What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Stevens]

Finally found the time to get a set of Super Turbo in. I've wanted to play for weeks and other shit just kept getting in the way.

[gameoverDude]

F.E.A.R. (PC) - Playing on extreme difficulty. Project Origin may be graphically better, but the first one plays almost as well and it is better than 3. This one has the dual-wielding that the sequel unfortunately drops. Killing three Replica soldiers in one burst of slow-mo kicks ass.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (PC) - Playing on "I am death incarnate!" difficulty. Stealth is important when there are Commanders in the area. You're better off to at least take the first one down with a thrown hatchet or stealth kill him than to go in guns blazing. If you're carrying the Lasergewehr and trigger an alert, drop it- the warmup time before it starts shooting is a bit long. Just about any gun can be dual-wielded.

[Sumez]

RE: our earlier talk about old school RPG archeology, I've finally started playing the first Dragon Quest game, aka Dragon Warrior on NES (so it's technically a later release, spruced up with battery saves and animated characters that actually face the direction they are walking, but I feel like it still gets the point across).

And holy damn, it is immediately apparent why this game was such a huge success at the time! In a world where all RPGs are sluggish, text and number heavy grinds to get through, this one manages to be immediately approachable and snappy. Compared to how archaic and clumsy the early Final Fantasy games feel, Dragon Warrior is in its simplicity also a much more elegant game where everything feels thoughtfully designed, and just works.


And how can you not love those cute enemy characters?

Of course, you gotta know what you're getting yourself into, because this game is entirely about grinding. It definitely gets very boring at stretches (especially around level 13, god damn!), but for what it's worth I like the feeling of buffing your character and wrecking areas that would have caused you problems early on. And I love the ability to take chances and try to duck into horribly threatening areas, making by with simply casting sleep and running, and an occasional backup herb to help you survive. There is always the risk of something just giving you unfair RNG with no chance of survival, but it's exactly that constant sense of gambling that gives Dragon Quest its identity.

[FinalBaton]

RE: our earlier talk about old school RPG archeology, I've finally started playing the first Dragon Quest game, aka Dragon Warrior on NES (so it's technically a later release, spruced up with battery saves and animated characters that actually face the direction they are walking, but I feel like it still gets the point across).

And holy damn, it is immediately apparent why this game was such a huge success at the time! In a world where all RPGs are sluggish, text and number heavy grinds to get through, this one manages to be immediately approachable and snappy. Compared to how archaic and clumsy the early Final Fantasy games feel, Dragon Warrior is in its simplicity also a much more elegant game where everything feels thoughtfully designed, and just works.


And how can you not love those cute enemy characters?

Of course, you gotta know what you're getting yourself into, because this game is entirely about grinding. It definitely gets very boring at stretches (especially around level 13, god damn!), but for what it's worth I like the feeling of buffing your character and wrecking areas that would have caused you problems early on. And I love the ability to take chances and try to duck into horribly threatening areas, making by with simply casting sleep and running, and an occasional backup herb to help you survive. There is always the risk of something just giving you unfair RNG with no chance of survival, but it's exactly that constant sense of gambling that gives Dragon Quest its identity.

I don't agree with your "snappier than FF" bit. I think it's the opposite.

Final Fantasy doesn't require a command to use stairs. Nor to talk to people. Nor to go through doors. Nor to open chests.

Where I can see your point a bit, is that you only have 1 character and only fight 1 monster at a time in Dragon Warrior, which invariably makes battles shorter most of the time(although a good deal of battles in FF are very short as well). But that has nothing to do with the interface. And personally I'd much rather face several monsters in a fight(including 2 different kind of monsters, and sometime 3, in the same fight), rather than just 1 everytime. It's way more engaging to me. Just my personal preference.

I love Dragon Quest, don't get me wrong. But I just can't get behind that one point of yours I highlighted

[WelshMegalodon]

^ What I wanted to say. The lack of a shared inventory in the Famicom-era Dragon Quest titles also makes item management much more of a hassle than it needs to be, although it's nothing the series didn't inherit from Wizardry. Granted, the first Final Fantasy also limited your carrying capacity to four pieces of armor and four weapons for each character, and FFII's tiny inventory was one of the worst things about it, but neither of those forces you through five or six drop-down menus to transfer equipment or curative items between characters.

And it wasn't until Dragon Quest II that you could do basic things like climb stairs and open doors without the menu, and even then you still needed the menu to communicate with NPCs and open treasure chests.

If I recall correctly, the infamous "Ineffective" when one of your characters attempts to attack a downed enemy were also retained in DQIII and DQIV but removed from FFIII (at least as far as physical attacks are concerned; spells can still miss).

Other tidbits:
- Like the Ultima games before it, the first DQ required you to choose a direction when you wanted to speak to an NPC.
- The DQ games let you waste MP by casting spells like Gira outside of battle.
- Rather than implementing a proper row system, the Famicom DQ games retain the system used in the first FF where characters leading the party are simply more likely to be attacked
(although a programming oversight allows a "Parry-Fight" option, something even better; I can't remember whether FFIII also allowed this).
- DQIV's "Tactics" AI stinks. Why they didn't allow for manual control is beyond me.
- The lengthy passwords in the first two DQ games are a pain. I don't like using save states, but...
- The first game has a grand total of one save point.

Don't get me wrong, DQIII and DQIV deserve all the respect they get (combat in particular is generally more interesting in DQIII, due to status ailments actually being useful - remember putting enemies to sleep in the first FF for one turn?), but I stand by Final Fantasy as the more accessible and enjoyable series of the time. Besides, Amano >>> Toriyama when it comes to character and monster design. =P

Uematsu vs. Sugiyama is less clear-cut - I adore "Eternal Wind", but then you have stuff like this...

[BulletMagnet]

Currently outside my comfort zone a bit with Horizon Zero Dawn, the first "triple-A" game I've tried in some time, and one of the very few "open world" titles that have caught my interest, so take my impressions with a grain of salt since I have so little to compare the thing to. The bugger is, yes, absolutely gorgeous (on a "regular" PS4, I ought to add), especially coming from a studio previously synonymous with "bleak grimdark FPS"; even at points where I feel the need to scrounge for resources before making any progress I don't mind, since I can just wander around and take in the sights all the while. The story and characters are more of a mixed bag, but nowhere near enough of a drag to distract me for long.

Combat's another matter: when things go the way they're "supposed to" it's a rush, efficiently bringing down machines which can and will kill you quick if you get careless, but if you barely miss a crucial sniper shot and alert the whole herd or something nasty wanders unseen into an already-tense encounter it can be really frustrating, since the camera in particular is nowhere near effective enough to allow you to scrap your way out of many situations that go wrong somehow. There's probably an argument floating around that this "forced desperation" makes the world and monsters seem more dangerous and forces you to use all the tools at your disposal, and I suppose it does, but it still really sucks when most of the hits you take are due to not being able to see what's happening, especially in cramped quarters, forcing you to endure a clunky battering as you clumsily retreat and hope your supply of health potions holds out longer than the chase does .

On the whole I'm still enjoying myself a couple dozen hours in, and still have plenty left to mess with, but that one flaw sadly holds it back from entering into my personal gaming pantheon; otherwise it'd easily be on the ballot.

