Star Wars: Dark Forces (Remastered) - First Impressions

★★★★☆

Today I played a couple of levels of the original Dark Forces and then the first level of the remaster.

Basically, imagine that they replaced all the sprites and textures with more detailed images, and enabled it to run with modern screen resolutions. Same with the cut scenes.

Otherwise it’s exactly the same.

It really is like remastering a song from the original audio channels.

Back when the Star Wars Special Editions came out, one of the things they did was redo compositing in a lot of the effects where you could see the mattes in the original print. (This being Lucas, they’d saved the components). Someone at Lucasfilm said of this that it would be “the movie you remember, not the movie that it was.” (Not counting all of the other changes made to the trilogy).

This is sort of like that. I could have sworn the original ran at better than 320x200, but apparently it didn’t. And at first glance, the remaster is in fact closer to the game I remember than the original game is.