Descent: Revisited - A Videogame Review
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 23 июл 2024
- In this video I am revisiting the videogame series called "Descent" I made this video longer because I didn't feel like I really sold it in the first review. It took me a long time to make so I hope you enjoy it. Leave a like if you do!
If you are wondering where all the music came from, I downloaded it from here:
downloads.khinsider.com/game-...
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:39 Descent 1
0:40 The Story of Descent 1
2:00 The Gameplay of Descent 1
7:17 The Major Issue of Descent 1
7:42 Is it Worth It?
8:16 Descent 2
8:17 The Story of Descent 2
8:59 The Gameplay of Descent 2
12:55 Closing
Want to use the source port?
www.dxx-rebirth.com/
Want to buy Descent?
Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/27...
GOG: www.gog.com/game/descent
#Descent #DescentReview #DescentPC #DescentGame #review #gamereview #firstpersonshooter #fps #fpsgames 
Развлечения
I was addicted to this game in high school. In my classes all I could think about was getting home so I could play until bed.
I randomly came across this game in Goodwill one time when I was in college, and I definitely got addicted for awhile.
I spent so many hours on Descent, the freedom of movement after bingeing on Doom was an absolute revolution. I still can't understand why this franchise hasn't been continued.
I'm not sure. I would be interesting to play a new game in the style of the old. The next best thing is Overload, which is like Descent, but on crack
It has been continued, at least in some forms. There are tons of user levels, multiplayer games, and of course, those massive source upgrades that turn the game decently modern. DXX-Rebirth. But on the other hand, there is also Overload. Overload is a modern game made by some of the same people who made the original Descent.
I think the reason why there haven’t been more games like it is just that its such a strange environment and game style that doesn’t reflect real life in any way. Even Overload had great graphics and fun gameplay, but the levels looked nothing like a place a human would ever inhabit.
Freespace open....
One of the very few true 6 degrees of freedom and gameplay designs -- outside flight and space simulators.
Old king real
You said one of the very few. Do you know of any others? I really would love to know.
@@Wooskii1 Freespace
@@Wooskii1 Overload, Forsaken. 2 I know of
Descent was one of the first games I played on my first PC, back in 97, I'll never forget the sensation of blowing my first reactor and escaping the level. Simple mechanic, but extremely immersive. Even today I love games that ask me to leave the level after completion (like Star Wars Dark Forces).
This is the best Descent 1 & 2 review on youtube, very concise and well written. Thank you.
Deep Rock Galactic and Descent, very different games and yet there are similarities. You're mining underground, the locals want you dead, and at the end of the mission you only have a couple minutes to get back to the dropship before it leaves.... without you.
I love this game. But I really think they dropped the ball wirh hitscan enemy. That Guy Aline ruins the game Pace.
Also, the First leves até better
Descent 2 is the game responsible for training me as a kid to never lose my direction going upside down, loopdeloop, rolldiroll.
There's a reason why I favor playing Alien in AvP or always rolling in Ace Combat games.
I remember seeing my dad play Descent when I was a kid. Gaming was different back then.
I played this game so much. It's a total classic. I used to wonder what happened to the hostages after you escaped the mine, if not before, after picking them up. Vertigo 1 was quite a small craft after all lol
As someone in the later half of his forties, I can add something essential: Before Descent, there was never a true 3D 6-axis game on PC. It genuinely was the first in this regard.
But if you didn't grow up with 486'es and DOS gaming, you may have a hard time grasping that significance. Before, there was Wolfenstein 3D. Which wasn't fully 3D, the map was still 2D. Then there was Doom, which was still on a 2D map. You may even have heard of Duke Nukem, also from that era. 3D'ish, sure, but on a sinlge-plane map. At best that could be called 2.5D.
It's difficult to convey just how mind-blowing Descent was in this regard. Just calling it revolutionary doesn't quite capture _why_ it was so ground breaking. All of a sudden you had 6 degrees of freedom. Movement on 3 axis _and_ rotation around 3 axis. You had to use a lot more keys to properly get around! Up to this point, no game had done this! Keep in mind that this came out before the original Quake shook the PC gaming world.
In other words: the appreciation for this game really depends on what you experienced game-wise before you first encountered it. If that moment would be post-Quake it wouldn't be as impressive.
