I was reminded of, and in the mood, to play Descent. If you don’t know, it was the first fps to be actually 3D, and not just kinda-3D like Doom or Wolfenstein. It predates Quake by about a little over a year. The first time I played it I got nauseous. I actually mostly played Descent II as a kid because we didn’t own Descent 1. My friend did. Also, it wasn’t until a few years later that I realized the correct way to configure the controls for a game like this. I played a lot of Descent II with keyboard-only, very poorly.
If you don’t know, Descent is kind of a mix between a freespace shooter like TIE Fighter and an FPS. You are in a space fighter that can fly every which way with complete freedom. You are in zero gravity outer space, so if you touch nothing, your ship just hovers wherever it is. You have complete control over pitch, yaw, roll, forward, reverse, and strafe on both axes. There is no physics or anything like a TIE Fighter. You can turn on a dime. Just complete freedom of movement in 3D space.
But unlike other freespace shooters, you are trapped inside a maze, like Doom or Wolfenstein. You are all walled in all the time. You get colored keys to open more of the map as well. The one difference is that every level has a Metroid style escape sequence. You find the core, blow it up, then race to the exit.
Anyway, the games are available on GoG, where I already owned them. I tried to play them there, which uses the original DOS release of the game plus DOSBox. It worked, but was not terrific. I tried to update the DOSBox config to make it better and then I found out that there’s actually a better way. Some fans have made a game engine called DXX-Rebirth. It’s a lot like ZDoom and friends. You get this engine, then you copy over some files from your official copy of Descent in order to play the game with updated features for modern times like improved graphics and controls.
https://www.dxx-rebirth.com/
What’s more, this project is under active development. The latest commit on their Github is only 13 days old as of this posting. I tried it out, and I can confirm it’s terrific. I was playing Descent 1 with perfect controls in 4K resolution. Dang, that game really holds up well thanks to this new engine.
There have been a few attempts to make Descent-ish games in recent times. Most notable was Overload.
Sadly, it didn’t rock the world. No matter how much you polish it, I don’t think there’s any way to make a game in this genre that doesn’t demand so much from the player in terms of controls. The lack of accessibility will prevent it from ever being a huge success. But if the game is accessible to you, I highly recommend playing the original Descent games, and continuing in chronological release order if you enjoy.
Kickass music also, especially Descent II. I used to put that CD-ROM for that game in my discman and just listen to the soundtrack.
