By trendy requirements, 1995’s Darkish Forces would not appear like a lot, but it surely’s rightfully thought of one of many more important Star Wars games ever launched. Not solely did it introduce essential technical improvements to the first-person shooter style, but it surely additionally went on to have an outsized impact on later Star Wars canon and spawned the Jedi Knight series. Nonetheless, like a variety of video games from the mid-’90s, revisiting Darkish Forces may be difficult. Earlier than as we speak, your greatest wager was to purchase a digital copy of the sport from both Steam or GOG and use DOSBox to emulate it on a contemporary laptop. Darkish Forces is one of the easier games to get working on DOSBox, however the software program may be intimidating for those who’ve by no means used it earlier than.
Enter The Drive Engine. The project is primarily the work of LuciusDXL, who spent three years reverse engineering LucasArts’ proprietary Jedi Engine to make the 2 video games that have been constructed with it — Darkish Forces and 1997’s Outlaws — simpler to run on trendy programs. With model 1.0, TFE is appropriate with each the GOG and Steam variations of Darkish Forces. As soon as you’ve got put in the software program, it’ll robotically detect the sport’s executable, and you can begin taking part in while not having to do issues like adjusting cycles in DOSBox.
What’s extra, it provides a handful of options to make it simpler to understand Darkish Forces in 2022. One massive addition is assist for contemporary widescreen resolutions, so you do not have to play the sport at its unique 320 by 200 decision. Different elective quality-of-life enhancements embrace full mouselook assist and a brand new save system that means that you can make quicksaves. In the event you’re a fan of Outlaws, LuciusDXL says they’re engaged on including assist for the cult basic shooter as a part of TFE’s model 2.0 launch. Whereas there isn’t any launch date for that but, LuciusDXL estimates it will not take them practically as lengthy now that they’ve gone by means of the method of reverse-engineering Darkish Forces.
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