Rodney Dangerfield Voice: my wife points to an advert for Daikatana and tells me "I want that" so I go to the store and get it for her. She then shouts at me "I meant I wanted John Romero to make me his bitch!"
The first 5 minutes of a civvie video are always "wow what a gem, I want to play this" then the next 10 minutes are him describing a series of levels that sound like they were designed to make players rage quit
@@TheRenofox Forsaken was a better clone in every way. I remember by the time I picked up a copy of D2 it felt so slow and clanky compared to Forsaken.
yeah that was Descent. But definitely play Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2. Those two games are absolute gems and have source ports that work with modern systems and huge modding scenes still to this day. Very sad Volition went under, loved those games so much growing up.
Descent is my favorite game ever, and I don't think it's that punishing. It's better than you, it wants you to know it, and it was you to conquer it. Depending on your mindset, you're going to be a Descent 1 or Descent 2 guy. Descent 1's difficulty is very unique. The only thing I have ever played that resembles it is Naxxramas, the final raid in Classic WoW.
My friend John loved this game. It was released in March 1995 and he died in October 1995 in a car accident … he spent a pretty reasonable amount of the intervening time playing Descent. Wish he was here to enjoy this video!
I hope wherever he is, he's playing Overload and is writing a detailed review explaining how much it does or doesn't slap so that you can read it first thing when you get there.
Fun fact, old shooters in this era often allowed you to run faster by strafing at the same time, which would add the forward part of the diagonal movement to your normal forward speed, which is sometimes called strafe-running. This exists in Descent as well, but thanks to 6 degrees of freedom you can also hold Raise or Lower in addition to Strafe Left or Right, and gain an additional forward boost. This became known as “tricording”.
Tycho Brahe had a pet moose that he would give large quantities of beer at parties as a party trick. This ended with tragedy when the moose got extremely drunk at one party and tripped going down some narrow castle stairs and fatally injured itself. A very Danish fate. Which coincidentally is the same thing that happend to Iceland's national poet Jónas Hallgrímsson when he was out drinking in Copenhagen. Tycho Brahe was not involved in that incident as he had been dead for a few centuries and Jónas Hallgrímsson was not a moose.
If there was moose in the Czech republic this would be an everyday occurrence, I guess, with the amounts of beer easily available at all times in your beautiful country! I love it and come to paddle on the Vltava or other rivers, to camp (with a real campfire, on a campsite!) and drink beer, of course. But what do we learn from these incidents? Don't play Descent when you're drunk or you might end up like that poor moose!
This is nothing. Tycho Brahe kept a Danish midget in his castle because he believed, seemingly sincerely, that the midget was a prophet. When his servants expressed doubt in the midget's prophetic abilities, Tycho Brahe built a torture dungeon in his castle, approved by the king, into which he threw the doubters. He also looked like a supervillain, because he had lost his nose in a duel, which he initiated a lot of, and made an artificial one out of gold as a replacement. He was a very good astronomer, not a very good theorist, and a batshit insane person.
Fun fact! According to LP superstar and former Volition employee Chip Cheezum, Volition was still using some aspect of Descent's engine as a camera to record trailers and promo shots for the Saint's Row series. Gone, but not forgotten.
That's pretty cool, and I had no idea about that. Volition being folded into Gearbox is perhaps the grimmest fate I can imagine for a studio short of the staff being literally killed in some sort of natural catastrophe. Woe to Randy Pitchford, double-woe to Tim Willits.
Civvie doesn't mention this but the Descent IP isn't in the hands of Embracer, its owned by Interplay who is SOMEHOW still around. I don't know which is worse.
@@KnoxCarbon they're IP zombie house now, leeching off money little by little while selling their back catalog on gog and steam. Most of the vets are either spread out through the industry or working at InXile. They also had dispute with Parallax over royalties (yes, Parallax was still a thing in 2010's, as another IP zombie house) but that's ancient history.
Interplay owns the word "Descent" and the rights to sell the games. The actual games are owned by Parallax Software, which still exists as a legal entity (mostly for Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog to punch sales royalties out of Interplay as needed. They've had to cut their rights to sell the games at least once before!) Hence the recent Descent 3 source code release - the person who released it negotiated directly with Matt without Interplay's involvement.
Man... Decent will always have a special place in my heart, back in the late nineties, our computer lab teacher installed it on all the computers and we were able to play it on LAN. Playing Decent with the boys in the computer lab over LAN was so crazy, you have to remember even seeing a picture on the internet took like 30 seconds, so playing a game and being able to see other people LIVE was *so insane*
Same here! We did this all the time. We also had Doom and Wolfenstein at some point but that wasn't appreciated so much by the teachers. With Descent they were fine.