[kitten]

The bugger is, yes, absolutely gorgeous (on a "regular" PS4, I ought to add), especially coming from a studio previously synonymous with "bleak grimdark FPS"

i wouldn't call all of guerrilla's previous FPS games "bleak grimdark," especially the last killzone, which featured a lot of really interesting usage of neon colors, bright landscapes, and a suitably appropriate soundtrack with significant contribution by lorn. it had some real artistry in its environmental design if you could get past all the bloom. somewhat grim/bleak setting, but i feel like there was a significant amount of optimism in its idea of revolution & dismantling oppressive structures.

[BulletMagnet]

I'll have to defer to you on that one, as I haven't played that series, though I can't personally recall any notable color other than the red glowy eyes of the bad guys in any of the media I ever happened to glimpse of it, heh.

[kitten]

it got better over time. google "killzone shadow fall" and you'll get a glimpse of some of the environments present in the most recent game. then quickly google "killzone 2" (make sure you keep it in quotations) and look at how far the series went. i'm guessing the original two games left a really strong impression that the series could never really escape, but guerrilla really grew as graphic designers.

[Sumez]

The lack of a shared inventory in the Famicom-era Dragon Quest titles also makes item management much more of a hassle than it needs to be
(...)
five or six drop-down menus to transfer equipment or curative items between characters.
(...)
If I recall correctly, the infamous "Ineffective" when one of your characters attempts to attack a downed enemy were also retained in DQIII and DQIV
(...)
- Rather than implementing a proper row system, the Famicom DQ games retain the system used in the first FF where characters leading the party are simply more likely to be attacked

I'm not sure what sparked a "FF vs DQ on NES" comparison - all I said is that the first Dragon Quest feels much more elegant in comparison due to how simple it is. No complex inventory, equipment is immediately replaced when you buy new stuff, super fast one-on-one battles, etc. It's easy to comprehend, and you don't feel that you have to constantly manage a lot of stuff the same way you would in other RPGs at the time or even the FF games and later DQ titles.
In fact everything I quoted above is completely non-existent, if not irrelevant, in Dragon Quest 1 (Dragon Warrior), and wasn't introduced until the sequels.

I don't agree with your "snappier than FF" bit. I think it's the opposite.

Final Fantasy doesn't require a command to use stairs. Nor to talk to people. Nor to go through doors. Nor to open chests.

Yeah, I expected that to be a hassle, but honestly I don't even think about it. It's so rare that you use those commands, and having the one menu for everything honestly works pretty well, even if it's superflous. What I was talking about was not so much the interface itself, but the entire game design. Everything is very simple, but not in a way that feels lacking, rather it comes across as much leaner than the typically more complex RPG formula with classes, multiple characters, inventory management and whatnot. It's a simple almost zen-like experience.
Also having battles show up on top of the world map instead of taking you to a separate screen helps making them feel less intrusive, even if it doesn't make an actual difference.

Uematsu vs. Sugiyama is less clear-cut - I adore "Eternal Wind", but then you have stuff like this...

Uematsu works much better on NES. Sugiyama is a great composer, but whoever translated his compositions into NES music had no idea what to do with it, and much of the music in pretty much every FC/NES era DQ game is borderline painful to listen to. Hell, even with a better soundchip, Sugiyama's music just doesn't shine as much as it does with a full orchestra arrangement. Uematsu's music is much more based on catchy hooks and melodies, like movie themes, and works better as video game music.
However, the orchestra versions of the first three Dragon Quest games sound absolutely amazing.

[BurlyHeart]

Defeated my second past in Enter the Gungeon. Two more to go!

Spoiler

Actually four including the secret characters

Having blast playing the game. Hope the forthcoming update doesn't make things too easy.

[Udderdude]

I got my hands on Fire Emblem Warriors. So far, it's pretty good. Definitely worth checking out if you like the series. Also, put it on hard difficulty, or the whole thing will be a complete pushover.

[Darkhero]

Dragon Quest Heroes on PC. I've been enjoying it so far.

[gameoverDude]

Trails of Cold Steel (PC) - Getting started with chapter 6.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (PC) - Got 2 weapon upgrades and used them for suppressors on the pistols & machine pistols.

F.E.A.R. (PC) - Garage battle, my favorite scene in the game because of the badass BGM. Perfect for watching your G2A2 assault rifle's bullets tear through Replica soldiers in slow-mo.

[BulletMagnet]

Still plugging away at Horizon, though its seams are still very much evident...case in point, decided to explore an area off the beaten path (kinda the point of an "open world" game, right?), managed to stumble my way through a tricky (and occasionally cheap) area, get to the end, clamber up a big ol' cliffside, and a "dungeon" icon appears on the map, right on top of me. I can see an entrance just a few feet above me, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get there; for a good half-hour to 45 minutes I'm investigating every last pixel in an effort to figure out what I'm missing. Finally, I do something I almost never do in situations like this: consult the internet.

After a bit of searching I find a video showing the approach I attempted; funny, a bunch of somewhat spoilery story cutscene stuff appears which never popped up for me. So the player gets to the spot where I got stuck, and...magically, a rope ladder has appeared just below the entrance, plain as day.

So, yeah, being gated off from a hard-to-reach but legitimately accessible area - and knowing I'll have to do the whole thing all over again later on - because I haven't progressed the story enough is annoying enough on its own. But gating off an area and giving no indication whatsoever that it's gated? Not even a cursory throwaway "I don't think I can go any further for now" voice clip? I just want to get the designer responsible for that on the phone and curse him out.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I've had that a lot with open world games. What's the point in letting you explore if half of it's gated off by invisible cutscene triggers? Just shows up open world design as needless padding. If you aren't heading directly for a quest marker, you're gonna have a bad time. But even then....

You also get a similar thing where sort of climbable hills will be in your path but that game actually wants you to go a long way around. But it almost lets you get to the top so you waste ages trying to do it before giving up and taking a huge diversion - just to get a few metres in front of you.

[BulletMagnet]

I've had that a lot with open world games. What's the point in letting you explore if half of it's gated off by invisible cutscene triggers? Just shows up open world design as needless padding.

As I said a few posts up, I'm accommodating enough that I don't even mind wandering into a somewhat nonsensical dead end here and there because the world's pretty enough to make the trip at least aesthetically worth it, but when I do so the game had darn well better either tell me outright that I'm not going any further or make it really obvious that there's no path here - if either of those things had happened I wouldn't have even made the above post, I would have just fast-traveled someplace else and moved on, there's still plenty of other stuff to keep me occupied. It's not even an issue technically "inherent" to open worlds (albeit one that commonly infects them), it's just a deeper disregard for the player's time and immersion that they didn't bother to even gate the gated content properly.

[Xyga]

In general I don't like open worlds. Jrpgs with '3d' world maps + all kinds of locations had it right mixing subjective perception of space/distance and travel for both global and places exploration, too few have pushed the concept far and refined-enough though, a shame it's become so rare now.

[LordHypnos]

not right now, but recently: Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. played a bunch of failed games, then finally managed to get a spriggan enchanter (of Dithmenos) to the last floor of the vault (and through both swamps and snake pit, so I do have 2 runes). Now I'm a bit stuck, because hexing and stabbing gets harder once you start facing enemies in the late game (or late assuming you're only going for 3 runes, which is, I think what you need to get the orb). I haven't really figured out what I should invest in as far as skills go to face the later enemies. shortbow? summons? necromancy?

Also played and finished Dink Smallwood (the open source version), which was pretty flawed in terms of design, but somehow still entertaining. Will maybe try some kind of fan made quest at some point.

