Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition

A long time ago (1995) in a galaxy far, far away (the basement den where I convinced my mom to set up her Windows 95 PC), I spent an awful lot of time playing Star Wars: Dark Forces. As a certified dork who loved the Star Wars movies and equally loved the fast-paced shooting action of Doom, a game that blended the two was like a dream come true. Of course, games have changed a lot in the nearly thirty years since Dark Forces first came out, which is why I'm so excited to see it getting a new and improved release. Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster comes to us from the retro masters at Nightdive Studios, whose updates of older games have included classics like

“You ate some priest porridge.” That’s the message I see whenever I slide over a bowl of nondescript red goo in Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, regaining some vital bars of health in its strange world of impossible spaces, springboards, and eyeball gibs. Unlike the complete rebuild that developerNightdive did for System Shock, the Ludicrous Edition is a straightforward port of the original Rise of the Triad: Dark War, which launched as a shareware title in 1994 before seeing an official launch the following year. It’s a profoundly weird game, and I’m thrilled to see it brought back to life in this edition because it’s such an odd piece of gaming history.