It wasn't Descent I did this with in the high school computer lab my Senior year, I brought Doom in on a Flash drive and because I had an A in the computer class I had, I gave it to a bunch of other random kids in the class and we would quietly deathmatch right there. Teacher would be in the middle of lecturing how to improperly use Excel (she was an older gal, bless her heart. She was *not* technologically inclined by any sense but schools had that remote desktop software by this point and she knew how to use that at least minimally.) Just remembering that after reading your comment has me feeling the same level of nostalgia. 💛
i remember playing this back in the mid 90's with the keyboard keys, no mouse. I looked like someone with cerebral palsy trying to steer the Millennium Falcon one handed while trying to shoo away a wasp stuck in the cockpit. But it was fun!
I remember when I was a kid in the era where every FPS was called 'Doom Clone'. My father had several pirated Descent floppy disks with the title: "Doom Ships." 👌🏻
Fun fact, I was #1 on the IDL (International Descent Ladder) a few times in the late 90s. My in game name was 'TR'. I had no life and played the game waaaaay too much. Always hung out in the MSN gaming zone. 😂 Also, dont know if its been mentioned, but D1x allows you to drop the framerate. Drop that bitch to 30fps and you'll dodge every homing missile with ease. 🤘 Funny you mention being so slow as well... you need to "tri chord" as we called it back in the day. You essentially use 3 vectors (forward, strafe right/left, and strafe up/down) simultaneously. Obviously you need to angle the pitch of your ship appropriately, but when executed correctly you can literally outrun homing missiles.
I feel sorry for anyone who didn't have the opportunity to play descent 2 online back in its heyday. This is the most memorable game I've ever played when I was a kid. The absolute chaos of those multi-player games was nuts.
The existence of a fan art wall implies that Civvie either gets mail every morning (hopefully from a Hammer wearing a little postman hat) or that he finds the fan art online and prints it out himself, both of which are equally adorable. ❤
Randy the greaselord's naked body covered in grease is an image that will haunt my nightmares forever, just like that USB stick left at medieval times haunts Randy forever.
Wait... I knew Pitchford was a creepy scumbag but I haven't kept up with anything about him in a long time. Apparently he got a countersuit filed against him by a former Gearbox employee over all of that, saying Pitchford liked to host parties where "adult men have reportedly exposed themselves to minors, to the amusement of Pitchford." He also said the USB had some content with girls of questionable age. Did anything ever come of this? Is Pitchford a kiddlerdiddler? Wouldn't surprise me.
I see my comment got deleted. Thanks TH-cam overlords for protecting us from discussing such topics and for protecting the reputations of such fine, upstanding individuals like Randy.
man civvie doesn't even need to cover games, i can just hear him talk about the ins and out of game developers and gaming companies and who gets acquired by what and how
Being a kid in the early 2000's and now loving classic games it is always interesting to see something in these old games that directly and obviously influenced my childhood games. I grew up playing the Defender reboot game from 2002 and seeing a ship rescuing Astronauts in this game just like in Defender is nice. My favorite part about Defenders rescue mechanic though was how the first two Colonists would hang on to your wing and the third would hold onto an energy tow cable.
Hey I'm really glad to see Descent get some attention in this day and age, I think you captured the many frustrations people tend to have with these games brilliantly. In case anyone's interested myself and a few others from the Descent/Overload community actually made "Overload: First Strike" which is the whole First Strike campaign for Overload with the goal to modernise it and also to reduce a number of frustrations that Civvie mentioned in this video.
I was really young when Descent 3 came-out. So my Dad would give me an unplugged mouse and tell me that the guidebot was me and that I can to click to shoot. I had so much fun!
I remember a time in 1999 my dad busting out a joystick from the top of a bookshelf I couldn't see along with his big box copy of Descent. He then tells me to hop in the pilot seat and buckle in. I exclusively played a handful of SNES games and a couple of GB games at that time in my life so this was the first time I ever touched a 3D game let alone a joystick. The difficulty and me trying to comprehend moving in a 3D space blew my 8 Year old mind so hard it traumatized me from playing any more 3D games lol
Folks used to play FPS games w/ a joystick in the 90s... That's part of the reason why the mapping seems so weird b/c there were no established standards yet. We knew a GenXer who frequented our LANs and he always used SHIFT+CONTROL like we used W(A)S(D).
I used to play descent on an acer computer when I was a kid, I got pretty good at the easy mode, but my favorite part of it was shooting a ton of flares and trying to write my name on the walls. Volition also was headquartered near me, and they were really cool, would let people come and playtest the games they were working on. It's a real shame what happened to them.