Also played through the majority of Hero of Dreams, which is a Zelda Classic mod that is pretty great. I will say that it gets kind of cheap and damage soak-ey at times, but it's mostly pretty well designed. There's some good puzzles and other stuff. Currently facing Ganon, but haven't yet beat him. Not sure when I'll go back to that.

[Zen]

Blade Runner 9732 http://store.steampowered.com/app/77099 ... nner_9732/
Not so much a game, as a virtual tour of Deckard's apartment.

It even has Vangelis playing, as you look over your balcony.

Spoiler

Oh, and its free

[Marc]

Too much stuff at the moment if I’m honest.
Mario Odyssey is still massive fun a good 20 hours or so after I started, it’s gotten to the point where I’m reaching the end, and actually skipping over stuff to give me an excuse to indulge in a second playthrough.

Finishing up my theirn and final playthrough of Need For Speed: Rivals. Still way better than the over-rated Burnout Paradise, or any of Criterion’s NFS entries for my money. Intend to gold every event, and complete every racer speedwall, then finally put this one down for good.

Sunk quite a bit of time into Flinthook… a great moment-to-moment platform-shooter, with just too many frustrating random elements to hit true greatness. Should think it’s something many on this board would enjoy though.

Played a few games of Shock Troopers last night, but realised that, much as I love the Switch, it’s completely unsuited to playing arcade-style games in handheld mode. Huge fun though, intend to give this some stick when I can plug back into the TV tonight.

About 28 hours into Lost Odyssey, I’ve really enjoyed this. Only real complaint is that the battle system never really expands in scope – at this point everyone can use everybody else’s skills, no other than being split between fighters and casters, the party is pretty interchangeable. I’ve enjoyed this so far though, any recommendations along similar lines would be appreciated.

Finally got my hands on a SNES Mini yesterday and decided to see if the old F_Zero skills still held up…. Cleared all three cups on Expert, and going back for the Master difficulty tonight. Love, love this game. Between this and the Switch, I’ve realised quite how much I’ve missed Nintendo being a part of my gaming, had both the Wii and WiiU but never really bothered with either. Still got the Wii actually, mate flashed it with MAME and the F-zero and Mario Kart arcade games, just need an HDMI convertor for it.

Got Zelda arriving this week, and the PS4 pile grows ever larger….

[Stevens]

Played a few games of Shock Troopers last night, but realised that, much as I love the Switch, it’s completely unsuited to playing arcade-style games in handheld mode. Huge fun though, intend to give this some stick when I can plug back into the TV tonight.

Shock Troopers is fucking dope, that drum n' bass is so good.

How is the Switch version? I know the Steam port is considerd poor.

[Marc]

Seems OK to me, I've had no issues with the various PS4 AA titles, and the Switch versions seem no different to me.
The music made me chuckle, the start of level two on the mountain route reminded me of a 90;s Pitchshifter LP.

[BrianC]

How is the Switch version? I know the Steam port is considerd poor.

For the most part, I had positive impressions of the majority of Arcade Archives on both PS4 and Switch. I have the Switch version of Shock Troopers and it seems to run great. It's also worth mentioning that Nintendo has started to license out some of it's arcade games for Arcade Archives on switch. Mario Bros and Vs. SMB are out now and Vs. Excitebike and Punch Out coming later. I have Vs. SMB and Mario Bros and both seem to be well emulated. I also have played Vs. SMB on real hardware via Everdrive N8 and response seems comparable (though I still prefer to play it on real hardware and got the Switch one for a portable version).

I actually found the analog stick to be better for some games than the arrow buttons (though they worked fine for Puyo Puyo Tetris). The Arcade Archives set the analog to no dead zone, so it's more responsive and works out better than I expected. The buttons would work much better if certain games didn't make the character stop when left and right are pressed at the same time. At least the pro controller works in portable mode, though it's not a portable as the stock controllers.

[Durandal]

Of the first-person shooters of old to be remembered by the current generation through pop culture and the many discussions pertaining the seemingly forgotten qualities of shooters made in that era, it is Descent by Parallax Software which has been undeservedly forgotten the most. In Descent you play as some mercenary who reluctantly accepts a job by a seedy corporation to pilot an Israeli-made Pyro GX and blow up thirty mining installations in the solar system where the robots have been infected by a virus and killed everybody. To do so you need to penetrate the depths of the mines through enemy robot forces, blow up the reactor core in order to trigger the self-destruct sequence, and escape through the emergency exit. There's also hostages in each level you can save, though as your handler grimly puts it, they're not the highest priority. It's available on GOG and Steam (as long as Herve doesn't pull it again) in a Dosbox package, but a sourceport called DXX-Rebirth exists which allows it to run on practically every modern system.

Released a year after Doom, pioneering the fields of true 3D level design before Quake and to even crazier extents than Quake, pioneering the fields of enemy AI in first-person shooters before Unreal, and pioneering the woefully underexplored subgenre of 6DoF shooters, yet the common man interested in games like Doom and Doukem 3D has never seem to have heard of the Descent games. Allegedly Descent was the shit back then, the shareware version being included in every PC game demo disk at the time (even I had one with Descent on it), and Descent had no shortage of user-made content due to its level editor, be it singleplayer or multiplayer. Though interest for it seems to have died out in favor of space combat simulators and because of the inherently initial confusing nature of Descent. When you google Descent, no mainstream publication ever seems to mention it in their faux-nostalgia pieces unless it's other new 6DoF games are in question, and google results are clogged up by another board game called Descent. Not everyone (read: untermenschen) can process full 3D labyrinths in their head, on top of other issues like suffering motion sickness, the unorthodox controls and general confusion with everything involved. I'm sure that most people who played this in their childhood remember this as 'the dizzy game' (I sure did) and never made it past the first level.

But if you give it some time, it's damn well amazing how much an early 3D game holds up in nearly every way. One of the key reasons are the controls, which are unbelievably smooth. The development team had experience in programming flight simulators, and it shows. As the genre implies, you can move in six directions. What this means is that you can move forwards, backwards, strafe left, right, look up/down and left/right, and tilt your ship left/right, in any point or time. The game takes place in zero gravity, so don't worry about falling down, or up. Though there's no real up or down here. In Descent, the ceiling is lava. It takes a little while getting used to, but the controls are incredibly intuitive, especially at the time when developers were still fumbling about with 3D controls and cameras. Descent natively supported joystick and mouse control, even twin flightsticks for maximum immersion.

The responsiveness and the control of your ship is excellent, and its hitbox reasonable enough to feel like you can properly dodge any projectile in the right circumstances. The keyboard controls aren't that confusing either, you can configure it to suit a standard WASD+Mouse layout with LCtrl and Space being used for moving up and down and Q/E for tilting left and right. It takes some messing around in the controls menu to set it just right, the default keybindings are set to something else entirely. Give it some time, and you can navigate around the levels like its nothing. Mind that bumping into things hard dents your shields, so don't just ram into anything. One trick unique to 6DoF is trichording, which involves moving at three axes simultaneously in order to go at faster speeds than using a single thruster. So going forwards and up and right at the same time will let you move 1.7x times faster than just moving straight forwards. You're never really required to use this in singleplayer, but it would see a lot of use in multiplayer. Of course, considering the limited turning speed of your ship, it gets hard to aim while moving along particular axes.