As a kid I was blown away by Descent 1 and 2. The 6 degrees of freedom, the enemies made of polygons (before Quake did it!) and the fully 3D map that you can rotate and zoom. It was a technological feat. And the gameplay, holy crap. As a kid, after having played pseudo-3D games like Doom and DN3D, I was so sure Descent was the future of first-person gaming. It's too bad that 6DOF shooters have been such a niche through the years.
Descent 2 was even better, with the guide bot. Some of my favourite memories were shooting flares at doors to open them from a distance (to prevent being ambushed), and firing guided missiles that let you fly them with a remote camera.
Even though I played all these retro games with keyboard only as a kid, I'm glad for modern remakes like DXX Rebirth and GZDoom. DXX Rebirth works great with a gamepad as well, letting me smoothly glide through the tunnels rather than the bumpy experience of KB/M.
haha yes wingnut was it? i also remember putting the cd-rom into my walkman one day and there were a bunch of random songs on it. cool little easter egg i miss those days :)
Descent kickstarted my obsession with controllers. I lost count of how many controllers I played it with. The most interesting was combining MS Strategic Commander for the left hand with a Logitech Force 3D Pro for the right!
@@MadsterV I tried it with a SpaceOrb, but quickly went back to M+KB
When I was a kid I could zoom around this game non-stop. Now it gets me motion sick pretty fast!
Excellent review, very well written and put together. I really enjoyed watching this. Descent is such an awesome game, it's insanely fun and challenging. I completed both D1 and 2 in 2019 and had an awesome time.
I am so glad you enjoyed it :D
Great video! Can't wait for your take on Descent 3 and all the games ever made!
one of my faves. Once i got bored I played all the levels upside down, and it went fine but after I finished I had serious vertigo and dizziness for several minutes.
This and terminal velocity were my go to games back then.
I’ve never heard of that game
This game was mind blowing back in the day, and Descent 2 just kicked it up even more.
I never got around to 3, but I heard 3 didn't do so well.
I played D3 not too long ago. It made me more frustrated than other games, but I eventually got over it. The levels are extremely long, like over 40 minutes for each one (at least for me). You should still check it out
@@Vardooman Long levels are fine. But the weapons feeling all super weak due to too fast ai on a too open space most of the time, while the ai got in D3 in reality really dumb, its just the speed, is what killed it for me. One of the main points I loved about Descent was the intelligent ai and the level design. I wouldve preferred more mines and less open space in D3 like in D1 and D2
The weapons feel super weak because it feels like they do barely damage, let alone that you have so much space very often and the ai dodges everything because theyre so fast now. And the frustrating part is, that this is what all is left from the descent ai. Otherwise they got really dumb. Not anymore the great intelligent ai D1 and D2 had.
But it wasnt parallax anymore and this shows.
Good review, i hope you make more of these.
I got one in the works! I am just waiting until I am no longer sick to record the voice over.
@@Vardooman yay
i never really played the single player campaign. however, where this game really shined was multiplayer deathmatches. me and my buddy's would get together and all bring our PCs on a friday evening to a friends house who had the space for 10 plus people and there bulky baege boxes plus bulkier CRTs and played this and command and conquer, warcraft 2 and revolt till late sunday night. man does where some dreadful and sleepy mondays at work. but it was soooo worth it.
descent was such a blast. to bad nobody is doing a modern take on this 90s gem.
that epic feel when you , after a long claustrophobic crawl through tight halls ,enter a monumental main room and then all hell breaks loose....
Loved these games while growing up. I look forward to your Descent 3 review!
That will have to be in a while. I am actually working on a new video right now. Nothing related to space shooters, this one is a survival game 😉
Very much looking forward to the Descent 3 video!
Just found this. Descent was the first game I ever owned myself. Changed my life...
This review is fantastic! Thank you!
I remember buying my first joystick to play Descent properly! Sadly, I only had a 386 back then, so gameplay was pretty choppy. My brother couldn't play it at all, due to motion sickness, but I pushed on through. (This was definitely one of those games, where the sticker on the box - "Plays better with Intel" - wasn't just a marketing gimmick!)
Overload was actually originally built as a Descent sequel and was even intended to carry the Descent name. The devs even had the rights to the name but there was a legal battle and in the end they got the rights to the game itself but not the name.
