Descent - My earliest gaming memory

jackshiels

New member
Hi folks,

I may only have one post count right now, but I'm more active over on http://www.mybroadband.co.za :D

Regardless, my favourite gaming memory is definitely Descent. At the time it was a pretty revolutionary due to the freedom of movement the engine supported. For the uninitiated, the game involves flying a ship around a mining asteroid that has been taken over by malevolent robots. What was so special about this was the fact that there was complete control over where and how you floated about the shafts - people today take these perks for granted but back in 1995 the idea was pretty far out. It was so alien at the time that many reviewers even complained of motion sickness :eek:

Descent_5.png


Battles were at times extremely difficult for my 4 year old self sitting on my Dad's knee, but we devised a unique control scheme - I would shoot whilst he directed the craft ;). I had the best times rescuing those poor prisoners. I remember that we even had nicknames for some of the enemies - one of them made a strange "munyeh" mechanical sound, so from then on they were called the munyehs :D

Our old Performa 5300 was pretty appalling looking back, what with half a meg of video ram and 32mb main memory, but it still managed to chug through and produce those awesome pixellated 3D graphics. There was no such thing as anistropic filtering back then so smooth textures were unheard of except in the realm of 3D modeling - the default resolution was something like 320x200! :cool:

All in all Descent is by far one of my favourite games ever - please tell me if your remember it too!
 
My best friend and I used to do the 1 person shoots and other person flies mission!

This was one of those games that we spent hours late in to the night on, eyes burning away on the old vrot monitor :)

Pretty good memory!
 
I so wanted to play the game and spend many hours trying. But just couldn't master it. Not sure if it was the controls or the game or my own self. Was constantly getting lost, or missing shots. In the end gave up - but remember and felt the WOW at being able to go in all directions and dimensions.
 
Used to use the mouse for aiming and of course the keyboard for movement, was used to it from flight sims, the joystick didn't work so lekker for some reason. Man I feel old, I was around 12/13 when this came out.
 
I suffer from motion sickness from certain games. Weirdly it happens more with COD but maybe that is because I am allergic to shitty games (haha I'm kidding lol) so the bobbing did get to me after a while with this game.
Still, I loved Descent and for the short bursts that I was able to play I really did enjoy this game.
In fact we bought Descent 1, Descent 2 and Atomic Bomberman for R99 back in the day (awesome deal back then btw) and never felt any regret. Awesome game.
As far as I know Descent 1 and 2 and freespace are all abandonware so you might want to link that up @ op
 
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