Descent's soundtrack is one of the best MIDI can offer and one of my definite favourites. A pulse-pounding industrial techno soundtrack suitably evil and menacing for the robots awaiting you below, with the only the LV19 BGM being a real stinker as it really sounds like a fart orchestra. I guess the soundtrack was composed by every composer Interplay had on standby, who probably saw gold when Parallax showed them Descent. The credits will tell you who worked on the soundtrack, but not who composed what song. As such it's kind of a hard guess for which soundcard the soundtrack of Descent was composed. Some say SC-55, some say AWE32, some say OPL3. I personally think it was made on OPL3, though some tracks just sound better on SC-55. Some bass-heavy tracks sound very much like constant farting with OPL3. The A-B bridge for the first level track sounds very enticing and alluring on the OPL3, but on the SC-55 that part sounds like a single note is being repeated, though you can just sliiightly make out the bridge of the OPL3 version, like it wasn't properly converted. The game also had a Redbook soundtrack where some of the original songs were remixed by Allister Brimble with studio quality and even more intensity. The Redbook soundtrack is very great, but it's also very loud as background music, so I prefer to play with the MIDI soundtrack. The Playstation Mix would also add four songs by Skinny Puppy/Type-O Negative, which do manage to fit the game, though Glut and Ratzez are earsores.

The artstyle for the game manages to hold up surprisingly well. Utilizing low-poly 3D models for enemies and the player ship, each enemy manages to stand out on its own through silhouette/color usage and sound design. Exploding enemies and the ensuing debris are quite satisfying to see. The levels themselves are abstract in layout and it's hard to imagine whether they're supposed to represent any kind of feasible facility. Though the texturing and layout for these levels is colorful and quite varied, you can tell the designers really wanted to play around with this idea of true 3D levels. The texturing/modeling/lighting is very crisp and clear, so you can pretty much instantly gauge what you're seeing at any range. There's also a basic lighting system in place with dark and light areas which you can light up using a flare or by shooting your weapons. The sourceport also adds colored lighting to have dark corridors light up in the color of your weapon projectiles as well.

To put it simply, the level design takes after the classic Doom philosophy of mazes filled with enemies and color-gated doors, but in true 3D, which comes with its own implications. For starters, it's important that the player should get his bearings, and for that reason not only each room, but each corridor is distinct. You might be descending down a passage and see two other passages heading north and west at your end, but there's no compass here, which is usually why subtle texturing is used to tell which passage is which, else you're constantly turning about or looking at your automap wondering what was left and right again. In almost each level you will find energy stations where you can recharge your energy for weapons just by positioning yourself in the designated zone, and these stations are usually placed in a curve. This way you only need to go forwards to get in and out instead of facing a dead end and having to turn your ship around completely, which would be much less intuitive.

In Descent, the levels are usually very tight and not spacious at all. The reasons are twofold, the first one being that the game makes use of portal rendering where anything beyond a door isn't rendered at all until the door is opened, and huge spaces with loads of enemies in them would cause massive framerate dips with the average hardware setups of that time, the second being that otherwise you end up with circlestrafe fests. It may be a little paradoxical that a game about freedom of movement puts you in very small and limiting environments, but it's also trying to encourage you to make the most of the space you have. Even in tight tunnels dodging projectiles is very much possible. Your ship is small enough that it won't take up a huge amount of space if you grind against one of the sides of the tunnel, and that way you can dodge projectiles by switching to another side of the tunnel the moment an enemy fires at your old position as enemy projectile sizes are quite reasonable as well. This way you have to mind how long an enemy's attack burst will last before you can switch directions to somewhere where you have room to dodge, as opposed to just running circles without too much trouble.

The levels being 3D also puts your navigation skills to a greater test, as you have 'above' and 'below' to contend with when passing through any cross-section and always need to check up and down before passing any corner. This is also why I love the escape sequences so much. The intro straight-up tells you to find the emergency exit before blowing up the reactor and to plan a route to the exit beforehand. In the initial levels the exit is nearby, but in other levels the exit is found in trickier places. You only get about 30-45 seconds to make your escape, while trying to fight off the anxiety of wondering whether you're actually going the right way. Some levels will trigger enemy closets near the emergency exits once you've triggered the self-destruct sequence, making escapes even more tight. There's also hidden exits which lead to secret levels. Not only are you tested for your navigation, but also your movement skills. Once you successfully make your way to the emergency exit, an in-game cinematic will play of your ship flying its way out of the escape tunnel collapsing in itself in a flurry of explosions, as your ship just barely makes it out unscratched. It's basically the same for each level ending, but it really never gets old.

There's a good amount of creativity at display in the levels of Descent. Basic combat scenarios have a lot of variation to them due to the many layouts and enemy types/formations, secrets are plentiful, traps are devious, and I also like the way power-ups are used in Descent. One level in particular is very grate.
There's only two power-ups, an invulnerability power-up which turns you invincible for 30 seconds, and a cloaking device which turns you invisible for 30 seconds. Enemies won't notice you when cloaked and missiles can't lock onto you, unless you fire off a shot, collide with an enemy, or take some other kind of damage. There are certain sections filled with loads of enemies where its hard to avoid damage, but often you're meant to use a cloaking device to sneak past some enemies, usually to grab a key and get the hell out unnoticed or just to get past something without getting shot at. Invulnerabilities are also secretly placed in places where a very tough battle is ahead, but the more obviously placed ones are usually meant to be saved for later encounters instead of immediately, which adds a little more nuance to how and when you will actually use the power-ups.

The necessarily tight and small true-3D levels also facilitated a different approach in enemy behavior. Up until then, most enemies in first-person shooters were slow and simple in order to account for keyboard aiming not being the fastest and accurate aiming method, and the most was made out of such enemies through tricky enemy placement. Descent aims to nail that dogfighting feeling of other space flight games at the time, and in order to do so the enemy would have to put up a fight of its own. It's also why most of your weaponry is projectile-based, because the uniqueness in enemy behavior would partially go to waste if their dodging is rendered moot if you had hitscan weapons only. On top of that, enemy pathfinding would also have to work flawlessly in order to properly accomodate the labyrinthian true-3D level design if enemies wanted to chase down the player. Because of this, enemies are actually capable of dodging your shots, and each enemy type also comes with its own unique behavior. Some enemies will aggressively try to rush you, some will wait to ambush you around corners, some will fly away from you while laying down mines, some will lay down cover fire at your last known position, and some will move around the level randomly.

Particularly the last point is what sets apart Descent from other contemporary first-person shooters. In games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, RNG barely played a role at all in terms of enemy placement or movement because the enemies in those games were usually very slow compared to the player. In Descent levels, some enemies may decide to just do their own thing and take you entirely by surprise. Suppose you know that one room contains a certain amount of enemies of certain types, and after clearing the entrance out you find that you haven't killed the last one yet which is usually at a given spot, but is now no longer there, so you have to carefully inch your way through to find out where the last bugger is. Alternatively, one might get you from behind through a passage you have overlooked. Thankfully this is limited through doors as enemies cannot open them (save for one enemy type whose entire purpose is to open doors and alert other enemies). This way even the umpteenth run through a level will make you feel tense and make you think on the fly, as you cannot completely predict everything that will happen.