Thanks for this review. I loved D1 and 2 back when I was a student. Played the hell out of these games. And D2 even allowed for multi-player, the second game I've ever played in my college's LAN (the first being Doom 2). Ah, the memories...
Same. LAN parties for Descent and DOOM. Good times.
Great video! Such a unique game. Super surprised there hasn't been modern clones.
There is a somewhat recent remake. It’s not the same as descent but it plays a lot like it. It’s called overload and is made by people who worked on descent.
@@Vardooman Thanks! I'll check it out.
Heck yeah! Descent games are an experience, and Overload as far as I'm concerned is a true successor!!!!
Really good video, amazed that your subscriber count is so modest. Incremented by one :)
Haven't heard of descent until now, and i really like the uniqueness of this game. sorta reminds me of star wars. it is also cool and interesting that this is a 90's game, which makes it really impressive. the video also has great commentary, so nice job mate! keep up the good work.
I played this game in the 90s on our family's apple computer. We actually had a joystick that worked with it. Coolest fucking thing ever for me as a little kid at the time.
The first startup! The music and the first video sequence... I was blown away... Played it in multiplayer with my best friend with 9600 baud rate serial... One of the best multiplayer fun ever!
i am not sure about the keyboard statement because i remember playing the first one with a stick and keyboard combination. but yes it was an amazing game.
I do not own a flight stick, and I never got the mouse to work for DOS, the only option left was full keyboard
Not sure what kind of system you had, but the cutemouse driver from freedos should be able to detect and work with most mice. Other issues you might face is if trying to convert connectors, such as from USB to PS/2 or PS/2 to Serial, most adapters are passive and rely on the mouse to natively support the port. If they don't you either need an active adapter or a mouse native to the connector you're trying to use. Oh, also, to save memory load the mouse driver into high memory, cutemouse supports that. If you're on Dos 6.22 there's a program called memmaker that can automate optimizing memory.
Thanks for the video and effort you put into it. Have a lovely day.
mouse + keyboard? sheesh, get an oldschool joystick, son!
I feel like that would operate better, but I don’t have a flight stick 😅
@@Vardooman ebay is your friend ;)
@@daskraut TRUE
Just play the PlayStation version with colored lighting and a game controller. Joysticks were ok, and this game was designed for it, but mouse and keyboard has always been superior even on descent.
Using the mouse was actually controversial in multiplayer. People were really toxic about the improved aiming. Hell, the community was toxic about the decent 3 unofficial 1.5 patch, because it didn't support the Mac. It was a very regressive community.
I was not a fan of the regressive toxicity. The community ended up destroying itself, and the series IMO. Descent 3 was probably the worst they behaved, and the best game in the series.
Descent underground put the nail in the coffin though, being a scam from star citizen devs, heavily censored forums, and rife with blind fanboys. Hindsight is 20/20, but it took years and killed the franchise in the process.
@@JohnDoe-ip3oq the PlayStation version has decsent maximum, the extra campaign, right? I found a PC conversion of it
I hope you do a tour through all the other good "flight shooters" of the era. I was a big fan of Tie Fighter when it came out 20 years ago. I remember wanting that sith tattoo so bad.
I'll have to see. I'm working on the next video at the moment, and it's a zombie game. I felt like switching things up instead. I don't want people to be too repetitive.
This was a great game, and actually pretty easy to control well in 6 DOF just using keys. Great fun in multiplayer too.
the problem was a lot of keyboards back then did not support more than 2 or 3 keys pressed at the same time. i had a cherry keyboard that did not had this limitation and i outperformed my buddies with sidewinder joysticks with it on DM lans. this was my favorite game to play on lan parties.
@@gamingthunder6305 This is still a thing. It's called 'key rollover'.
USB keyboards are generally limited to 6 these days, though some really cheap ones might be just 2 or 3.
Nice mechanical keyboards using the PS2 port are usually unlimited.
Laptop integrated keyboards are all over the place. Again, the cheap ones might be as low as just 2 or 3.
I found a copy of Descent during a random trip to Goodwill back in college and got hooked! I haven't even played through the others yet.
10:46 That f*#@^ng Thief Bot was the bane of my existence back in the day! I hated that little f*&^%r with the power of a thousand suns. I became convinced that the damn thing had an actual personality the more I played.
Descent Max released on Playstation 1, it had a lighting and soundtrack overhaul and looked quite good at the time.
