It’s no secret that some games from the 1990s are easier nowadays to play on an PSX emulator. Emulators allow key remapping (and proper gamepad support!), higher resolutions, and also there are some nice shaders available that emulate what the game was supposed to look like.
But in case of Dark Forces, this isn’t the best way to play this game. Raising internal resolution doesn’t improve the visuals much, and running this even on my top-of-the-line CPU is very taxing. There is a better solution though. Someone has been working on a complete engine rewrite for Dark Forces, and it’s still actively developed and works really well: https://theforceengine.github.io
I’ve almost finished the game some 20 years ago, but for some reason lost all of my progress. So I do remember it, but quite vaguely.
The game requires you to be quite intentional in what you do. At one point you need to pick up codes, and read them in your inventory to get the combination.
There is actually a quite good story to the game. And that’s from the age when storylines weren’t common in shooters at all. You don’t just shoot everyone. There are characters, like an Empire officer that gives away information to the Rebels, and you may need to rescue that character at some point, for example.
There are some quite challenging acrobatics, even with WASD. That’s taking into account that there’s no save/load system in this game.
Was surprised to see ricochetes from walls.
I also didn’t remember there were powerups. There’s one akin to quad damage from Quake that supercharges your weapons, making them fire twice as fast, and another that supercharges your shield.
In the prison level, I vaguely remember the ingenious elevator puzzle (the one where you have to align the elevators to jump on their roofs), so it wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to figure out that a blinking force field means that it’s active, while a still forcefield means that you can pass through it. I bumped into a blinking one a few times, and thought that I need to find a way to disable it, because on another floor there was a force field that you had to disable (for no good reason, that is, beside a few pickups).