Great memories. I got Descent for free when it was released because they used a comment I made in their magazine ads. Something along the lines of "Descent is to Doom what Doom was to Wolfenstein!".
I wanted to play Descent since I was a kid in the 90's. My parents never let me. They still don't. Thanks for posting this and letting me know how what I missed in my childhood.
"My parents never let me. They still don't." I feel your pain, I'm 30-something and my mom still won't let me play Doom because of satanism or violence or was that Diablo?
It's never too late, and what they don't know won't hurt them. If they're willing to disown you as a "satan worshipper" for your own grown-ass choices, even if you're (presumably) living on your own away from them, then you need to tell them to make like spitting geese, and duck off. They don't respect you as a person, and in turn you don't respect yourself as a functioning human being. It's disgusting...
I grew up on Descent, and I love it. But it also broke my spirit as a kid. I finally beat it a few years ago on Hotshot by save-scumming, and it required *a ton* of cheesing. That “elephant” noise the Class 1 Driller makes is burned into my psyche and can instantly trigger anxiety in me.
Fuck, I could never remember the name of this game as an adult. A flood of memories just came back to me as I played this as a young 6 year old as my parents were fighting in the background. Thanks Civvie.
Freespace and Freespace 2 were high water marks of my childhood. I can't even express the feeling of SCALE the first time you meet the Shivans, and one of the best desperate endings in sci fi. I really hope you come around on playing them, even if just for the narrative.
I remember weeks of playing Descent 1 and 2 with a long serial NULL model cable between my PC and my brother's PC, we would fly around in the levels killing eachoter :) Such nostalgia...
"Then you jet off to Mercury..." I feel a particular emotion knowing what's coming. It's like how I'd imagine Satan feels when a particularly righteous soul gets sent down to him. A heady mixture of anticipatory glee and empathetic schadenfreude. _Now_ my pain will be shared. So I'm glad to see you giving the montage to the Class 1 Driller, that tablesaw sounding hitscanning fuck deserves it. When I was first watching "Pro Blood" years ago and was introduced to the cultists I remember thinking, "Oh they're like Drillers but they graciously only shoot you twice instead of 12 times and you actually have tools to deal with them."
"I'm using DXX-Rebirth which comes with its own number of issues" You may have been hiding from Descent, Civvie, but as the former lead-dev of said port, I've have been dreading you saying something like this for years now. ..... alright, I had this video on pause for an hour now, let's do this. EDIT: Okay, I am still alive. And that Guide-Bot RIP sequence made my laugh tears. Awesome video!
@@memoriesin8bitgamedev Thank you for your work on this port! I'm curious, do you remember how you determined what the movement speed of the homing missiles should be? The fact that the original game tied it to the framerate is a downer because there's technically no definitive answer. Do the demo playback files just record input actions? Synced playback is the only accurate thing I could think of. Otherwise, maybe the homing missile movement speed is effectively the same for machines at the time of release in 1995, up to a Pentium 166mhz's performance?
@@teranokitty Thank you. As for the homers, I pretty much settled myself at 30 FPS. This was also what most players who gave me feedback agreed with, so we took that sort of as a baseline. But the game has a LOT tied to the frame rate. From the mouse input, homing missiles (their turn rate, how many frames until line of sight is broken and more), collision responses (how much damage a Lifter does grabbing you or damage from a piercing fusion projectile), even little things like how long enemies dodge in certain directions - all tied to frame rate. Unfortunately demos were only helpful in limited ways. Unlike Doom, the demos in Descent record the positions of everything you see on screen. And guess what: It does that PER FRAME. So when they're played back, their recorded FPS needs to be interpolated to the playback FPS. So in the end, they could only tell me the FPS rate at which they were recorded. In the end, I gave it all my best shot, but I cannot guarantee if Civvie died so much because the original devs were balancing for 20 FPS.
Ahhhh descent 1 and 2. Descent2 was one of the very few games that eventually provided a 3dfx accelerated binary for use within MSDOS. 60 FPS buttery smoothness. Also, with the melee bots in D2, you can prevent the green blobs by killing them with physical weapons. Didnt learn this until decades later.
Oh yeah, that's one of the best uses for the Gauss Cannon. I used that thing as much as I could, the damage and that *chug-chug-chug* rare of fire was so satisfying.
I'm quite sure the 3dfx patch for Descent 2 was unofficial. And it was tricky to get it when internet was not that much available. (got mine with some videogame CD fanzine I think)
Holy crap, I thought I imagined this game! I've been searching for this for years, thinking it was my imagination playing tricks on me and that it didn't really exist. I played it when I was really young but remember almost nothing about it except a little bit of the first level. I'm just going to assume that I never beat it, and that's why the memories are so vague. Thank you for helping me rediscover old memories!
