Postby Greatsaintlouis » Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:41 am
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.
You also distaste me with passion!