Star Wars: Dark Forces is one of my favorite games; it's the 90s shooter that got me into Doom. DF is an amazing game, with amazing graphics (within the context of the time of course), amazing gameplay, and it's not just a Doom clone but really innnovated to be superior to Doom in many ways. It has an actual campaign, with fleshed out characters (better than the Disney movies) voice-acting, pre-rendered cutscenes, etc. that feels like a new Star Wars movie, at the time the first since ROTJ. The engine can handle rooms over rooms, jumping, crouching, looking up/down; all in all much more complex level design. And this was in 1995, so well before Duke Nukem 3D, and only a year after Doom II. It's a perfect game as it is and does not need a remaster. Even for Playstation players they could have simply re-released an emulated version of the PS1 port for PS4 & 5. Here you pay $30 for a game that's $0.99 on sale usually, in order to get a.i.-upscaled sprites/textures and re-done cutscenes that change the vibe of them from pseudo live-action to feeling more like an anime or cartoon. However, perhaps more importantly, you lose the classic controls. Part of the charm of this game is precisely the fact that it has early FPS controls different from most modern FPS games. I like using mouse to move and right click to run. Yes it's a little unusual, but it's easy to get used to and the game feels nice with the set-up. You do have to use buttons to look up/down (no free look), BUT the game isn't really meant to look good with freelook anyway. You get weird texture warping doing that. I don't even recommend the free Force Engine you can download online. Just play the DOS version. Just go into your config file first "C:\GOG Galaxy\Games\Star Wars - Dark Forces" open up dosbox_DF.conf, set aspect = false, scaler = none, fullresolution = original, output = openglnb If you prefer other midi than OPL3, download virtualmidisynth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MZnZQO7rJk
Soldier of Fortune: Payback has an unearned notoriety as one of the "worst games of all time," but this is far from true. What is more accurate is to say, is it's probably the buggiest game of all time, when you first get it, anyway. When shooting enemies, bullets go right through them and the crosshairs don't even register that you're aim is dead on. Ragdolls are hilarious, with enemies flying like rockets. However, all this is just compatibility issues, that are easily fixed by a quick moddb download of the 1.1 patch, followed by setting compatibility mode to Windows 98. This worked for me. Another solution for others was to force V-Sync from Control Panel (but that didn't work for me). Once the technical issue is gone, the game is everything I wanted and expected it to be. It's pretty much the same as any other "Soldier of Fortune" title, which if you are unaware is a sort of B-movie type game that takes the industry standard shooter of the day, and decides to add ridiculous levels of gore and dismemberment to it. The first SoF ran in Quake II engine and looked like Half-Life, with linear levels that you just run through, feel like an action movie badass, and enjoy near-Brutal Doom levels of gore. (Actually not quite that extreme. More like Mortal Kombat blood with Jedi Outcast's Dismemberment with the cheat code on.) SoF: Payback is no different, except it's got updated mid/late 00s graphics. In a nutshell, this game is like CoD 4 with awesome levels of gore. There's not much more to it than that, and there doesn't need to be. Is it some groundbreaking title? Of course not, nor does it need to be. Not everything has to be a Half-Life. The story is like the iconic John Carmack quote--it's like story in a porn movie. It's there, but just in the background. Not that important. It's welcome, but not meant to be taken too seriously. This is a game that is very easy to get into, turn your brain off, enjoy a few missions, and then you're done.
Since GOG only gives me 2000 characters for a review, here is a link to a Steam discussion page where I wrote my review without any such limitations. https://steamcommunity.com/app/358410/discussions/0/3882723820578996460/
Star Wars: Battlefront is a classic, and I still highly recommend playing it...just don't buy it from GOG or Steam. They revived official online servers, as a gimmick to get you to buy a game you likely already own, but the game's unplayable. Online multiplayer is laggy and sparsely populated. But even the singleplayer is ruined due to a number of changes to the way the game is rendered. Aspect Ratio is changed, so that the weapon models are off screen and camera is very zoomed in. Objects in the distance are invisible, and instead the sky texture is just mirrored on the ground. They completely ruined the look of the game. Does it still run? Sure. Is it any fun to play with these glaring flaws? No, not really. Sad thing is, earlier versions didn't have this issue (nor did they have online servers). If GOG just undid the bad changes but kept the online, the game would be fine.
