STAR WARS™ Dark Forces (Classic, 1995)

First played this on my Windows 95 computer in high school. I was still kinda inexperienced with then-modern computers and wound up printing out an entire GameFAQs walkthrough that I barely used. I found DOS very tricky and it took a while to get the hang of using it for games like this and King's Quest. Hearing the crunchy, Sound Blaster rendition of the Star Wars theme and songs like Imperial March was so incredible to me back then. Replaying it for the first time in a decade or so here on Steam it brought back a lot of memories of getting lost or frustrated, falling to my death in the ice canyons cause using Page Up/Down to look around is very unnatural and still isn't something I like doing cause you can't simply reset it back to normal. Point being that Dark Forces is a really great game with a lot of action and a compelling story, which DOOM lacked even though I still love the classic shooter so much. The mission briefings, the cutscenes, seeing pixelated Stormtroopers and various aliens.. it feels really good even after all these years. It's not a [i]flawless[/i] game and there's a few things that really hold it back. Any time the game wants you to do platforming the engine's limitations light up like a Christmas tree. You simply move too fast by default to make precarious jumps reliably. Sometimes, in order to proceed or to explore side areas, you have to crouch [i]and[/i] jump and getting it to work is tricky since sometimes the game doesn't understand what you're trying to do. When the battles get crowded or you're fighting a strong enemy, it's cumbersome to change weapons on the fly. Likewise, the alt-fire key is R for some reason and that's difficult to reach while using WASD to not die while dodging fire. Still, for its age and what it offers, Dark Forces is a lot of fun and since it's an [i]old[/i] computer game it has a plethora of cheats you can type in if you want to mess around or make things easier.