There is nothing wrong with the game, an easy 4/5, 5/5 if it weren't for the brutal difficulty, but this GOG release really isn't worth it. You have to manually add the music because otherwise there is NONE, which is unacceptable. This isn't GOG's fault so to say since they released Rayman Forever as-is. But there are numerous other problems as well; only English even though this absolutely had a German and French release, the DOSBox cyclespeed is too low, strange clicking noises while loading, Rayman 60 level pack is omitted etc.
Jedi Outcast, by its own, is still a great game, but my problem is that I can't possibly rate this higher because Jedi Academy is vastly superior. Though in many ways Jedi Outcast improves on Jedi Knight, in particular lightsaber combat, but in more it actually goes back a couple steps! Atrocious pacing, worse puzzles, worse level design overall, the progression system has been massively dumbed down and the story is kind off weak compared to the epic and immersive experience you get in Jedi Knight. Academy, which everyone agrees has the more polished lightsaber combat, adding more saber types, always gets a bad rep for its story but I think Outcast's story is worse. If they killed Jan it maybe would matter, but because it turns out she is alive after all and Desann really isn't that interesting as a villian. Jedi Academy's story isn't as immersive or important as Jedi Knight's, but the contextualisation works surprisingly well (the Imperial Remnant actually feels like an Imperial remnant and the cult actually feels like a guerrilla threat, justifying the great variety of locations!) and, like in Jedi Knight, force alignment matters and important characters can die. But even on its own, Jedi Outcast levels are frustrating mazes with the solutions being anything but satisfying to find out. Outcast has this constant muddy gray tone that becomes grading quickly and further exacerbates the lack of variety and awful pacing. Jedi Oucast is to Jedi Academy what American McGee's Alice is to Alice Madness Returns: The levels drag on for far too long and half of it you spend on Imperial installations. In addition, ALL the Nar Shadaa levels are atrocious. I originally wanted to call it the second worst, but despite MotS's frustrating final levels (they are a great change of pace and style though, fitting the theme of the title!), I still had WAY more fun with it.
I discovered this game in like January 2018 and was intrigued by the art style and setting. Four years later, this is probably among my top three games of all time - and that is saying a lot, since I only ever played it once and in a way, it's a bad game. Before the update coinciding with the 10th Aniv. edition, "Edna bricht aus" as its known in its native language (which I played and you should play too if you speak German; the performances are amazing!) was a technical nightmare. A Java game that warned you about performance problems if you run it in window mode. It also ran in 16-Bit, meaning if you somehow switched colour depth through running another programm, the game window turned white. Yes! Frequent crashes too. Now, that is all fixed, but what remains is the fact that EBA is really not a point-and-click-adventure for newcomers, with a lot of solutions being seemingly impossible to figure out even with hours of trial-and-error. I don't want to spoil anything, but the game itself eludes to this fact mockingly in a few of the well-placed 4th wall breaks. All that being said, I love this game! "trying everything with everything" was fun and rewarding for the amazing dialogue and humor from Edna and Harvey, with the voice-acting in native German being surprisingly memorable. (All voice-actors are professionals except for "the Yuppie", which shows.) This game oozes with something games nowadays rarely have: personality, dedication and passion. The art style might be childish, but I really liked it, with it reminding me of some of the educational games we used to play at Grundschule. It's unique. The only criticism of the game that I even would have is that the themes of Mental Health are somewhat lackluster. The game was released in 2009, but still, I would have appreciated characters in the asylum being more than sterotypes.
Like many people, Blood Money was my first encounter with the franchise. I first played it in January 2013 at now-long gone "Core Online" and immediately was enchanted by the insane weapon customization, the missions, the atmosphere etc. To be fair, the weapon customization nowadays is kinda gimmicky and hasn't aged well, the rest however, absolutely has. Blood Money is the perfection of the OG Hitman formula, from music to disguise system to level design, and even though the Hitman games post 2016 are objectively even better than Blood Money, Blood Money still has a lot going for it. The only criticism I could ever offer would be that many of the cutscenes haven't aged that well, in particular though, the story is meh at best, with it kind of being retconned by Hitman games post 2016. That being said, unlike the retconns of material from C47 regarding the cloning projects origins, I couldn't care less about the BM story. I also find the America-centric nature of the missions grading, though that's just personal preference.