Sound design plays a surprisingly important role here (especially for a game made in 1994 when not everyone had the best soundcards), as it should in any first-person shooter where all active enemies will not always be placed inside your field of view. Each enemy has their own distinct sound tics which only play if they have you in your sights, so you can always tell when you are being engaged and usually by what. This is also helpful when anticipating shots down tunnels when hiding behind cover. A frequent beginner mistake is to pop out of cover to avoid enemy fire and quickly pop out, only to get hit by enemy projectiles which were already in travel. Instead, you can count the amount of times you hear the sound a shot has been fired and judge when to make your move based on that. When homing missiles are locked on, a sound plays urging you to get outta dodge. There's also a strange amount of pig noises in the game, on top of a lot of pig references in the game file formats like .HOG and .PIG. I guess Jeff Minter's cousin worked on the game.

You get about five primary weapons and five secondary weapons, with secondaries usually being some kind of missile. Primaries and secondaries are firable at the same time, with primary fire being bound to LMB and secondary to RMB, so getting the most out of your weapons is quite intuitive, as you do not have to equip each weapon separately. Primaries include the Laser Cannon, a basic peashooter which shoots two straight lasers and is decent at killing lower-class enemies, but can be upgraded to level 4 for bonus damage and can be upgraded using a Quad Laser power-up to double projectile size and firepower by letting you shoot four lasers at once. The Spreadfire fires bursts of three projectiles which is more useful close-up or for denying areas. I didn't use the Spread all that much, though I imagine it has more of a use in multiplayer. The Plasma Cannon fires a constant stream of plasma bolts, which are faster and deal more damage, but chew through your energy supply. It's not as energy-efficient as a fully upgraded laser, but it's easier to hit things with and when playing levels with a cold start you'll usually have access to a Plasma Cannon before you get to fully upgrade the LC. The Fusion Cannon is a massively powerful weapon which fires two giant purple bolts which penetrate through bots. However, it needs to be charged before firing to deal full damage, and while charging your ship shakes erratically making it rather hard to aim over long distances. Charge it too long, and your shields start taking hits. All weapons drain energy from the same energy source, which is recharged in energy stations or by finding energy pick-ups from fallen enemies. The only exception to this is the Vulcan Cannon, which is a long-range hitscan weapon capable of easily hitting anything, but has its own separate and limited ammo supply which cannot be infinitely refilled.

The secondaries consist of the Concussion Missile, a straightforward dumbfire missile, the Homing Missile, which homes in at nearby enemies and is quite useful for enemies behind corners, the Smart Missile, which on impact sends out a flurry of homing plasma projectiles which evenly spread out in the direction of all nearby enemies so you can tell where there are enemies when peeking isn't an option and hit them from behind cover more reliably than with homers, and the Mega Missile, the most powerful weapon in the game which homes in on the closest enemy and can insta-kill every enemy type on impact. There's also Proximity Mines, which are actually quite useful for denying roaming enemies, putting them in front of enemy closets you can't open yet and in multiplayer I guess. The frequency of each missile type pick-up is suitable, and each missile got its own uses. My only gripe is that the Concussion Missile is too slow to be really viable in a dogfight despite being the most common missile type, in a fight it only really works against stationary enemies.

For the most part, you will be using the LC and PC. The Spreadfire just doesn't perform as well DPS-wise on medium ranges, the Fusion Cannon is overkill most of the time when not used against a large group of targets, and although it's easy to hit anything with the Vulcan, its ammo is limited and damage-wise it's not always the best, making it more suitable for long-range sniping or a back-up weapon. The weapons are universal enough in effectiveness but with their own niches, so an universal ammo supply in Descent doesn't cause any massive lack of weapon balance as opposed to having an infinite amount of plasma cells for your Plasma Rifle and BFG in Doom for example.

Energy can be refilled an infinite amount of times through energy stations. Normally such energy stations would facilitate a lot of backtracking like in games like Marathon, though here it's done rather tastefully. Usually energy stations are placed at crossroads where you can easily return to when making rounds in a level and minimize backtracking, or are placed at certain parts where you're bound to be low on energy after having shot a whole bunch of robots. Energy station placement can also largely affect how you can go about situations knowing that you can or can't return to a station in order to regain energy, so sometimes you can let loose with a Plasma Cannon you found early on, but other times you need to be more conservative and make do with energy pick-ups which only restore a fraction of your energy.

One reason for why I think they included this is because the developer couldn't really envision a back-up weapon on a ship which didn't use ammo in some way, like melee weapons in other first-person shooters, but what kind of ship in a dogfighting-esque game uses melee weapons? It'd run counter to the whole way combat was designed around dodging things as opposed to charging head-on. It could work like the ram in Overload, but there it works more like a stun than a viable way of dealing damage. Most enemies in Descent don't really take hitstun on impact, and you're never really expected to rely on hitstun in Descent either. The alternative Descent provides is to take advantage of the limited turning speed of larger robots in order to keep landing shots at their back while they can't keep up with you, though most levels aren't spacious enough for that to be a viable strategy. Basically running out of ammo sucks, most weapons use the same energy source anyways, and there's not a whole lot of reliable back-up weapons. The placement of energy stations on top of the average rate of energy depletion in combat and frequency of energy pick-ups doesn't make backtracking an issue, so I'd say it's a concept executed well.

One neat aspect is that energy and shield can be overcharged. Though you start each level with 100 shield and energy if you had less in the previous level, you can still reap the benefits from pick-ups up to 200 shields and energy. And if you had more than 100 shield/energy at the end of the previous level, that gets carried over as well. This way pick-ups always manage to be useful, and you don't need to go back to get one all the time when you're 1% short of maxing your shield/energy out. Since the player will start off each level at 100 shield/energy anyways, not being able to pick up pick-ups from the get go would be rather frustrating. Better players can also stockpile on more shield/energy this way for future more dangerous encounters inside a level.

One also rather neat aspect about Descent is that the levels are designed around pistol starts, or in Descent terms since there's no pistol in Descent; cold starts. Each level in Descent doesn't assume you carried over any weapons or ammo from the previous level, so each level is designed around the player starting with his default loadout. This way, each level can be more easily designed with a proper flow in mind where you start off weak so the initial encounters are easier, until you find some better weapons. Alternatively, some levels can turn finding a better weapon first into an implied goal, as you can find all of the weapons in the game quite early on and the game doesn't really have a large overarching progression curve for finding weapons. Designing levels around cold starts also ensures that the player doesn't need weapons or a higher shield/energy stock from a previous level to have a chance at surviving in the current one, so I'd say it's a good habit for these kind of games which rely on long-term resource management.

The universal ammo supply and the overall effective primary weapons actually work more in tandem with levels designed around cold starts but with weapons carried over, than in Doom. Though Sandy Petersen designed Doom levels with pistol starts in mind, id forgot(?) to disable weapons carrying over between levels, so often you'd end up with weapons like the Plasma Rifle or Rocket Launcher in situations which were not designed with those weapons in mind and were thus rendered easier than intended because of how powerful those weapons are/how you had more ammo than intended. Because in Descent each weapon isn't such a dealbreaker individually and ammo is the same for all primaries bar one, being able to carry over more crap doesn't make things necessarily easier, aside from more shields/energy. There's also your secondaries, but there is a suitable maximum limit for how much you can carry for each type and the stronger ones are also suitably more rare, on top of Megas/Smarts usually being meant to be used up in the level they're placed in than being carried over. Usually there's no real narrative excuse for why you would lose your weapons after each level, and in cases where simply dying has you restart the level with the default loadout as punishment everyone just reloads a save anyways. However, Descent is unique in that it's actually supposed to be played in one run (though almost nobody does that either).