My first ever Boomshoot! Bought it back in the day, after convincing my violence-shy parents that it was about killing robots. SO many memories! SO many hours! Thanks, Civvie!
@@InnuendoXP When you say flight game are you thinking of Descent: Freespace? I'm not familiar with flight games having circle strafing as a core combat mechanic.
14 year old me putting the Descent 2 CD in a CD platyer and realising I could make a tape of the music to listen to on my walkman is one of my core memories.
Using "Spray" from ROTT as the music was a great way to hammer home the difficulty of the final boss. Which, after seeing this, I can say I'm glad I've never actually gone up against.
Descent!? LET’S F’ING GOOOOOOO Edit: YOU PLAYED FREESPACE WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER!? Dude, you should do Freespace and FS2, especially if you can bring some attention to Hard Light Productions and FS2Open.
I absoultely love Freespace. I love it cuz the game tells you a story of facing insurmountable odds, and it does it through the story but also the gameplay. You suddenly find your entire armory replaced by the single weapon that can kill the enemy, and enemies that will just not go down no matter how much you shoot at them, it's fantastic how the gameplay 180º to show you how unstoppable the enemy is.
Descent was my jam back in the day, I spent many many many hours playing both Descent and Descent II. Even the Descent II soundtrack did a big chunk of defining my musical tastes that still stand. Our internet sucked back then but I was still halfway decent playing on Zone. I had also hooked in to the developer network and at one point was working on my own campaign that unfortunately never went anywhere, though I did provide some voices for one of the Freespace fan campaigns.
Man, been having a seriously hard time in RL lately and after a long bath listening to ambient thunderstorms trying to stave off my inevitable stress induced pre 40 year old heart attack I get in bed, pet the cat, and open youtube to see... my favourite channel is playing through one of my favourite childhood games. I really needed this, like, my god man. Thank you.
Does listening to ambient thunderstorms help with stress? Also I'm sorry to hear that. May you find small comforts to help you through this stretch of darkness.
One of my all time favorite game series! Delighted to watch this. The game had a few things that were tied to your processor speed, homing missiles being one of them. They were easily dodged on an old 486, but could turn on a dime on faster processors. The shareware version even had the subtle ship bob tied to processor power, and on fast processors would literally slap you into the walls fast enough to take damage. I'm surprised none of the source ports have ever re-tuned the tracking to be more in line with the original hardware.
I went to the current master github of DXX, and apparently the most recent public commits have fixed projectile speed; given that D2 changed the overall frequency and speed of homing misses, I would say that even the *ideal* hardware setup at the time would have meant that homing missiles were probably faster.
Well, could have been worse. You should see how Wing Commander goes with faster processors... gods, those games have not aged well, and it's frustrating that it still has its loyal fans. Then again, that may be my TIE Fighter and FreeSpace 2 bias speaking.
"I'm _pretty_ sure there was something about riding talking velociraptors at some point" That's from the _Enter the Dominatrix_ DLC, which is an in-universe making-of film about a movie dramatizing the events of the main game. Badly. "LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE! BOOM, BOOM, AKALAKALAKA BOOM. BOOM, BOOM, AKALAKA BOOM BOOM!"
Enter the Dominatrix was originally planned as a DLC for Saints Row 3 before the scope got so out of hand it turned into Saints Row 4. So afterwards they cobbled together a bunch of cut content from what the DLC was going to be and released it as a DLC for Saints Row 4 under the guise of being a documentary about what the DLC would've been if it wasn't the game that you're playing. Saints Row, man, it's a series.
@@saffral It *was* a series, for many of us it ended at 3, more ended at 4, and the few left took whatever was left and tried to enjoy it. The need to constantly out-do the last game in an overly dramatic flair resulted in enough DLC for them to do a whole new game, and then add more DLC. The third game was rather fun, but SR4 was way whack.
@@saffralIt is honestly one of my favorite DLCs of all time just because of the way it was presented, and I wish more games would do something similar. It's really neat getting to see the stuff that was originally planned that got cut, and the "Behind the scenes documentary" style presentation with interviews with the characters fit in beautifully with Saints Row.
I remember spending hours in a save file editor trying to create my own ultimate custom weapons in Descent, so that there would be bouncy splitting plasma everywhere with splash damage to basically kill everything
Those MFers were awful. But they were weak, one homing missile was enough to kill them and it was almost always worth it. Even worse... remember those green robots in the final levels that fired volleys of concussion missiles?
I remember playing this as a kid and my dad could only watch for a couple minutes before he would get sick to his stomach 😂😂 I need Tanarus from you, Civvie. At some point!
