Retro Games Beaten
Jun 22, 2021 5:59:58 GMT -5
Post by anayo on Jun 22, 2021 5:59:58 GMT -5
2c) Warcraft II: Beyond The Dark Portal (human campaign)
26) The Operative: No One Lives Forever
27) Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D
28a) Warcraft III (Human Campaign)
29) Descent
About 25 years ago I had a game called Faceball 2000. It was a first person shooter for the Gameboy. If that sounds like a bunch of cave men trying to build a rocket to land on the moon, that’s because it was. All of Faceball 2000’s enemies were smiley faces and all of the weapons were single-shot nerf guns. There was no strafing, texture maps, or frame rates measured with more than one digit. Once in the late 90’s I took Faceball 2000 over to a friend’s house and showed it to him. Rather than curling his lip in disgust, my friend lost all interest in playing outside in favor of shooting grayscale smiley faces. It just cast a spell on him.
The point of that story is that while I do not personally remember Descent, I remember when the likes of Faceball 2000 could turn heads, so I’m uniquely qualified to understand why Descent thrilled people in 1995. A perusal of LGR’s YouTube channel taught me that editors of PC magazines used to include Descent in their charts when benchmarking new 3D accelerator cards. I have no doubt there were consumers who spent hundreds of dollars for a better Descent experience. But I also understand why the qualities that made Descent exceptional in 1995 aren’t so special anymore in 2021. Reconciling these two realities isn’t easy.
Fundamentally, Descent is Doom. You enter a dungeon where you must find three colored keys corresponding with three colored doors. Unlock them all and you advance to the next maze. Enemies lurk around every corner, growing more powerful and numerous with each stage. At the same time, newfound weapons increase your firepower, fueling an arms race between you and the enemies.
Descent differs from Doom in that Doom is fundamentally flat, with visuals which are actually 2D images extruded to appear 3D. Doom may look three dimensional, but in reality it’s more like Robotron 2084 confined to a first person view. Descent, on the other hand, actually supports 3D X-Y-Z space. You can go in any direction in a zero-gravity environment, even clearing a stage while standing on your head if you want.
I understand how this makes Descent stand out from Doom, but in practice it introduces new blindspots and obstacles to threat management. Far too often I would enter a room and inexplicably begin taking damage. I’d look to the left, but there was nothing there. I’d look to the right, with the same result. I’d look up and there’d still be no sign of anything. Then finally I’d look down and see a drone emptying a chain gun into my hull. If I wasn’t dead by then I could dispatch him, but only after three quarters of my life bar had vanished.
Upon entering a room in Doom, I felt as though I got a fair chance to take stock of what I was up against and prioritize threats. Even when I got ambushed, the process of elimination was less overwhelming since the angles from whence I could take fire were confined to the directions of a compass. But in Descent each room felt like a dice roll which could fine me with a health bar tax for reasons beyond my control. I’d focus on one enemy, only for another to appear out of nowhere and stab me in the back, leaving me dead and lifeless before I could even realize he was there. I also noticed Descent really likes to hide enemies behind doors and around corners. These enemies could omnisciently anticipate me, melting away valuable health points before I could react. Worse yet, health is a limited resource in Descent. These “sneak attacks” would add up, leaving me feeling like I was trying to get through the rest of the month with $20 in my bank account.
I acknowledge that finite health was standard operating procedure then - after all, even Doom doled out health kits, and once you used them all, that was it. But Descent differs from Doom in that lives are also a finite resource, and if you run out of those you game over and start from the very beginning, as though this PC game with 27 stages were a coin-operated arcade game. So, unsure of how else to get the upper hand, I began save scumming the living daylights out of Descent. I would save every time I:
- got ready to enter a room
- killed an enemy
- picked up a significant power up
The question begs asking why I finished Descent if it was so frustrating. Descent is from a time when the “pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher” arsenal wasn’t stale yet. So, while Descent’s weapons seem unimaginative today, in practice they prove useful in different combat situations, and getting a feel for what kind of ordinance to use in which kind of engagement is gratifying. The game incentivizes killing enemies in really tedious ways, but I seem to derive perverse satisfaction from poking holes in enemy AI. I had to do lot of that to prevail. One detail I liked was how I’d get points for killing enemies, although this didn’t appeal to me for the reasons you might expect. I couldn’t figure out how to play this at a resolution any higher than 320 x 240, making it hard to discern whether I had killed distant foes. But 1000 points suddenly added to my score was a surefire sign that my target was dead. I also liked to peek around corners, lob missiles at my foes, then take cover. Getting points for a dead enemy was reassuring visual feedback and just felt “right.” Aside from that, I like the old “three colored keys, three colored doors” formula. It’s comfy and I never seem to tire of it.
One quality I love about PC games from the 90’s is their nihilistic edginess, as though you’re supposed to lock your door and hope Mom doesn’t catch you playing. Descent lacks this quality. I can’t even say this is because I prefer skeletons and heavy metal over robots clinically firing laser beams at each other, since Mechwarrior 2 has the exact same premise but I found its missions and world to be vastly more memorable than Descent’s. It also occurs to me that I have a hard time remembering any of Descent’s stages. In my mind’s eye I can return to Duke 3D, Doom, or Mechwarrior 2 but when I try to do that with Descent all I get is “Oh yeah, that one stage where I… uh… err… wait, which stage was that again?” That aspect reminds me a little of Quake II, although it’s probably better to think of Descent as the evolutionary relative of something like Asteroids rather than an actual FPS. Descent is certainly not as obsolete as Faceball 2000. If that had been the case I wouldn’t have finished it. But time has not been kind to Descent.
I recommend Descent for exactly two kinds of people:
- People who are nostalgic for MS-DOS gaming (I belong to this category).