Truly loved this game, sunk hours into it and playing death match in it was just too much fun. Descent is one of the few games I actually outperformed my classmates in high school on :D
I absolutely lived this game and Descent II back in the day! I don't think I've ever even played the story mode though 😂 didn't even know it had a story! It was all about the online multi-player for me. I loved playing this game against other players online via the dial-up Kali gaming network back then! This was also the first time I got introduced to "hacking" videogames as well, as one of those online players showed me how you could hex edit the game to do stuff like clip through walls during multi-player matches, and get invincibility, unlimited ammo, etc.
Its the first game having 3D Model enemies. It wasnt quake. Right? :D
Also the AI is way ahead of its time. Not just a basic "run towards player in airline, shoot when in LOS" ai.
The skill level design is amazing too. Influencing all the indirect like shield powerup efficiency, ai aggressiveness, ai projectile speed, ai amount of shots per attack and so on is so much better than fighting against damage/HP multipliers or removed and replaced enemies and powerups. This way the gameplay stays the same experience and the weapons feel the same strong.
I absolutely love the level design. It fits so nice to the planets. It gets even better in Descent 2.
I'm disappointed about Descent 3 though. In Descent 3 on higher difficulties the weapons feel all super weak, the ai dodges way too fast on very wide space most of the time, while the ai got dumb too - they just fly fast, but all the intelligence and strategy and variety of strategies they had were suddenly gone in Descent 3. Very disappointed about that.
I wish dxx-rebirth would support VR though
One of my all time favorites, but I never beat it because I get sick of being perpetually lost after a while. Also the engine is highly underrated. Wish there had been other types of games made with it (or maybe there were and I just don't know bout them).
It would be cool, but I think some people have attempted to make their own level packs (missions) that are like a complete overhaul. I haven’t played any of them though.
Drillers ended so many of my runs as a kid. Still loved the game.
This review was great! never got to play those games, because using the keyboard for it looked too complex for me at the time. Do you know if it plays well with a Joystick? I still have my old MS sidewinder force feedback2
Glad you enjoyed it! I have not played this game with a joystick because I myself don't own one. I have a feeling it would play well though.
Man, this is the first game series I have any memory of, so I've got a seriously rose-tinted memory. So much I could say about this. I got all the extra missions I could find for this. I ended up making my own levels with the mission builder (which still exists in the form of DLE XP). In a way, I think this prepped me as a child to learn how to use CAD software later. I played this some on an early 3D VR helmet called the VFX1, which is a lot like modern VR actually - right down to the nausea. Oh, and mouses sucked in the mid 90s. Had to be very careful not to press too many keys at once or it would overload the few keyboard interrupts you had when you tried to tri-chord with only a keyboard.
1 Comfortably played D1 + 2 on Hotshot with keyboard only. Took many hours of practice, but I loved these games anyways.
2 I also love the Class A driller, because its AI allows it to play hide and seek. A single homing missile is enough, but that guy won't just sit there and take it. Yes, I actually enjoy hunting these guys down.
2b Descent 2 did have hitscan vulcans (IIRC, at least close to), if you turned up the difficulty. Those small ITDs are now the new Class A driller (albeit weaker) and you'll face them constantly from level one onwards.
3 D1's music would start over on level 23, as there were only 22 tracks + 5 more for credits, menus etc.
4 As for motion sickness: turn off "auto leveling"! 11:46 ... the game automatically tries to align your ship to the surface below, so you're constantly getting rolled around. Turn that crap off and you'll glide to the mines much more smoothly.
5 If you have one of these 3D TVs, which you barely used, give Descent a shot in stereoscopic.
Jeez you must be a master with keyboard then 😅
Great Review. Good times on my 486PC.
Thanks for the comment!
I'm fairly certain I used to play Descent with CH Flightstick back in the 90's. It was truly a marvelous game. I don't think I ever beat this though, the levels got so complex and enemies so numerous that my computer just died. 6 degrees of freedom reminds me bit of Aliens vs. Predator, the old one.. you should check it out if you haven't. It's got playable xenomorph which is also quite disorienting to play as it can run along walls and ceilings while predators and humans are confined to just ground. Super cool level design for xenomorphs.