Descent takes more after arcade games with a lives and scoring system. When you die, all of your equipment is scattered around the point of your death, you lose a live, you lose your hostages, and you are respawned at the start of the level (don't ask how this works within the narrative). You can then go back to the place you died to pick up all your shit again (with the exception of your keys which you keep even after death), though depending on where you died this might range from busywork to a death spiral. Lives are then gained by finding secret life pick-ups hidden in levels, or every 50,000 points you gain. Points are gained by destroying enemies and picking up hostages. There's also the level clear bonuses where you earn score for your remaining shields, remaining energy, a Full Rescue bonus for rescuing all hostages in a level and making it out alive, and a skill bonus where the score you earned throughout the level is added to your total score again, but with a multiplier (0.5x on Hotshot, 1x on Ace, 2x on Insane, you get no skill bonus on Trainee and Rookie). The shield and energy bonuses are rather redundant and uneven, as the most optimal way of scoring would dictate that you charge your energy at a station before escaping, and you can sacrifice a life to start the level again with 100 shields and only then pick up the hostages for the full rescue bonus without losing them, for the highest possible shield bonus as well. The energy bonus would facilitate using missiles and vulcan ammo at the end, and the shield bonus could have been replaced with a No Deaths bonus and another bonus if you end the level with shields above 100 (on top of a No Saves bonus as well).

If you die during a self-destruct sequence or don't make it out of a self-destructing mine in time, you will lose a live, receive no stage clear bonuses, and start the next level with the default loadout. Keeping the latter in mind, it's important to design your levels around the fact that the player might not start the level with a carried-over loadout instead of following some self-imposed challenge like I did (though having a toggleable mode for something like that would be neat). So yes, you're actually supposed to go through 27+3 levels of chaos without losing all your lives, and start over entirely if you do. But most people just play it with saves, saving at the start of the level and reloading when they die (the only acceptable way to play with saves). One major reason being that most people who play games like Descent don't care much about 1cc's, and those who do will feel that Descent 1 is way too long to sit through in one sitting, one run possibly taking up to 2-3 hours. On higher difficulties it's hard as sin too, and not necessarily in a good way either. The full campaign length problem could have been solved through branching stages of some kind where at the end of each level you can choose one of two levels to go to next, and each run taking up to 7/8 levels. While the game may be hard, it's very generous with its lives, especially with the skill bonus on Insane where you're bound to earn a life at the end of each level if you get the full rescue bonus as well.

The difficulty settings in Descent do not affect enemy locations and spawns (to my knowledge), though they affect a lot of other things which does make each higher difficulty a different experience. On higher difficulties, enemies fire more projectiles per burst, enemy movement speed is higher, enemy projectile speeds are faster, enemies dodge more actively, shield and energy pick-ups have diminishing yields (from 12 to Hotshot to a measly 6 on Insane), end-of-level self-destruct countdowns are shorter, and your starting count of concussion missiles will be smaller. Basically, combat will be more demanding, there's more to dodge, and it feels more like shield pick-ups are there to delay the inevitable rather than giving you another fighting chance. To most beginners, Hotshot will be a challenge enough. Not only do you have to deal with unorthodox controls and a style of gameplay, but you're also still figuring out how to properly dodge those projectiles. Once you get a good grasp at the mechanics, Ace should be very much doable. And after that, there's Insane, and it will kick your ass until you know the levels inside out. But once you do, going back to previous levels feels like performing a dance you know thoroughly, and lower difficulties will feel as if you're playing the game in slowmotion. That said, a good part of its difficulty really stems from the wrong reasons.

But first, let's go over the enemies. The basic C1D, a small yellow drone, can shoot some big but dodgeable projectiles at you and goes down fast easily, but they always come in groups, so you know if there's one nearby, there's another. The C2D is the same as C1D but blue, slightly larger, and slightly more evasive, though not a huge threat. Green Hulks are larger, but dodge a whole lot, and like to roam a whole lot. Spiderbots are like larger and slower C1D's, but on death they will spawn a random amount of baby spiderbots which are very small and tough to hit, and a general annoyance to deal with, on top of their randomness and their tendency to spawn in random directions making them an unpredictable threat in smaller quarters, but of the good kind. Medium Lifters like to scratch your ship from up close, and are only a real threat in numbers. They also come in cloaked versions. Secondary Lifters will fire projectiles at you, but they are incredibly aggressive and will immediately try to rush you with no regard for their own lives. Plasma Drillers are rather dangerous because of their faster and harder-hitting plasma weaponry, so keeping distance is essential with these guys. Medium Hulks will fire Concussion Missiles in straight lines which are easy to dodge, but have an annoying tendency to damage you through backblast when you do manage to dodge the missile but it explodes at a wall right behind your ship. On Insane they will fire in bursts of three missiles and kill you almost instantly if you let them get you. Gophers are fast, small and annoying robots who run away from you but drop mines everywhere, though I think they aren't used nearly enough in the game. Fusion Hulks fire highly damaging fusion bursts, but despite their huge size and HP pool these guys are fairly easy to dodge and deal with.

Some enemies are straight upgrades of some types. Laser Platformers are like C1D's but more resilient and evasive. Missile Platformers are the same as Medium Hulks, but fire in 5-missile bursts on Insane, tank more damage than Medium Hulks, are smaller, and dodge much more. Advanced Lifters are the basic Lifters but more silent and faster and more agile. I suppose the Defense Prototypes are the answer for the C2D's and can fire quad lasers and dodge a whole lot. There's also Supervisors, which are the only robots which can open doors. They are supposedly supposed to alert other enemies and get them to move towards your position, but I never saw them doing that. They are slow and will usually drop some good stuff on death.

Though I'm not a huge fan of how item drops on enemy deaths work. Often, this is entirely based on chance. For energy pick-ups I don't really mind because energy stations exist anyways. But shield drops on enemy kills depending on chance can make or break a run, especially on Insane. It's rather baffling considering some enemies in a level can be assigned by the level designer to always drop a certain item on death, like a cloaking device, quad lasers, or other items. There's even a level in particular where you need to kill a colored enemy in order for it to drop a key. Some enemies like Supervisors will always drop guaranteed shields, so I gotta wonder why shield drops per enemy kills aren't always static when it's clearly possible to do so.

From playing the game I got the idea that designers determined level difficulty by the type of enemies used, rather than how existing enemy types are used, resulting both in an odd difficulty curve for the campaign and older enemy types rarely ever being used later on. Every enemy type is useless on its own, but they're made significantly more challenging depending on how they're placed in the level, like Missile Hulks in tight tunnels or Plasma Drillers around corners. I'm not a huge fan of deciding difficulty solely by enemy types used because it makes the enemy cast feel less consistent and memorable, as opposed to games in Doom and Quake where even the starter enemies will always make an appearance in later levels, but the newer and tougher enemies just appear more frequently later on. Enemy placement is the main determining factor for what makes an encounter challenging or not. Moreover, enemy types which are just straight upgrades of existing ones are lazy. Any setpiece battle in a very open room is ez because you're given practically infinite space to dodge anything that comes your way without fear of getting flanked because most enemies will try to directly chase your tail or stay in place.