@@ariloulei814 It should teach you something very important, don't fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yourself like that. Fallout 3 taught me to JUMP in fallout games with every bit of knowledge because fkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkking Todd wanted us all to jump into Fallout 4 and get ourselves fkkjkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkked, sequence breaking, killing of whatever NPC not knowing who is important and who doesn't matter. DO you see my point? Do not believe anything he says at all, kay. Knowledge is power, power to not get yourself into a death loop, no pun.
In the tech support office I worked at in this era (I did Windows 3.x and '95 support for the After Dark family of screensavers) we had an OK to play games between calls -- since keeping games running on different PCs was a skillset, management believed that this helped us do our jobs. Also, being familiar with popular entertainment software helped us resolve issues when they arose. Descent was pretty popular -- except that we had two joysticks. A CH Flightstick and a CH Flightstick Pro. Only the Pro had the "hat" button that you could use to slide/strafe. You could circle strafe at an angle with only one hand on the stick. It was awesome once you got used to it. Main axis for cardinal direction on the X plane, "twist" for yaw and the hat for pitch and roll, all 3 axes in one hand. You could fly through a door into an open area and then slam yourself down flat on the wall near the opening and smartbomb the other guy as he came through. I don't even think modern controllers have features like the CHF Pro did. Those were some times. Definitely times, those were.
I haven't watch your vids for awhile. Just now reminds me how good they are. Descent is one of my favorite childhood games. Your review style applied to it is brilliant. You could take most music tracks for descent 2 and have Trent Reznors voice in the back to match a NiN track.
Gotta second that recommendation - Overload is just Descent But Better. Also it got a huge mod - Overload: First Strike - which is a remake/reimagining of Descent 1! But also better!
the fact that Civvie talk's about Talking velociraptors being in Saints row 4 and he is also technically correct is incredible. Because I was convinced no one remembered that on bit in the DLC.
They sang walk the dinosaur while you were riding them...... and then THEY PARODIED THE ENDING TO A NEW FUCKING HOPE!!!! The only way people would forget that mindfuck was to drink it away
I won't demand anything of you Civvie, it's your channel and already my favourite on youtube What I will say is that I'm really looking forward to the Jedi Outcast video
Next level edging. Never played this game, have no stake in it, but hearing you talk about this one so much for so many years and FINALLY making a video about it? Instant bust. At some point you're going to need to stream. Cheers mate and thanks for the video!
The amount of effort put into your videos and rate at which they come out is amazing. I know that you usually don’t like to break character except for rare occasions, but I would really love to see a breakdown of your production.
Amazing and groundbreaking games, thank you for torturing yourself through it so I could reminice a little 😂 I haven't played Descent 2 in probably well over 25 years now but man the sound design is still firmly embedded into my brain. That damn thief bot noise gave me a jolt of anxiety and frustration as if I played it yesterday.
The best way I describe Descent to people who haven't played it. Imagine if we made you spin in an office chair 500 times. Then we put you in a Tilt-O-Whirl. Once you get off, we put horse blinders on you and made you play a game of laser tag.
While I'm thinking about it, there was a third port of the original game to Mac. Instead of a MIDI soundtrack, it had full CD quality music on the disk. It was probably my first serious introduction to Industrial, and filtered through almost 30 years of nostalgia, it is amazing.
I used to play this game with a Saitek Cyborg 3D (not the Gold version) back in the day. Though I never beat it then. The controller, even with a throttle and HAT switch still just didn't have enough buttons. When I replay it with DXX-Rebirth, I was able to fully set up an Xbox 360/Xbox One controller for it. And let me tell you, that played amazing. Way better than trying to play the RPG in the engine!
i was about to write, "wait, civvie plays this with a mouse? it should be played with a 4-axes-joystick" ^^ - but xbox controller i think is also ok :)
No way! Civvie11 is bringing my childhood back to life. And I'm all for it. Now I must go back and replay the Descent series (yes, that includes Descent 3, Civvie11...bite me). A shame Descent and Descent 2 weren't divided into two videos - would join the Thief Playlist as my "background noise" videos. Ah well. Now to just wait for Thief: Deadly Shadows, and even the 2014 reboot. Hey! Civvie11! I have one and only one request: *RECOIL* and the BFT - "The BATTLE (BIG) FORCE (FREAKING) TANK!"
Saw the vid title and thought to myself, "No way is Civvie playing Descent 1 in PRO-MODE" because Descent 1 (or as I often referred to it as "FFFFFUUUUUCCCKKKKK THIS GAME!!!!") makes Doom Plutonia look like an episode of Paw Patrol. The only thing missing from this video is the always hysterical sewer count bit. One could argue Descent 1 in its entirety counts as an entire sewer level considering how much shit is floating in this digital septic tank. Kudos, Civvie for actually finishing the game. I'd never seen the end boss on this one before, for obvious reasons.