You haven't played Decent until you had Team Anarchy matches over the company's LAN at 2 PM. 😂
i have broken seven joysticks over my lifetime and every single one was because of this series
Haha, poor joysticks
The creator of Decent has recently made a VR game which is the spiritual successor to Decent. Its pretty much Decent VR. It's really good.
If you are taking about Overload, then yes I have played it! It’s really good. I’ve also tried it in VR and holy cow it’s pretty nauseating.
Overloads the one. I couldn't think of the name. Really enjoyed going through it in vr. But I have a good vr stomach.
My first experience with Descent is back when the Gorillaz first album came out. My friend was showing me the game while we were listening to the album. I had just found my first hostage when M1A1 came on. If you're not familiar with the song, there's a spooky bit at the beginning where someone is desperately pleading "hello! Let me out of here!". I thought it was in the game and was blown away with the detail only to realize it was the song. To this day I think that song title sounds like a Doom or other boomer shooter level name. Like Mission 1 Area 1.
Used to play this as a kid with my younger brother. I used to pilot the ship and he used to shoot. Fast Forward to today, there's this game called Overload, Spiritual successor to the Descent Series. I hope you have tried that one as well.
That must've taken a lot of cooperation between you and your brother to successfully blow up mines. I couldn't imagine someone else controlling the ship while I shoot 😂Also, I have heard and played Overload, it is very well made.
@@Vardooman yeah you know how moms are. Take your younger brother to play with you. 😂
Thanks and make sure to follow up with Freespace!
I remember using mouse and joystick on these games as a kid.
3:03 I don't remember exactly why or how, but I used to play Descent keyboard only as a kid too... something to do with these shoddy early mouses back then I guess... the stubborness we have as kids to achieve something is interesting to look back upon 🤣🤣should have used all that energy to learn how to code 🤣👍
Not sure if it's a false memory, but I could swear I played Descent 1&2 in DOS with mouse and keyboard back when they came out.
Someone else in the comments said that it was possible, I just think I never got it to work
@@Vardooman
Played D1 with mouse and keyboard from the start. It was pretty much the only way to be competitive in multiplayer.
Not a bad video at all! As a fan of the series, Descent and Descent 2 do allow for play with a mouse and keyboard. Select the mouse as the control method, then customize your keyboard controls to use the appropriate buttons for movement. I'm a fan of WSAD for forward/back/left/right, Space for slide up, C for slide down, and Q/E for rolling left/right.
I might have configured the mouse wrong and it never worked, I don’t even remember 😂 I am glad you enjoyed the video too!
now you gotta play the successors: Freespace 1 and 2.
the pinnacle of Volition/Interplay.
I have not returned to descent since fall 2010. But this game was a big part of my game rotation growing up.
As a kid I owned the demo version which came free with the family pentium overdrive 200 machine. Then shortly after my dad bought descent 2. I sunk so many hours in this in the lower difficulties. I do not think I beat the game without cheats as a kid though it was not until spring semester of my freshman year of college in 2009 that I finally beat descent 2 all the way through in one of the hardest difficulties without cheating. By fall 2010 i got a full copy of the original game, played through it for the first time, then immediately went to descent 2 again where everything while a lot easier, was an overall better experience because lack of cheap fights.
Descent 3 was my goto game for a little over a year in around 2001. It bought it when it dropped to 10$, and played through the game once and spent hours upon hours playing monster ball in multi player. I have attempted to play descent 3 again over the years, such as when I last beat descent 2 again in 2010, but descent 3 just has not aged as well in regards to the feel. In Descent 3 it always felt while technically a 6 degrees of freedom like its predecessors, the title forced your camera in certain orientations.
Well, i started playing this game when i was like 5-7 years old and since that time i was quite often playing games through my life. I found that all parts of Descent are in Steam (and i was really amazed by this fact, instantly bought it like 2-3 weeks ago). All i wanna say that even ACE difficulty is so hard and requires actual effort to beat it. Old gaming experience, not this new casual model.
Also level 7 on Desc 1 was my like daily routine where i was loading after red door for couple weeks and tried hard and finally did it lol.
p.s. when i started playing this again couple weeks ago with mouse and kb, i was truly amazed at how i managed to control with basic keybindings when i was kid lol
Not too long ago I was playing Descent 3 because I needed footage for a video and I was playing on hotshot. Holy crap I have never changed the difficulty back to rookie so fast. I was struggling on the first two robots. I like to think I'm good at the Descent series, but guess not 😂
@@Vardooman that's an answer for me, why there's no descent 3 video :D
The story is perfectly fine. A good story doesnt have to be book length.