And then there's Red Hulks. Christ, fucking Red Hulks. These guys can take a good beating, but what makes them an absolute pain to deal with is that they can fire homing missiles. And homing missiles in Descent 1 are no joke, their tracking ability can only be interrupted with a corner, but when you see them for the first time you often can't react in time. Often, you'll never have enough space to simply dodge a homing missile, and when you accidentally stumble upon one, you're dead, ESPECIALLY on Insane where homers come in bursts. This isn't helped by the fact that Red Hulks are placed in the absolute cruelest of positions, like right behind a door or at the end of a particular junction you can't really scout out. They will fire their homers immediately, and your ship cannot outfly homers. If you don't know it's there beforehand, you're fucking dead, kiddo. Sometimes you might get lucky and catch the Hulk from behind before it can turn to fire at you, though often you're better off simply hiding than immediately trying to kill them. The best way to deal with these assholes is the indirect way, and that is by firing a few homers or smart missiles or megas around a corner. Often you might not get the right angle, so what you'll instead be doing is using the LC's property of being able to fire around corners without exposing yourself in order to hug corners and shoot the red hulk without it seeing you and none of its homers damaging you.

You cannot deal with these guys head on because you're often not given enough space to do so. When they're a good distance away from you you can snipe them even if they're looking at you because their range is limited, but the game doesn't always throw you such a bone. The game starts veering more in trial 'n error territory when these fucks are introduced. When they get the drop on you in Insane, you will die, no questions asked. And often they will get the drop on you because of how they're placed. Better memorize where they are next time. Other enemies are fairly fair to deal with because you can actually dodge their shit without beforehand knowledge, but since the designers wanted to link level difficulty to enemy threat levels, you end up with crap like Red Hulks. They'd be a better fit in wide-open areas, because there their homers are actually challenging, but not impossible, to dodge, as opposed to all other enemy types which are rather easy to deal with in open spaces. Red Hulks might've been tolerable if you could figure out their position without them being aggroed. Like Red Hulks having a firing delay for each homing missile in order to lock on to you.

Because the designers didn't fulfill their cruelness quota enough with the Red Hulk, they made a pact with the devil to create the most despicable enemy in all of videogames: the Class 1 Driler. Why's that? Because they're the only enemy type in the game with hitscan weaponry. Yes, in a game all about dodging and dogfighting and limited resources, a hitscan enemy with no wind-up for his attacks would be the greatest addition. You thought Chaingunners were bad? Ha ha Ha Ha Ha Ha ha Ha ha. YOU WILL REMEMBER ITS SCREECH. The sounds enemies make are usually an indication for the player that there's incoming danger, but in the Driller's case the danger has already struck the moment it screeches.

While it can be killed with a single missile of any type and goes down easily, that does not ease the fact that it will rip a good portion off your shields the moment it sees you which usually results in inevitable and undodgeable damage, and that feels like utter bullshit. Now, that doesn't mean that the designers made this enemy for the sole purpose of shoving a rusty rod up our bums. The first level in which the Drillers are introduced see a noticeable increase homing missile placements, with the obvious message being that we're supposed homing missiles in order to hit an enemy who shouldn't see us from a position he can't see us from. Of course, that doesn't change the fact that you must find out their positions through either slowly inching around every door and corner, or the simple hard way. While Drillers aren't outright lethal, they will deal significant damage before you take them out. Oh, they also come in cloaked variants, and cloaked enemies can not be locked on to. Drillers especially like to roam, even though for the sake of the player this isn't the kind of enemy which should ever be roaming and moving unpredictably.

Some enemies you just want to be stationary (and some enemies are, what enemies roam and remain stationary no matter what is determined by the level designer). Roaming drillers and red hulks will often be the deciding factor whether you pass through a level clean or dirty. When it comes to random elements, you want to keep the potential punishment limited as the point of roaming enemies is to keep you on your toes and test your awareness, making lighter enemies like C1D's and Green Hulks more suitable for taking you by surprise because they're not inherently dangerous to begin with unless you don't expect them. Nor will it feel that a randomly appearing Green Hulk is what will kill your run. When enemies start to roam because you entered a particular room or aggroed nearby enemies, you usually want to hurry it up before enemies start changing position and take you by surprise. I feel like this could have been better telegraphed through some kind of alarm or message telling you that THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU, because you never see enemies patrolling or moving around without shooting at you unless you're cloaked, especially in spaces not frequently separated by doors. Sadly there's no way to consistently lure enemies away from places you can't even begin to enter safely without getting shot at from 270 degrees around you. Firing a shot at a wall might attract a nearby patrolling enemy, but it's very much up to chance, and very much a necessity when it's roaming drillers you're dealing with.

It's the moment that Drillers and Red Hulks become more commonplace in the levels that the game sees a noticeable spike in difficulty (around level 7/8 or so). Now I don't mind games that are heavy on memorization, as they're good fun when you manage to pull a route off successfully, and is partially what kept me going to play Descent with no mid-level saves, no deaths, w/ cold start and full rescue on Insane difficulty. Just not so much when you can't even see the curveballs the game throws at you coming. Combat in Descent 1 very much becomes an all-or-nothing state of affairs when it decides to get difficult, which I don't think really suits a good portion of the enemies which don't deal that much damage in comparison and the health system in general which is more suitable towards whittling you down slowly over time as other games like Doukem and Doom did. Though it does facilitate deliberate aggression on your part rather than being slow and careful if you want to kill enemies quickly and not get overwhelmed. I like that monster closets are signified with obvious hidden door texture with a message saying you can't open them (which always means it's a monster closet) so you can place mines there in order to prevent enemies from getting out, though traps revolving around enemies placed around corners aren't as forgiving, nor are matcens.

Matcens are these zones signified with pink web textures which when you move over a certain trigger start spawning enemies. Each matcen spawns about 5 enemies at a fixed interval every time it's triggered, and the enemy type(s) it spawns varies per matcen. Often you can see a matcen before you trigger it, in order to give you time to (mentally) prepare yourself. Though sometimes the matcen triggers can be rather vague. Usually the triggers are right next to a matcen or at an entryway leading to the matcen, but sometimes a room can have multiple entrance and not all of them have matcen triggers placed in them. Matcens cannot be destroyed, so once you triggered a matcen you either need to hurry up and get out fast or kill the enemies it spawns one by one, and I'm sure that the former is its intended purpose. Though if it's just a single matcen, you can fly in front of it and shoot the enemies as they're being spawned. With the inexplicable exception of Lifters, enemies generated by matcens can't attack for the first few seconds of their lifespans as they're still being formed, so in that case you can just kill them as they come out and the whole thing poses no real threat other than wasting your time. Matcens can only spawn three waves before shutting down permanently, so in rooms where you'll be passing through or doing a lot of stuff it's often safer to spawnkill all enemies a matcen spawns. This way you cannot grind bots infinitely for their drops.

Of course, how it affects player decision-making depends on the placement of the matcens. In rooms you won't be returning to, like rooms with keycards in them or reactor rooms, you don't have much reason to stick around, and multiple matcens spawning multiple enemies at once will give you more trouble than you can deal with. But in empty rooms with not a whole lot of enemies around, it's just safer to empty out matcens. Matcens as a hazard only truly work as intended when there's multiple matcens at once, and when they're placed in areas you don't want to pass through again or need to do something quickly like grabbing a key or destroying the reactor. Otherwise it feels like you're farming bots for pickups. An example of matcens working properly is their first introduction at the end of LV3 where between the yellow room containing the red key and the red door containing the reactor there is a room boobytrapped with matcen triggers which will spawn C1D's.