Descent may be the only franchise Civvie has touched that legitimately does not have any actual sewer levels, though, since the levels are all mines and research bases and military complexes.
Ah, the thief bot. One of the coolest, and most annoying additions to Descent 2. Its a perfect example of how the developers did some really simple but clever things with the enemies to make them interesting. I found two effective ways to kill them, instead of just chasing them around with the Gauss forever. Either shoot it with flash missiles, because it will briefly stun it so you can keep up with it and hit it a little easier. With some luck, you can catch it in a corner and stunlock it until it dies. Or, you can set a trap. The thief always tries to sneak up behind you whenever it can. Find a dead end with only one entrance. Fill that entrance with smart mines or prox bombs. And then stare at the wall facing away from the entrance, and the thief will inevitably run into your mines trying to pinch that sweet Pyro-GX booty. Also, in all the times I've played Descent 2, I've never actually seen the Guidebot die. I always figured it was indestructible. Also also: PRO OVERLOAD WHEN CIVVIE? PRO DESECRATORS WHEN CIVVIE? PRO SUBLEVEL ZERO WHEN CIVVIE?!!? PRO FORSAKEN WHEN CIVVIE?!?!?!??!!!!1! PRO DESCENT TO UNDERMOUNTAIN WHEN CIVVIE!?!?!?!?!1111!??!GABBAGABBAHEY!?!
If I could give this video 999,999,999,999 likes I would. One of my favorite games ever! I remember my IBM Aptiva had the shareware version bundled in with its optional software package. Tried it, got slightly motion sickness and stopped playing. A few months later I booted it back up again and was hooked. Beat the shareware version, almost immediately bought the full version and the strategy guide. Then I got D2. My brother also got into the game, and he’d be the type that would lean around while he was piloting the ship. He bought D3 and after he stopped playing it to focus on a bachelors degree he was going for, he gave it to me. I have many sheets of paper with pencil drawings of concept robots, including a driller with 3 Vulcan cannons that would have shrieked like 12:49 (CV11’s absolute worst nightmare!) and a robot that was a mobile robot generator, it’s intended purpose being used in remote areas of the mines far away from the built in generators and in emergencies creating robots that might be needed. I also have all 3 novels.
Same here! The family got an Aptiva Pentium 120mhz with 16 MB RAM in December 1995. The Descent shareware included was the bomb! I remember having a lot of trouble with the level 7 yellow Super Hulk boss. I had so much trouble that I was convinced that it was invincible and that the actual reactor core was hidden in the central column in the arena. Eventually, I killed it, but it took a while. We bought the full version via Descent: Anniversary Edition sometime in the next few years which had the base game, the 100 level pack add-on and 20 additional levels (user made?). I remember trying to play additional levels I downloaded, but the levels never showed up in the level select list despite my putting them in the same directory as the Descent AE add-on levels.
I remember making my own levels for D1 using an MS-DOS level editor called Devil. It was a painstaking process but damn was it fun. This video is peak nostalgia for me.
This was a mind blowing game when I first played it way back when. Also the only time I ever felt a little seasick playing a game. Nightdive did a Forsaken remaster some years back too... RIP Volition
I remember experiencing this as a child... Somehow my Grandmother had both Descent and Are you Afraid of the Dark on her PC in the 90s, and I was sufficiently terrified of both. Now, 25ish years later I'm far more intrigued. I wish I had a Thruster and Joystick with some multi-monitor action XD.
Decent, the first game I played on the internet IN DOS. It was awesome. That game cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars in Logitech Wingman 2 joysticks. I used to use the 4 way joystick hat and would just break them off with my thumb. Well Done Material Defender.
Rodney Dangerfield Voice: my wife points to an advert for Daikatana and tells me "I want that" so I go to the store and get it for her. She then shouts at me "I meant I wanted John Romero to make me his bitch!"
I tell ya, he gets no respect.
No respect at all.
I respect that
tough crowd
Somebody step on a duck?
The first 5 minutes of a civvie video are always "wow what a gem, I want to play this" then the next 10 minutes are him describing a series of levels that sound like they were designed to make players rage quit
Indeed.
1 minute in: Wow, I wonder why I didn't like this as a kid...
5 minutes in: Oh, now I remember.
I remember playing this game as a co-op a "gunner" and a "driver"
@@TheRenofox Forsaken was a better clone in every way. I remember by the time I picked up a copy of D2 it felt so slow and clanky compared to Forsaken.
yeah that was Descent. But definitely play Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2. Those two games are absolute gems and have source ports that work with modern systems and huge modding scenes still to this day. Very sad Volition went under, loved those games so much growing up.
