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Talk:Star Wars: Dark Forces

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Good articleStar Wars: Dark Forces has been listed as one of the Sports and recreation good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
January 26, 2009Good article nomineeListed
August 31, 2009Good topic candidatePromoted
Current status: Good article

Source

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Mac version

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Hello,

the chapter about the Mac version hypotheses that it is worse than the DOS version. The opposite is right. Mac version has higher resolution (full 640x480) and better sound.

Everybody can test this with e.g. DosBox and QEMU.

2003:E6:2F1B:9D76:D7A:ADD4:F237:A979 (talk) 19:16, 26 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Could you point us to the particular sentence that is incorrect? I couldn't find anything that would suggest the Mac version is worse than the DOS one. --Krótki (talk) 07:31, 28 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
"...meaning the Macintosh version has less RAM available for Dark Forces to use. Aaron Giles, who was the Macintosh programmer for Dark Forces, explained that to resolve this problem the memory had to be managed more efficiently."
I would think with less memory you will get less details. I have not written that one sentence is incorrect. But if one cannot compare the versions and has only the information from this chapter one would come to the conclusion the DOS version is better because of more memory available.
2003:E6:2F1B:9D55:C00C:8DF1:A52B:A865 (talk) 18:11, 4 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for answering. The assumption that less memory leads to less details is basically wrong, especially when discussing mid-1990s games. A game would require a specified amount of RAM, and if a computer did not met that requirement, the game would simply not run; but adding more RAM that required would not improve details. Besides, the same sentence you've cited, states that the Mac developers went to great lengths to overcome the low RAM problem. So, for me, the sentence suggests the opposite, i.e. that the Mac version does not lack any detail, because the developers put additional work to avoid that.
I think though, that a statement about improved screen resolution and sound is valuable and should be directly put into the article. Could you find some reliable sources to support such statement? --Krótki (talk) 13:03, 13 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Release date

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Greetings everyone. I just amended the release date for the game to say March 10, 1995, instead of February 28, 1995. The new date was taken from the June 1995 issue of Games World: The Magazine,[1] which states (in response to a reader letter):

Dark Forces is already on sale matey, it was released on 10th March and retails at around £49.99. As for the leather-clad Full Throttle, that will see the light of day on 1st May and will also cost £49.99.

(emphasis added)

The former date was sourced solely to GameRankings, which we know is not reliable for dates (just like Metacritic). I've been trawling through a few old game sites for additional clues but results were mixed.

  • GameSpot's initial site for the game (1996) states the release date as "03/95". However, this was changed to "02/28/1995" around 2001 (five years later) for no discernible reason.
  • This FAQ by Karsten A. Loepelmann (which was endorsed by IGN) claims that the game was "first released for MPC (MS-DOS CD-ROM) systems on March 7, 1995".
  • "Available now" advertisements only started in the March 1995 issue of Computer Gaming World.
  • The earliest known review (per MobyGames) is from March 1995.
  • the current Steam page states the date to be February 15, 1995. Of course, this page was set up decades after the fact, likely by uninvolved people, but it's strange to see yet another release date.
  • A newspaper clipping from March 10, 1995, declares that "Babbage's Software at Lakeview Square got it's [sic] first shipment of the game Wednesday", Wednesday being March 8.
  • At the same time, the game had been "just released" on March 4, according to another clipping.

Any help figuring out whether the release date as stated in Games World is correct, such as by finding an additional source, would be greatly appreciated.

References

  1. ^ "The Game Brain". Games World: The Magazine. No. 12. Paragon Publishing. June 1995. p. 93. Retrieved October 24, 2023 – via Internet Archive.

Regards, IceWelder [] 16:01, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't found anything about March 95 date but the game was scheduled to come out in December 94 and was delayed to January 95 (and then was delayed again to March, I assume):
  • PC Zone said in October that the game was going to be released in two months: [1]
  • Announcement of the delay to January 1995 in PC Gamer: [2]
  • The last time the game was listed on CGW's Pipeline section, the release date was estimated as January 1995: [3]. --Mika1h (talk) 17:12, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
PC Zone also, in the March 1995 issue, listed the release date as "March"; note that magazines come out weeks before the cover date. Also note that it's really hard to get a street date for games from the mid-90s and earlier, because they didn't really have them- the publisher often just shipped out stuff starting on a date, and whenever stores got them they stuck them on the shelves. It wasn't until the turn of the century that a specific date to start selling inventory became a consistent thing, unless the publisher really wanted it. --PresN 19:05, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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