- People who are nostalgic for Descent.
For anyone else this might be a really hard sell.
26) The Operative: No One Lives Forever
27) Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D
28a) Warcraft III (Human Campaign)
29) Descent
About 25 years ago I had a game called Faceball 2000. It was a first person shooter for the Gameboy. If that sounds like a bunch of cave men trying to build a rocket to land on the moon, that’s because it was. All of Faceball 2000’s enemies were smiley faces and all of the weapons were single-shot nerf guns. There was no strafing, texture maps, or frame rates measured with more than one digit. Once in the late 90’s I took Faceball 2000 over to a friend’s house and showed it to him. Rather than curling his lip in disgust, my friend lost all interest in playing outside in favor of shooting grayscale smiley faces. It just cast a spell on him.
The point of that story is that while I do not personally remember Descent, I remember when the likes of Faceball 2000 could turn heads, so I’m uniquely qualified to understand why Descent thrilled people in 1995. A perusal of LGR’s YouTube channel taught me that editors of PC magazines used to include Descent in their charts when benchmarking new 3D accelerator cards. I have no doubt there were consumers who spent hundreds of dollars for a better Descent experience. But I also understand why the qualities that made Descent exceptional in 1995 aren’t so special anymore in 2021. Reconciling these two realities isn’t easy.
Fundamentally, Descent is Doom. You enter a dungeon where you must find three colored keys corresponding with three colored doors. Unlock them all and you advance to the next maze. Enemies lurk around every corner, growing more powerful and numerous with each stage. At the same time, newfound weapons increase your firepower, fueling an arms race between you and the enemies.
Descent differs from Doom in that Doom is fundamentally flat, with visuals which are actually 2D images extruded to appear 3D. Doom may look three dimensional, but in reality it’s more like Robotron 2084 confined to a first person view. Descent, on the other hand, actually supports 3D X-Y-Z space. You can go in any direction in a zero-gravity environment, even clearing a stage while standing on your head if you want.
I understand how this makes Descent stand out from Doom, but in practice it introduces new blindspots and obstacles to threat management. Far too often I would enter a room and inexplicably begin taking damage. I’d look to the left, but there was nothing there. I’d look to the right, with the same result. I’d look up and there’d still be no sign of anything. Then finally I’d look down and see a drone emptying a chain gun into my hull. If I wasn’t dead by then I could dispatch him, but only after three quarters of my life bar had vanished.
Upon entering a room in Doom, I felt as though I got a fair chance to take stock of what I was up against and prioritize threats. Even when I got ambushed, the process of elimination was less overwhelming since the angles from whence I could take fire were confined to the directions of a compass. But in Descent each room felt like a dice roll which could fine me with a health bar tax for reasons beyond my control. I’d focus on one enemy, only for another to appear out of nowhere and stab me in the back, leaving me dead and lifeless before I could even realize he was there. I also noticed Descent really likes to hide enemies behind doors and around corners. These enemies could omnisciently anticipate me, melting away valuable health points before I could react. Worse yet, health is a limited resource in Descent. These “sneak attacks” would add up, leaving me feeling like I was trying to get through the rest of the month with $20 in my bank account.
I acknowledge that finite health was standard operating procedure then - after all, even Doom doled out health kits, and once you used them all, that was it. But Descent differs from Doom in that lives are also a finite resource, and if you run out of those you game over and start from the very beginning, as though this PC game with 27 stages were a coin-operated arcade game. So, unsure of how else to get the upper hand, I began save scumming the living daylights out of Descent. I would save every time I:
- got ready to enter a room
- killed an enemy
- picked up a significant power up
The question begs asking why I finished Descent if it was so frustrating. Descent is from a time when the “pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher” arsenal wasn’t stale yet. So, while Descent’s weapons seem unimaginative today, in practice they prove useful in different combat situations, and getting a feel for what kind of ordinance to use in which kind of engagement is gratifying. The game incentivizes killing enemies in really tedious ways, but I seem to derive perverse satisfaction from poking holes in enemy AI. I had to do lot of that to prevail. One detail I liked was how I’d get points for killing enemies, although this didn’t appeal to me for the reasons you might expect. I couldn’t figure out how to play this at a resolution any higher than 320 x 240, making it hard to discern whether I had killed distant foes. But 1000 points suddenly added to my score was a surefire sign that my target was dead. I also liked to peek around corners, lob missiles at my foes, then take cover. Getting points for a dead enemy was reassuring visual feedback and just felt “right.” Aside from that, I like the old “three colored keys, three colored doors” formula. It’s comfy and I never seem to tire of it.
One quality I love about PC games from the 90’s is their nihilistic edginess, as though you’re supposed to lock your door and hope Mom doesn’t catch you playing. Descent lacks this quality. I can’t even say this is because I prefer skeletons and heavy metal over robots clinically firing laser beams at each other, since Mechwarrior 2 has the exact same premise but I found its missions and world to be vastly more memorable than Descent’s. It also occurs to me that I have a hard time remembering any of Descent’s stages. In my mind’s eye I can return to Duke 3D, Doom, or Mechwarrior 2 but when I try to do that with Descent all I get is “Oh yeah, that one stage where I… uh… err… wait, which stage was that again?” That aspect reminds me a little of Quake II, although it’s probably better to think of Descent as the evolutionary relative of something like Asteroids rather than an actual FPS. Descent is certainly not as obsolete as Faceball 2000. If that had been the case I wouldn’t have finished it. But time has not been kind to Descent.
I recommend Descent for exactly two kinds of people:
- People who are nostalgic for MS-DOS gaming (I belong to this category).
- People who are nostalgic for Descent.
For anyone else this might be a really hard sell.