Descent is my favorite game ever, and I don't think it's that punishing. It's better than you, it wants you to know it, and it was you to conquer it.
Depending on your mindset, you're going to be a Descent 1 or Descent 2 guy. Descent 1's difficulty is very unique. The only thing I have ever played that resembles it is Naxxramas, the final raid in Classic WoW.
My friend John loved this game. It was released in March 1995 and he died in October 1995 in a car accident … he spent a pretty reasonable amount of the intervening time playing Descent. Wish he was here to enjoy this video!
Rest in awesomeness John. I bet he's happy where he is right now, that he has a friend holding fond memories of him to this day. You're a good friend.
I hope wherever he is, he's playing Overload and is writing a detailed review explaining how much it does or doesn't slap so that you can read it first thing when you get there.
There went a gamer. One of us. Rip to your friend. Good thoughts to you.
F
Gone but not forgot; keep that memory alive.
Fun fact, old shooters in this era often allowed you to run faster by strafing at the same time, which would add the forward part of the diagonal movement to your normal forward speed, which is sometimes called strafe-running.
This exists in Descent as well, but thanks to 6 degrees of freedom you can also hold Raise or Lower in addition to Strafe Left or Right, and gain an additional forward boost. This became known as “tricording”.
Resulting in a whopping 41% movement speed increase! It was required for high-end PvP.
... The angle you'd have to hold to go forward properly puts the image of descent crossed with virtual insanity
You forgot the kick mechanic and bypassing the slow ass reloading animations. Cringe it's like you don't even fucking play Boom Shoot games.
(chording)
You let it sound like a bug. But in this game, this behavior is accurate/ as expected.
Tycho Brahe had a pet moose that he would give large quantities of beer at parties as a party trick. This ended with tragedy when the moose got extremely drunk at one party and tripped going down some narrow castle stairs and fatally injured itself. A very Danish fate.
Which coincidentally is the same thing that happend to Iceland's national poet Jónas Hallgrímsson when he was out drinking in Copenhagen.
Tycho Brahe was not involved in that incident as he had been dead for a few centuries and Jónas Hallgrímsson was not a moose.
If there was moose in the Czech republic this would be an everyday occurrence, I guess, with the amounts of beer easily available at all times in your beautiful country!
I love it and come to paddle on the Vltava or other rivers, to camp (with a real campfire, on a campsite!) and drink beer, of course.
But what do we learn from these incidents? Don't play Descent when you're drunk or you might end up like that poor moose!
This is nothing. Tycho Brahe kept a Danish midget in his castle because he believed, seemingly sincerely, that the midget was a prophet. When his servants expressed doubt in the midget's prophetic abilities, Tycho Brahe built a torture dungeon in his castle, approved by the king, into which he threw the doubters. He also looked like a supervillain, because he had lost his nose in a duel, which he initiated a lot of, and made an artificial one out of gold as a replacement. He was a very good astronomer, not a very good theorist, and a batshit insane person.
Jonas Hallgrimson was not a moose _as far as well know_
That last line felt like it came out of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide.
Fun fact! According to LP superstar and former Volition employee Chip Cheezum, Volition was still using some aspect of Descent's engine as a camera to record trailers and promo shots for the Saint's Row series. Gone, but not forgotten.
That's pretty cool, and I had no idea about that.
Volition being folded into Gearbox is perhaps the grimmest fate I can imagine for a studio short of the staff being literally killed in some sort of natural catastrophe.
Woe to Randy Pitchford, double-woe to Tim Willits.
I could tell with the SR2 main menu
Chip Cheezum my beloved. The only reason I got through MGS1-4 as a non-console-haver.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine as a SR guy. They became Gearbox with The Third
omg I haven't heard that name in ages, one of the great stars of the early era of video let's plays. A lot of the SA LPers were Under appreciated
"If you've paused the video to read this far..." That joke was 100% fucking worth pausing for.
Don't forget to become offended, you hardcore gamer you.
Dammit , i paused read 2 points , got a call , then just resumed the video without reading rest of them
11:25 Feminizing anti-gamer chemicals, how can I get more of that?
As the target demographic I am horribly offended. There was nowhere near enough masturbation to properly represent the steps.
@@TrinSpin Well, you have no one to blame for that, but yourself.
Civvie doesn't mention this but the Descent IP isn't in the hands of Embracer, its owned by Interplay who is SOMEHOW still around. I don't know which is worse.
No shit? I thought Interplay went bankrupt years ago.
