre (even if Wolfenstein 3D did come out first), there was another game that came out a few years after, one that was based in the Star Wars universe.

I'm talking about Dark Forces.

Made during a time before George Lucas decided to vomit all over the integrity of his bread-and-butter franchise, Dark Forces was a glimpse into the world of Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial officer turned mercenary for the Rebel Alliance. The gist of it was that Kyle was fighting a covert battle which ran parallel to the events of The Empire Strikes back, in which he was trying to thwart the Empire's plan to build a robotic stormtrooper, the Dark Trooper.

Part of what makes Dark Forces special is that it was one of the first games in the genre to feature crouching and jumping, as well as the ability to look up and down (although the perspective really never changed), and in places it had honest to goodness texture mapped 3D renderings. (All of these 3D pieces were done in a coordinate-based text file, so you could change them to anything you wanted, provided you had the patience to type it all out.)

Unlike Doom, which I was into mostly because of the ease of modifying it, Dark Forces was a right pain in the ass to edit. I don't know how many hours I spent trying to figure out how to put a half-decent map together, or understand the format of the GOB files it used, but I don't recall myself ever being successful. Of course, I'm okay with that because the game was just so much damn fun.

Aside from being able to mow down stormtroopers with a blaster rifle a la Han Solo circa A New Hope, the game offered another 9 weapons, some of which still hold a place as some of my all-time favorites. To this day I wish for Dark Trooper Assault Cannons, a happy blend of plasma rifle and rocket launcher (that feels almost as strange to type as I'm sure it does to read), or the Stouker Concussion Rifle, capable of launching your least favorite Death Star gunner some 20-30 feet in the air. Thermal Detonators, anyone?

At the time I played it, I was really wishing that it would have contained a lightsaber, but in retrospect I'm glad it didn't. The game wasn't about Jedi and Sith. It was the Rebellion at its purest form: one guy trying to turn the tide of a war that seemed almost impossible to win. Katarn was truly a darker, brooding Han Solo, minus the pimp but with double the badass.

The story was pretty solid, too. Events in the game actually mirrored events that would have unfolded in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, and at the time -- being a wicked rippin' Star Wars geek -- I thought that was pretty impressive. There was also a fair amount of cutscenes which brought it all together, and the voice acting wasn't too shabby either.

Of course, like everything George Lucas has touched since 1997, Dark Forces was eventually ruined for me. The cool, calculating mercenary Katarn was turned into a Jedi, given a lightsaber, and thrust into the middle of a new Jedi/Sith conflict. While I own a copy of Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2, I have played maybe a total of six minutes worth of game. This is for two reasons. One, at the time it was released it required 3D acceleration, and I didn't have the cash to shell out for it. And two, I felt that the notion of making Katarn a Jedi more or less pissed on the character that had been built up in the original Dark Forces. To this day, both games sit on a shelf about 4 feet from me, but if I ever decide to revisit the franchise, there'll only be one that I install.

Jan Ors, I'm ready for evac.

Out of Control

Things are starting to get out of hand. Right now, at this very moment, I am running Unreal Editor for UT3, as well as a copy of DoomEdit for Doom 3. My desire to build worlds has gone completely over the edge.

In truth, I've started to finally get the hang of UnrealEd, after having messed with it for the better part of a two weeks, and while I haven't actually constructed anything that you could call playable yet, I do have a rather lengthy collection of nonsense maps, which at the very least have given me the chance to mess around with the features of the tool. So far, I've got basic room construction, mesh scaling, lighting, terrain, and skies under control, but all that I should be able to build upon within the next few weeks.

The problem I'm finding is that every map I create, even if it's only a few rooms in size, is in the "dark 'n spooky" category. This is why I decided to install Doom3 on this machine, so I could get away with dark 'n spooky in an engine that was designed for it (or at least, for a game that was designed for it).

I suppose it's worth noting that I also have the Source SDK on this same box, and will probably eventually start to fiddle around with Hammer (though I wager the folks on the Oh Hi TF2 team would rather I use my time in Steam for that than anything else).

Seriously though, I think that even though I'll be playing around with all of these editors, I would best be served by just getting really good at one of them. If that's the case, it'll probably be UnrealEd, if only because it seems to be the most widely used of the three. Seeing as I really want to work in gaming, it only makes sense to learn the popular tools.

Now if only I could convince myself to spend this kind of time getting funky with C++...