There’s a lovely line in Rick Lane’s review of Star Wars: Dark Forces. Actually, the piece has no shortage of lovely lines, but one stood out for me in particular. “The result is a game that looks sharp and fresh, but crucially, not new.”
Dark Forces is our Game of the Week, of course, and I think this line gets at why. It’s an old game – 1995, so it’s as old as Elastica’s first album, for those of us who use that metric. A remaster has to bring it up to date without losing that thrilling sense of oldness. The right kind of oldness, though. Complicated.
Remasters are on the rise. They have been on the rise for a number of years, as games have more and more history worth revisiting. But questions like this – of how to make a game look sharp and fresh, but not new, are going to get more important. Dark Forces hits the sweet spot perfectly, I think: look at the screens and it’s clearly an old shooter, but your eyes don’t reject it as being an interesting relic that’s probably unplayable. Subtle tweaks have been made to ensure it looks modern-old rather than relic-old.
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