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Second Dark Forces Mod Demo Out
The team behind the Dark Forces mod for the Jedi Academy engine have released another Demo. The newest demo contains the first three levels of play, new weapons, enemies, a new portion of the Dark Forces soundtrack, and some 5 minutes of fully rendered cutscenes. Amazing work.
Ummm, why would anyone do this? The only thing fun about the Jedi Knight games are the force powers and light saber. The weapons are inaccurate piles of crud that do less damage than a bb gun.
Hell, after using the blaster in Dark Forces/Jedi Knight, I can actually buy greedo missing! The actual shot seems to have little relataionship to where the weapon is pointing, and it takes half a dozen shots just to take down a lone stormtrooper...
What exactly do you want us to imagine?
Umm...nah, better not...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Hell, after using the blaster in Dark Forces/Jedi Knight, I can actually buy greedo missing!
Heresy! Han shoot first!!!
...just plain awesome.
Dark Forces is one of the best FPS', if not one of the best games, I've ever played. For it's time, it had the perfect blend of action, story and environment interaction that really makes it a true classic. Next to DOOM, I think it's one of the only FPSs I've played straight through multiple times. Plus, it's set in the Star Wars universe.
As for this MOD, I have to say it looks great and I'm going to have to keep my eyes on it. While the update to the graphics engine will add some new depth to the classic Dark Forces levels (I remember always LOVING the "Detention Center" and that level set in the mine), I really hope the gameplay can be carried over as well. In the meantime, let's hope Lucasarts doesn't shut it down, eh? Though I don't own Jedi Academy, I'd definitely pick it up for this MOD alone, so I hope that should be incentive enough for Mr. Lucas to keep his lawyers off of this one.
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Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
Sour grapes.
:) This mod is a nice compromise.
With the Jedi Academy engine backing the mod up, surely you can use the cheat codes to give yourself a light saber. I can't imagine that the modding folks would leave that out. If they did, well, that's another story.
The first demo was awesome, lots of fun to play with the updated graphics and behaviors. I went out and found Dark Forces in the $5 bin at my local software dealer so that I could play the whole game through, only to find it to be completely unplayable at GHz speeds.
I remember the original dark forces II has pretty huge city scaps where you'd look up and see a skyscraper rising to the heavens. The jedi knight games didn't seem to have this effect and I was really disappointed. I figured the QIII engine couldn't really do that kind of effect (it's optimized for close in death matches after all). Guess I was wrong :). Let's hope we can get some guys like this to make a new Jedi game that plays like the original when they finish this project.
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I disagree. Dark Forces was fantastic, and I'd love to see an update to the original. Jedi Outcast's saber dueling was fun, but it really took the gameplay away from its roots. That's one of the reasons I haven't picked up Jedi Academy. Just because it's a Star Wars game doesn't mean you have to use the Force. Han didn't have a lightsaber and he was still cool.
:)
Perhaps you just didn't use the right gun for the job. The stormtrooper rifle is wildly inaccurate as a nod to the fact that stormtroopers never seemed to hit anything in the movies. In Jedi Outcast, just about any time you snuck up on a pair of stormtroopers you could hear them griping about their weapons. It also helps to recreate the Star Wars experience to have blaster shots flying everywhere and hitting nothing but walls.
Anyway, it's useless at long range, but its high rate of fire makes it darn convenient up close. The basic blaster pistol is just as strong and almost perfectly accurate, and you should use it at long range. The bowcaster is also much more accurate and more powerful. Most of the other weapons are pretty gimmicky, though, and don't feel right in the Star Wars setting, especially that Star Trek-y disruptor rifle. Nothing's wrong with Trek, but that weapon (at least the Outcast version) just didn't fit in.
What be this story about "unplayable at GHz speeds"? I've run it under Win XP on a 1 GHz computer, and I never noticed any speed problems.
If you still want to get the canonical DF working, try this guide.
If you need a reason to install it, look at some of the mods that have been made over the years, especially the Dark Tide series. There's also a candidate for the worst game levvel ever made.
- [Darth Oosha]
Seriously, I was pretty disappointed when they gave Kyle Katarn jedi powers in the sequels. I always felt they should've used another character instead. Katarn, being a rough-and-tumble mercenary, struck me more as having a pragmatic Solo-ish attitude ("Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."). Now that I think about it, DF2 didn't really leave a lasting impression (the hokey cutscenes didn't help) and I didn't progress any further in the series.
Just my two cents...
He sure did..
surely you can use the cheat codes to give yourself a light saber
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.
Dark Forces was the only game of the series I really liked- saber fights and the force looks good on the screen, but I'd rather play Han Solo than Luke Skywalker.
But it was done with out the Single Player Source Code (Raven/Lucasarts havent released a SP SDK yet, and probably won't).