I was watching this video wondering why the music sounded SO, so different to me, but then I remembered, I played this game on MAC, and it must have had different sound processing. Anyone else experiencing this?
I just checked out lunar outpost's track for MAC and yeah it is different. I think someone composed another version of the OST for it, which explains why it sounds similar but different. Majority of the tracks I used for background music were for DOS using Roland's SC-55 soundfont.
@@Vardooman cool! I know very little about DOS but that sounds right👍. Also, Level 4's music is forever stuck in my head cause I could never get past the big bad in the lava room lol
we used to play this at the college computer lab :D
That sounds like it was fun
When I play this game, I use both the wasd and arrow keys to move and look around. I haven't tried using mouse look.
Overload is a worthy successor.
I've started to play it, never finished it though.
3:12 I played and play it only (!) with keyboard! 😁 Most of the ship’s controls are on the numpad and that’s how I used it to play when I was 15 and never changed it. I fly the ship as flying with a joystick - nearly 30 years of muscle memory 😅
Haha nice. I could probably beat it with just keyboard, but I'd have to turn down the sensitivity LOL!
Note: Some of the best players play keyboard-only. The mouse simply doesn't have enough degrees of freedom/buttons to be worth it. There's a guy making 100% insane speedruns on RUclips who does that, for example.
Interesting, I wonder how long they've been playing for.
I want to play this again, glad to hear there are port cause last time I tried it was a mess. I definitely played a lot of Descent when I was a kid, but I used a joystick (My dad's friend apparently brought it to work and let him borrow because "he couldn't get any work done with it around". I don't remember if it was 1 or 2, but I think it was around '98...
I need to check out the 3rd game, I've never seen it.
The third game is quite interesting, it took a bit to run which is part of the reason why I was a bit infuriated by it. To me it felt so different compared to 1 and 2. The enemies also made me a bit angry, but I feel like that may have just been my poor shooter skills, but I still think its worth a try.
I never, ever got motion sickness playing Descent while growing up, and still don't today. I find it strange that there are only 2 games that have ever done this to me:
007: Nightfire for the Gamecube, after playing all day
and
Half-Life 2 for the PC, after roughly 15 minutes(!) of play. At this point I'm pretty sure people are just wired differently.
Also worth mentioning that Descent 1 actually does have more than 1 soundtrack. There's the original MIDI, and separate, non-MIDI renditions that were created for the Macplay and Playstation versions, with real-sounding, heavy metal & synth-pop instrumentation. Some of these were even entirely new compositions, not covering the original.
Hardcore fans tend to hate the 2nd soundtrack, but I actually love it. Maybe that's because I played Descent on the Mac as a kid and not the original DOS.
I use the Dxx port that review author mentioned, and actually downloaded the Macplay/Playstation OST just to put in the game files for my experience. Also in my car. :D
nice video!
I’m glad you liked it 😄
use the numpad keys for turning in descent its the best way to play
when i was a kid i never messed with the controller settings it was scary to me lol
I can't be one hundred percent for certain but I vaguely remembered descent actually starting as a quake mod and then the game had such promise that a publisher picked it up and pay them to develop a full standalone game.
That wouldn’t be the case. Descent came out a year before Quake did, but there is some possibility that it could be true.
Looks and plays like Forsaken for the Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64. I liked that game a lot.
im sure forsaken was inspired by descent. but i personally always prefered descent over forsaken, even too it was the preatier game because of its multiplayer mode.
You should check out forsaken if you like descent, probably the best descent clone I've played
I don't think I've heard of that title before. I'll have to check it out sometime
I personally find Descent 2 harder. Trainee was made easier though.
At insane the Material Centers (the purple walls which spawn robots) are also now infinite waves. In Descent 1 it was also on insane 3 waves
On the high difficulties I really must say the difficulty is rather increased.
