Descent 2

I was pleased and at smoothly these ancient games installed and ran on my machine. Of course, it never heard of the exotic buttons and hats on my Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 - forcing me to play all keyboard - but nonetheless the game is here in its old fury. One of the great shockers of the first two entries of Descent was in how truly 3-D the levels were - all notions of ceiling and floor were completely upset, forcing players to visualize their situation in completely new terms. No game since has dared challenge players with such mind twisting situations, and the freedom may have cost the game players with its steep learning curve (there are a lot of keys to learn with 6 degrees of movement). It may also have been a bit too much for nauseous stomachs, as Descent 3 was a lot more careful about establishing up and down and replacing the exotic (and somewhat frightening) alien menace with more prosaic Earthly foes. Nevertheless, action simply does not get more intense than it did in this series.

Thanks for bringing these two games back! They are among the first I played on PC, in addition to other classics like Doom, RoTT, Duke Nukem, etc. of the same era. I think this is the first and maybe only game I have played where a joystick was a distinct advantage. I used to be big on flight sims, and I could manage to play these using just the keyboard/mouse. Not Descent, though! Still trying to find that optimal control configuration to this day. Truly a classic in every sense. Gameplay that continues to impress, appropriate difficulty settings, and revolutionary in the FPS and simulation genres.

Human beings are not normally born with the ability to think in three dimensions. We don't fly or swim particularly well, we're land-dwellers, so we are used to conceptualizing our environment as a 2D plane. Even with the majority of so-called "3D" games, if you replaced the first-person camera with an overhead view, the gameplay would be largely the same. But not here. Descent is built around the concept that your world is true 3D. You are flying in a 3D space. You not only look around in 360 directions, but can rotate yourself forward/backward, right/left, and clockwise/counterclockwise. If you're used to WASD for movement, this is more like QWEASD for movement. As such, this game has a high learning curve, and not everyone will "get it" - if you are in love with more traditional FPSs, or particularly the more modern ones that simplify their interface with assisted aiming and similar qualities, you'll probably find this a bit frustrating. If you're used to mini-maps in 2d, trying to navigate your way through a series of mazes where the passages loop around each other can be maddening. But if you are willing to work at it or you just have unnaturally good spatial perception, you'll probably enjoy this as an FPS in a class of its own.

I remember the day I saw this. I was at the Egghead Software in my area and there was a very persnickety store worker there playing Descent I on a Gateway 2000 Pentium Tower PC. Man, that PC was the sh*t back then, I still remember looking at it. Anyway, he was playing this game which required the player to maneuaver in every which direction, I was in awe. What a game. I had to buy it. It ran flawlessly on my PC. At the time I was running it on a Packard Bell which I upgraded to a DX4-100 processor, and 16 Mb RAM. w00h00, those were the days. Computers were a lot more fun in those days, weren't they? That's why I like GOG.com so much. These guys bring back such good memories.

I never played this when it was originally released and found the controls annoying and pretty boring, guess I just don't have the nostalgia factor on this one.