Descent

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.

Raising the price by 100% out of nowhere is diabolical...Or as you would say in German...Interplay hat wohl zu viel Lack gesoffen.

I've played quite a few old school shooters and I have to say that this one was the hardest by far. That's comparing it to Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen and even Blood which I thought was pretty tough until I got to this game. Other people on the internet said how tough this game was due to hit scanning enemies and boy were they right. When playing on hotshot or normal mode, they'll rip right through your shields in just a few seconds. Homing missile enemies are likewise brutal. These two types of enemies are always lying in wait to give you cheap deaths. Combine that with the fact that this plays more like a 3D shooter with extra lives and they just crank up the difficulty through the roof. You will die over and over and that's by design. Sometimes dying is a good option to get more health and energy for your weapons, but if you die in a bad spot, good luck getting all of your equipment back. Some of the equipment sucks pretty badly too. The supposed strongest gun in the game, the fusion gun, just doesn't work well at all. I didn't find much use for proximity mines either. I used the DX Rebirth mod to update the visuals and controls so I can play on my TV and I have to say that it works really, really well. The visuals are basically just upscaled, but I didn't turn on any of the new special effects since I wanted it to look as close to the original graphics as possible. Playing this game with a controller worked really well also. I had to tweak it a bit, but eventually I got it just right. Hopefully my ranting about the difficulty doesn't turn you off, but if you want a less frustrating time do NOT play on hotshot difficulty your first time through. The first few levels will trick you into thinking it isn't that bad and then wake you up to reality real quick.

Descent is a "first person shooter" in maze like levels and six degrees of freedom. Every mission you have one main goal: destroy the reactor core, then get the hell out. On your way you destroy robots, rescue miners and collect weapons. It's simple, but fun. The graphics is great for the time, the music is freaking awesome, the controls are buttery smooth, and it's just fun to blow up shit. It would be perfect, if not for a few very annoying things. Most of the enemies are using projectile weapons, which you can dodge, but there is a specific droid that uses a hitscan minigun, which eats up your armor in seconds, and you cannot avoid it. The other annoying robot is the one that uses homing missiles, which - you guessed it - cannot avoid. These two enemies ruin the game. It makes the run-and-gun awesomeness into a carefully-peak-into-every-corner and save-every-five-second chore. Other things I don't like: the game is not very generous with the health. By that I mean you can barely find any. There is a life system, so if you die, you respawn at the start of the level with max health (but you have to collect all your weapons and upgrades), so sometimes the best way is just to commit suicide in a safe spot then go forward with max health. It would have been cool if there are shield rechargers (like energy rechargers), or the enemies would drop more health. I really hate the droid respawner too, which spawns infinite number of droids (if the existing ones were not enough already). The level design can be confusing too, imagine Wolfenstein 3D mazes, but in full 3D. Fortunately, the map is very good and easy to navigate, so that helps a lot, but without that, you have absolutely no idea where even up or down is. There is a great source port for Descent called D1X-Rebirth, which I highly recommend using instead of DosBox. So all in all, awesome game, but HARD as balls with lot of cheap deaths and artificial difficulty. Proceed with extreme caution.

... and that's - of course - Descent III :-) I'll keep those boxes on an altar for ever on. The interesting thing is that there are open source projects that let you play D1 and D2 on fresh game engines a lot faster and better than the original. See http://d1x.warpcore.org/ - http://icculus.org/d2x/ - http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html - http://www.dxx-rebirth.com/. You still need the original data files, of course ... which is where GOG comes in :)