Nightdive Studios' high-quality remaster of "Star Wars: Dark Forces" is a great way to revisit the groundbreaking FPS that was Kyle Katarn's first adventure and spawned some of the best lightsaber action games of all time! . As the Twitter account of Dark Forces/Jedi Knight fan site df-21.net points out, the remaster also preserves a bit of FPS history by restoring the cut levels, ISD Avenger.

Avenger was used as a demo level at the Consumer Electronics Show prior to the original release of Dark Forces in 1995. It appears to have been an alternate first mission in which Kyle Katarn attacked a Stardestroyer and took the Death Star blueprints in a commandeered TIE Fighter.

Some say that LucasArts decided it was too difficult to introduce to new players, so it was replaced by Secret Base, the first mission of Dark Forces. A screenshot of the Avenger wireframe map was left in the big-box release, tempting players with a mission that would never be accessible in the main game. It is second from the LucasArts logo, on the spine, along with four screenshots.

DF-21 acknowledges that open-source Force Engine creator luciusDXL helped Nightdive recover this mission. The mission apparently existed in the original LucasArts development vaults that Nightdive used to remaster the game, but it needed to be converted to a new file type and pieced together into a playable form. [The result is now playable directly from the main menu of Dark Forces Remastered. The final process for accessing the Death Star blueprints was somewhat esoteric: a switch would reveal a secret room, another switch would open a hatch in the secret room, and a hidden entrance to the ship's air ducts by the bridge had to be found.

In other words, that's Jedi Knight and Dark Forces for me! Until 2003's "Jedi Academy," the final entry in the series by Raven Software (now best known for "CoD: Warzone"), "Where the hell do I go? I don't know where to go" was one of the defining and essential features of Kyle Katarn's adventures.

I still fondly recall getting lost on the final level of "Jedi Outcast" in a recent replay, and when I checked the guide, I found that the author of the video was stuck and circling the exact same place I was. This has been the case since the beginning when the series was first made playable to the public, and thanks to this remastering, it will be preserved for posterity.