Descent was ahead of its time. Are there any modern games that are similar?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/
Overload. It was made by the old devs of the original Descent.
I think there are custom maps that recreate the original Descent levels.
Miner Wars 2081 has similarities. Same people who made Space Engineers.
Brilliant game.
Worth playing with the PS1 Descent soundtrack too for a different experience (or Descent Maximum as it was across the pond), it got me in to Type O-Negative too.
I never played Descent itself, but I played a shitty clone on one of those “1000 Games on 10 CD-ROMs” packs back in the day.
After learning about the source material, I always wanted to go try it but haven’t taken the time.
This game holds a special place in my life. Back in the 90s we had it on the family PC and it was so awesome.
Every once in a while I play it on DOSBox. I fully recomend it. It’s an amazing game.
Great game, but I could never play it for more than ten minutes at a time before getting woozy and nauseous.
Fuck yes, Descent 2 was even better, with your small helper robot and even more cool weapons/rockets.
I used to play the hell out of both 1&2, but now my old brain can no longer compute the 360 movement in a claustrophobic environment.
I remember playing this on my Voodoo graphics card back in the day.
I always wanted to check it out again, but there are no proper discounts of this game anymore, and the price even increased to 20€ a couple of months back. Who thinks that anybody will buy Descent with DOSBox for 20€ in 2025? Might as well just use my old pirated copy on a burned CD I have somewhere.
Playing on a Pentium with 3D accelerator was a blessing and a curse. Multiplayer Descent 2 with someone who used one was wild. The game used client-side calculations that would break if your computer was fast.
Enemy homing missile trajectory was calculated per frame, so they were extremely difficult to avoid. At the same time, weapons like the gauss or plasma beam would shoot per frame, so you could kill an opponent so fast that it seemed instantanous on their end.
I played the shit out of this. I bet the controls are still hard coded in me.
I remember spending hours configuring the controls to something I would like. Mouse aiming? Never heard of it!
All I remember from my scheme was that A and Z were for up and down. Orientation probably with the cursor keys. I know I had something on capslock and shift. Maybe forwards and backwards.
You rolled with Q and W, dude.
One of the few games from my childhood that I don’t have a copy of on any modern library. :(
Descent was one of the first games I had to play, I remember it fondly. It came bundled with my family’s first computer (along with Lemmings and Simcity 2000) so I spent a fair amount of time on it. The freedom of motion you had in Descent was impressive - albeit easy to confuse yourself with - and something I have rarely seen since.
Nausea has never been as fun as it was back then.
FYI, there’s a modern Descent-like game called Overload.
It has VR support.
I used to have an early VR headset. With 3DoF headtracking, 640x480 at 60 Hz (combined, so actually every eye got only half of that). Descent supported stereoscopic 3D and the headtracking could be added to almost every game with a mouse driver. It was bad. Really bad. Descent alone could be nausea inducing. In VR it was a literal pukefest. Still I had to try it every few months or so, because it was so cool on paper.
I would really to try out this VR headset, almost as technology history type project.
Unfortunately it died a few years ago.
Man I friggin loved Descent II. Game was so fun and immersive. I watched that opening cinematic over and over. The soundtrack was fantastic as well.
I later went and played Descent 1 as well but 2 was the one I played the most.
I was in a computer club in High School. So we were able to play a few games in the computer lab after school. The teacher that headed it absolutely loved playing Descent, but she was also so bad at it that it was pure blind luck if she ever actually hit anyone.
Descent II has maybe the most unique soundtrack I have ever heard in a game.
It really was incredible. Especially back then when I hadn’t had much exposure yet to that style of music. The fact that it was CD quality instead of midi really helped.
I vividly remember discovering how you could just put the game disk in a regular CD player and it’d work. Kinda blew my mind lol.
If you liked and miss Decent, check out Overload on Steam. It’s great.
For those that don’t know, this was made by the original Descent devs. It’s also great on Deck.
Fun fact: Overload supports VR.
It didn’t make me motion sick, so I’m confident nothing ever will.
The resemblance is immediately obvious. Didn’t know this existed. Thanks.
It’s made by the original Descent devs and it genuinely slaps :)
Already bought it. It’s the Descent IV we never got 20 years ago. Dang, been a while since I thought of the dev drama surrounding these games.
