I've been revisiting the Kyle Katarn series recently.
I owned the original Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight (as well as Mysteries of the Sith) back in the late 90's, when I was still using a Windows computer. I always had a good time playing them, but found the level design to be confusing, so I couldn't get into them as much as I would have wanted. Also, the graphics performance on that computer wasn't the best, so I was hindered in the gameplay experience.
Once I switched to a Macintosh, I was no longer able to play any of them at all, and given the not-entirely-satisfactory experience I'd had with them, I set them aside and moved on to other things.
In 2003 I went off to college, where I was introduced to Jedi Outcast by a friend, and this reawakened my interest in the series. The graphics and gameplay were in every way a major upgrade over the previous installments, and with Jedi Academy coming out a short time later, I soon had more fun than I'd ever had with a Star Wars game before. The amount of time I've spent playing both of these is fairly epic, though nearly all of it has been single player, since I rarely find the experience of online gaming to be satisfactory. My current Macbook Pro runs them with an excellent framerate; and with the source code having been released a few years ago, I now usually use the fan-made version called OpenJK, which eliminates the need for the CD-ROMs as well as providing various bug fixes. I also have a mod that allows for the Outcast levels to be loaded into Academy, and though it has a few minor issues (not nearly as many as earlier attempts at such a mod), going through Outcast and being able to use all of Academy's improvements to the lightsaber and Force powers is a lot of fun.
By all accounts, playing Dark Forces 2 on a Mac has always been highly problematic. Recently I discovered that it is now (finally!) possible to run it with excellent performance in Crossover, the WINE loader for OS X. While figuring out how to install it, I found the JKE mod which provides upgraded high-res models and textures, and well as a vastly improved lightsaber animation. So all these years later, I'm at last able to appreciate this game for what it is, and enjoy it as I never did before. While I still find certain things about it somewhat frustrating, it is not nearly as opaque to me as it used to be, and quite a bit more fun than I remembered it. At first I was troubled by the lack of music, which is meant to play from the CD-ROMs and is simply silent on most modern computers, but I discovered that someone went to the trouble of creating a mod to restore the music during gameplay, which was the last link to completing the experience.
One notable difference from the later games is that DF2 is very much a shooter with lightsaber and Force powers added, while Outcast and especially Academy place extensive emphasis on the Jedi aspects, with the guns being almost an afterthought. Since I started with the original Dark Forces, which is a shooter only, there is something quite nostalgic about this. On my most recent playthrough of Outcast I found myself wanting to use the guns a lot more—sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. I started making my own sound mods to replace a few of the changed sound effects with ones from DF2: the concussion rifle, in particular, sounds far cooler in its original incarnation than in the Academy revision, and some of the saber sounds were also better. (As a sound guy I'm sensitive to things like that, so I like to take whatever steps are necessary to make them the way they should.)
One of these days I'll look into getting the first Dark Forces going, as well . . .