So you want to make a mad dash towards the yellow room when you enter the room before the enemies start spawning, make another mad dash towards the red room in order to avoid enemy fire, and make another dash from the red room towards the yellow room in order to get to the exit, where monster closets have already opened up to get in your way. A poor example is the Bomberman-like maze at the start pf LV18 with invisible matcen triggers between pillars, and you just gotta figure out the proper path through without triggering anything the hard way. I'd argue that the matcens are placed poorly if you can safely grind them.

Especially on higher difficulties, Descent might feel cheap. You could either play the game at a lower difficulty (you can start the game at any level you've played through at any difficulty and play from there), savescum your way through, but even so I think it'd rob you of the experience to feel like you got better at the game. Initially when I first started playing Descent I settled for Ace which was already a big challenge of its own, and Insane would just kick my ass even in the first few levels. But after running the whole game Insane, the first levels will become a breeze, and you will feel in control. Dodging becomes an automatism, leading shots becomes natural, and you'll start to recognize what kind of situations you will be facing ahead. You'll have to use all the tools at your disposal. Knowing the whereabouts of secrets is essential.

Unfortunately Descent 1 can be rather rough on the edges difficulty-wise. It's very much doable on Insane, but expect a lot of cheap deaths. If you like making a tough cunt your bitch, you might like this. You can tell the designers were largely experimenting with Descent as there really was nothing quite like it to take from, though Descent really nails where it innovates. I wouldn't say that it didn't age well, it's just the product of an age where games were tougher. A lot of issues would eventually be smoothed out by Descent 2 which I personally consider superior (for the simple fact that there's no Drillers and Red Hulks in 2), but that's a story for another time, after I manage to complete my cold start|full rescue|no mid-level saves|no deaths|Insane run for Descent 2 and Vertigo in order to prepare myself when the very promising Overload leaves Early Access, which is the unofficial Descent 4 being developed by the actual original developers of Descent, and should definitely check out as it might very well be the only good old-school-ish first-person shooter since ever.

[Udderdude]

Nice write-up on Descent. I remember playing the crap out of it back when it was new. And yeah, a lot of players just couldn't handle the complexity of the game. I still have Descent Rebirth on my PC.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

If you like Descent, check out this:

https://www.gog.com/game/sublevel_zero

It's pretty fun. Descent's always been my fave first person shooter for a variety of reasons (and yeah, Insane is brutal and at times simply ridiculous). I still love playing D1X/D2X Rebirth (classic Descent playable on modern OS).

Most of the time, you don't have to worry about "pistol starts" since you'll carry over weapons from level to level, except if you a) die during a reactor explosion sequence (ouch) or b) die late in the level in a position where recovering your weapons might be tricky. The latter case is when having access to weapon caches is very appreciated. The level design in general was really great, and getting disoriented was never an issue for me in the standard levels because they were really good about making sure rooms had an "up" and a "down" in the sense that they used specific textures for the floor and lights or different textures from the wall in the ceiling, so you could always orient yourself that way. Of course you can fly upside down or however you want oriented to the level I suppose, whatever works!

The minimap was also really detailed, a necessity to have for a fully 3D environment of twisty, claustrophobic passages.

[gameoverDude]

The Witcher 3 (PC) - Playing on the Blood & Broken Bones difficulty, currently at Kaer Morhen.

Spoiler

I had spared Letho in Witcher II, so he's helping fight the Wild Hunt along with all other possible allies. Left off right after Vesemir's funeral.

This holds its own against a lot of the AAA games released in 2017, and the combat system is solid. The Igni sign's "walking flamethrower" mode simply rocks.

[Sumez]

Moved on to Dragon Warrior II, and honestly, I'm liking it a lot more than I expected. Like, a lot more.


How bad-ass is that American box art? I almost forgive them from trying to strip off the anime this time around.


Pretty much everything I said about the first game's elegant design is gone, as was expected, thanks to the "new" multi-character party and enemy battles. The battles are a lot more dry, with their drab black backgrounds (the cost of gaining multiple detailed and colorfol enemy types), and inventory management has gone from being a non-issue to a pointless chore.

That said, much to my surprise I still prefer this to the early Final Fantasy games, by a long shot. In my perspective, the first FF game is boring at best, with the third one being the only one I really like. But even that feels completely redundant at this point, coming off kind of like a prototype of where the series would go with its amazing sequels in Final Fantasy 4 and 5.

Meanwhile, Dragon Warrior II completely holds up on its own today. It's as old school and archaic as to be expected, but once you get the boat, the open world exploration with all the discoveries and mysteries that the world holds really helps create the experience of going on your own adventure without relying on the game to tell you its own story.
Two of the later dungeons even caused me to bring out the graph paper and start drawing my own maps, something I haven't done in eons. Maybe that aspect doesn't sound too compelling to most people, but I really enjoyed it.



So yeah, I guess "DQ vs FF" is on, after all...

[Marc]

Did a few hours on the SNES mini last night. Got up to round 9 on Castlevania IV… still fun, but not the all-time great I used to think it was. It’s pretty pedestrian, and rather ugly looking in many places. Using the suspend feature to play a single run – last time I did that, I’d just finished my final exam and left school for the last time…. ’93 I think. No real issues up to that point other than those fucking sticky stairs…. Forgotten how annoying it is when the game throws bats at you while you moonwalking up and down those. I’ve added Vamipre’s Kiss on there, and the first round of that looks nicer and seems to play at much more of a brisk pace, though I’ve really not played too much yet.

Started off Super Mario World, obviously back in the day I used the save feature and everything reset each time, so it’s nice to finally do a full run. Still the pinnacle of 2D platform games in my eyes, with Yoshi’s Island just behind. Never did play any of the New Super Mario games apart from the first DS one though – any of them in particular worth a go?

Contra III kicked my ass by the third stage. Back when I bought SNES games, I used to whack them straight on hard, because each game had to last me a good month or so, and that’s if I bought nothing else with my money. Think I may need to reconsider that approach here.

The two Turrican games haven’t aged very well. They were never the best as straight shooters, but the sprawling levels gave them a feel of their own and went some way to making up for the weaker aspects. The first one has condensed the levels massively from the Amiga versions, and the second, at least the opening round, is simply a poor man’s Contra clone.

Received Breath of the Wild and Nioh in the post. BotW is one I’m probably going to start another time as I’ve still not finished with Odyssey yet, but I had a quick half hour last night, and it’s pretty astonishing what they’re managing to pull off with the relatively weak hardware. The size of the landscape is genuinely astonishing.

Nioh was quite a surprise. Ninja Gaiden never really clicked with me – I don’t know how anybody can suffer such a shitty camera in a game that’s already so damn difficult – any I only gave this a shot due to hearing the numerous Souls comparisons. Enjoying it so far, the one thing I don’t get on with in general are games with huge lists of button presses to execute pre-set combos, so it was a nice surprise to find the controls so stripped back. The Ki mechanic adds a nice dash of strategy (though am I right in thinking that you can just hammer the recovery button and not really be penalised?) and the pace is frantic enough that it instantly shrugs off any meaningful Souls comparisons. It should also be mandatory from now on for every game to offer the ‘action mode’. Good stuff.