Finally! Someone who DIDN'T like Half Life! I knew you existed! "The the plot's so good!" The fans cry. Er, Steven King, The Mist, 1980? (but I must admit, seen the movie, never read the book so...?) And whats with the 'kill a few enemies then spend 2 hours in a huge maze working out how to get out only to enter another huge maze, kill a few enemies then spend...?' Game loop? How is that enjoyable as apposed to face palm boring? It's like the early Lara Croft games. How is running around a maze for hours looking for a lever fun? Man. Didn't get it, don't get it, will never get it. But hey, they're real popular games so, guess that's just me. Descent 1 and 2? Belong squarely next to Doom and better than Quake in my book. Bought an analog joystick with thruster for this game and if you ain't pedal to the metal, finger firmly on the trigger? Your going the wrong way. Strangely, the last modern game that brought back these feelings? Nier Automata. Played it on a pc with a controller. In my 50's and still banging bad guys. Waiting for Overload (lets see if I puke in VR!!!) and Boltgun to come on sale on Steam and off we go again! Thanks for the trip down memory lane dude - rocking!
My friend played it while I was watching and it was late and I needed to go home from him. It took like 2-3 hours whole section but before I left I vomited his toilet. My first experience with it.
Well that's certainly an unforgettable first experience
@@Vardooman only game which made me flat stomach 🐵
The thumbnail looks like a smiley face.
I play only with keyboard and I can get quite far on the Ace skill level. Although I will say that you could play the original DOS version with mouse & keyboard-You had to install a mouse dos driver.
Love the game. Playing it currently on PS1. BTW... you finish all 27 levels in 6 hours?
Yes, I did finish all the levels in 6ish hours.
Will you get to decent freespace and freespace 2?
I have never played either of those games so I am not entirely sure.
@@Vardooman highly recommend them they are some of the greats for flight Sims and very story rich. Made by the same people
Why do you say that the Descent 1 final boss room is poorly designed?
I thought it was great when I was a kid.
Very challenging, but ultimately doable if you've mastered 6DOF movement.
For some reason I remember using a 3 axis joystick?
that kind of Joystick was the supposed controller, or a 4-axis one. At that time you could either have a joystick with 4-axis but only press one button at a time, or 3-axis and press 2 buttons at the same time
I was pretty disappointed learning from creating test maps on Descent 2’s level editor that the Class 1 Driller and Red Hulk didn’t have the same terrifying sound and damage. The red haze too when getting hit was severely toned down 🫠
Level 27 boss is easy. You can literally kill it invulnerable ^^ Find the secrets :P
The Descent 2 final boss was difficult, yes. In general Descent 2 bosses are much tougher :)
I had a demo of the first level early in the PS1 days and thought the freedom of movement was interesting but not enough to actually buy the game
Grew up with this game
I bet you dumped hours into playing it 😂
AMD Athlon and Pentium II PCs intensified!
you can easily do mouse and keyboard in dos. (I'm 5 levels in playing it that way in dosbox)
9:57 You clearly forgot about the Gauss Cannon Driller, right? :D
Overload is another great game in the same flavor and some of the same devs, but built using modern tech.
Love this game. The Pyro GX is my favoritel little ship!
Please tell me you have checked out Overload, same developers. Feels exactly like Descent, just better overall. Very hard but fair, no Bullshit enemies like the driller.
Yes I have! I actually own the game but I haven’t finished it. I could probably review it eventually, but I have been very busy and I just did descent. Don’t want to seem too repetitive
The phenomenon 'Computer game skill' didn't event exist......... until Descent.
ps: The loborinthic design is one of the coolest thing of the
game.
PPS: don't ever, EVER, compare Descent to Duke Nukem or Doom!
for the rest, nice vid :)
I wish they’d make more 6dof games!I’ve completed Descent 1&2 on insane, overload and sublevel zero redux on the hardest difficulties. Anyone have suggestions on other 6dof descent like games out there?
0:48 I like you.
"The one you don't want to hear sounds like a digitized power drill"
Ohhhhhhhhh..... It's a *DRILL*? I spent my whole life thinking it was supposed to sound like a pig.
The original on DOS does also have mouse control. People thought I was insane, but I played mouse and keyboard the whole way through. Apparently the "right" way to do it was with a joystick. Pssshhh... I also use inverted mouse, so I guess maybe I am insane?
I excelled at M+KB, would they play doom with a controller? Probably not, no reason to do it here either.
Descent: Freespace and (especially) Freespace 2
Freespace/ Freespace silent threat / Freespace 2 / Freespace Open project hold a spot in the top 5 best games of all time