Kerr Avon wrote on 2023-08-31, 23:57:
I remember seeing Dark Forces on my mate's PC, when it was released. It was amazing, it really looked, sounded, and felt like Star Wars.
That was my first impression of the original game as well (I found the demo sometime in mid-2000s and played it in DOSBox). It basically transports you inside Star Wars -- and that with me not being that much of a Star Wars fan in the first place.
Kerr Avon wrote on 2023-08-31, 23:57:
How good is the game, really?
I haven't played to completion, only reached I think level 10 (Imperial City), but I had fun with it, for the most part. The constant change of scenery and intricate level design is a very fresh take compared to the many Doom clones, and even Doom itself.
WolverineDK wrote on 2023-09-02, 12:04:
As far I can gather, then yes DarkXL is a remake . But I consider and I call both The Force Engine, and Strife: Veteran Edition a remaster. Because with Strife: Veteran Edition, they used Chocolate Doom and reverse engineered Strife too. Since the source code has been lost.
I'm not sure why you guys brought up DarkXL, it's an abandoned project which is the predecessor of The Force Engine, and I think it never reached the stage where it was actually playable. I mixed this up with DaggerXL, sorry.
As far as I'm concerned, The Force Engine is correctly classified as an engine recreation, in this case, based on careful reverse-engineering of the original binary executable (although other engine recreations may be based on external observation of a game's behaviour, for example). As such, it acts as a regular source port, but without actually being built from the source code. There is nothing specific that would make it a "remake" more than any Doom source port is a remake, for example. I guess the Night Dive version could be called a remake, or I guess "recreation" also goes, but not of the same variety as TFE, because of the different engine.
As I said elsewhere, the problem with the term "remaster" is in that it's been borrowed from the realm of completely different media, namely music records and films. Both types allow somewhat different kinds of manipulations with them compared to video games -- for example, you could take Dark Forces and replace all character/enemy sprites with higher resolution versions, and it would still be technically the same game, whereas should you reshoot a film with different actors using the same script and even the same sets, I guess these would be two different films? And certainly no one would call the second film a "remaster" of the first one. Basically, a remaster is supposed to improve the quality of a work, but there is a big difference between what constitutes improved quality of music and films on the one hand, and of video games on the other.
But generally, I'd expect a video game remaster to retain the original gameplay mechanics intact, with possible QoL improvements, while significantly upping the visuals, for example redrawing all art in a 2D game in higher resolution. Something like StarCraft Remastered or Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. The problem (of sorts) here is, that in the past decades there have been various official re-releases that did exactly this, sometimes appearing just a couple of years after their original counterparts came out, but none were ever called remasters, likely because the term wasn't in fashion yet.
On the other hand, one probably has to accept for a fact that publishers today use the term "remaster" in a very loose fashion. Personally I wouldn't call either Strife Veteran Edition or Rise of the Triad Ludicrous Edition remasters -- they're just source ports with some added bells and whistles plus some extra content (well, in the case of Strife it is, again, not a source port but a source-port accurate* engine recreation).
*that's the term lucius uses for TFE