Slightly Off Topic: Descent Underground

[Gaijin Punch]

Official Site

Before I got back into Japanese games in 1999/2000, I played the fuck out of Descent 3... on ISDN (which was charged by the minute before 11PM). That and a pack of cigarettes or three was all I needed on a handful of crappy weather weekends. Good times. I know that the community of this is going to be about 1% of people that played any of the originals, but still, I wonder if it will captivate me and possibly wreck my other hobbies as it's predecessor. I don't even have Steam installed on my Laptop, which is now a couple of years old.

[ryu]

I played bits of Descent on Playstation when I was about 11 years old and really liked the series. Guess I'm going to check out Underground once it's out. Thinking back it's almost weird. I loved fast paced FPS games back then, but never found my way back into the genre. Maybe it's because I missed out on stuff like Doom and Quake which was what introduced people to Unreal Tournament before the genre pretty much died out.

But then Descent is a bit different from even those games lol

[Gaijin Punch]

The learning curve for Descent is pretty high, which I've found turns off a lot of people. The pay off is big though. I still have my flight stick here somewhere... or did I trash it? I had one for ages and I don't think it survived my move 2 months ago. Stupid, as always.

[Greatsaintlouis]

I was going to come blazing in here to talk about how you can still buy the original three Descent games on GOG.com, but not anymore, apparently. Seems that Interplay has kindly been neglecting to pay royalties to the developers (who are still around!) for like 9 years, so Parallax terminated their sales agreement but is still somewhat shanghaied over Interplay's ownership of the trademark, or something like that.

But anyway, I remember the shareware version of Descent coming installed on one of the first Windows 95 computers they got at my high school. The levels got a little repetitive after a while, but once you really got a key configuration that let you easily slide in the different directions, it didn't matter because the design philosophy was (and still is) so unique. The developers actually seemed to approach the levels with the idea that since the player was granted six degrees of freedom, there was no point in keeping a constant "up" and "down" throughout the level. Plus there was always something so cool about destroying the reactor and having to remember/race to the level exit before the mine blew.

I bought a copy from GOG a few years back and found an engine remake that supports modern operating systems. If I can recall, I was actually able to get a pretty decent control setup using a DualShock 2-like USB gamepad.

[Gaijin Punch]

I had a flight stick for Descent 3 -- totally necessary. Huge learning curve but fun. Not sure if I'll be able to play this new one like that... and the one that the original developers have a kick starter for is single player only. :-/

[xorthen]

I remember when I was in in 6th grade back in 1995 when I was new to this school there was this kid on windows 95 playing Descent. I never got around to playing it myself but when I got the PS1 later that year there was a clip of descent on the demo disc that was included on the PS1 when you bought it that I would always watch over and over.