@@KnoxCarbon Their last game was the Kingpin remaster lmao
@@KnoxCarbon they're IP zombie house now, leeching off money little by little while selling their back catalog on gog and steam. Most of the vets are either spread out through the industry or working at InXile.
They also had dispute with Parallax over royalties (yes, Parallax was still a thing in 2010's, as another IP zombie house) but that's ancient history.
Interplay owns the word "Descent" and the rights to sell the games. The actual games are owned by Parallax Software, which still exists as a legal entity (mostly for Mike Kulas and Matt Toschlog to punch sales royalties out of Interplay as needed. They've had to cut their rights to sell the games at least once before!)
Hence the recent Descent 3 source code release - the person who released it negotiated directly with Matt without Interplay's involvement.
@@mralexsWow. That's fitting lmao
"What are they mining? FIREBLU" That had me rolling
completely underappreciated moment right there
Man... Decent will always have a special place in my heart, back in the late nineties, our computer lab teacher installed it on all the computers and we were able to play it on LAN.
Playing Decent with the boys in the computer lab over LAN was so crazy, you have to remember even seeing a picture on the internet took like 30 seconds, so playing a game and being able to see other people LIVE was *so insane*
As I recall, it was like arcane black magic to get those network multiplayer games to even work back then.
Same here! We did this all the time. We also had Doom and Wolfenstein at some point but that wasn't appreciated so much by the teachers. With Descent they were fine.
You could play head to head with dial up too, can't remember if it was only head to head though.
But I used to with a friend in town back then.
@@dereinzigwahreRichimust be a "mUh ViDeO gAmEs CaUsE vIoLeNcE" moment xD
It wasn't Descent I did this with in the high school computer lab my Senior year, I brought Doom in on a Flash drive and because I had an A in the computer class I had, I gave it to a bunch of other random kids in the class and we would quietly deathmatch right there.
Teacher would be in the middle of lecturing how to improperly use Excel (she was an older gal, bless her heart. She was *not* technologically inclined by any sense but schools had that remote desktop software by this point and she knew how to use that at least minimally.)
Just remembering that after reading your comment has me feeling the same level of nostalgia. 💛
Fraggy: "B-b-b-b-boss, I'm *trying* to find the exit, it's not *my* fault you only armed me with flares!"
Hah g1! I guess you could say he lost his... mojo?
Perilous 😁
@@ShadesMan Holy shit, Shades! Fancy seeing you here!
@@sonofeyeabovealleffoff5462 heya how's it hanging? 😊
DRG Scouts be like, "Am I a joke to you, no lights for you."
Descent was my childhood introduction to getting actually mad at a game.
oh yea
It was nuts. I never finished it.
In my case it was Super Mario Bros 3.
Satanic black magic. Sick shit.
i remember playing this back in the mid 90's with the keyboard keys, no mouse. I looked like someone with cerebral palsy trying to steer the Millennium Falcon one handed while trying to shoo away a wasp stuck in the cockpit. But it was fun!
It was my introduction to heart attacks caused by drillers.
I remember when I was a kid in the era where every FPS was called 'Doom Clone'. My father had several pirated Descent floppy disks with the title: "Doom Ships." 👌🏻
Doom does indeed ship, so it's not wrong.
That is awesome, and technically correct =D
"Doom Does Dizzy"
@@goopah Doom does Johnny Rico and Diz.
Yeah it was Rise of the Triad or Heretic or Duke Nukem or whatever shareware they were pushing on the BBS systems those days. Good times.
Fun fact, I was #1 on the IDL (International Descent Ladder) a few times in the late 90s. My in game name was 'TR'. I had no life and played the game waaaaay too much. Always hung out in the MSN gaming zone. 😂 Also, dont know if its been mentioned, but D1x allows you to drop the framerate. Drop that bitch to 30fps and you'll dodge every homing missile with ease. 🤘
Funny you mention being so slow as well... you need to "tri chord" as we called it back in the day. You essentially use 3 vectors (forward, strafe right/left, and strafe up/down) simultaneously. Obviously you need to angle the pitch of your ship appropriately, but when executed correctly you can literally outrun homing missiles.
Oh right, if the ship has a thruster in every direction, then you can go faster by firing three of them instead of just one. That's kinda funny.
Descent's version of bunny hopping lol.
I feel sorry for anyone who didn't have the opportunity to play descent 2 online back in its heyday. This is the most memorable game I've ever played when I was a kid. The absolute chaos of those multi-player games was nuts.
@@jamesstewart7628 dude, the chaos of Descent 1 with 8 players in Minerva. Unmatched. 😂
So FN kids doing their wild animal routine of the same thing with WASD or arrow keys on PC? We call that "Fortnite Strats" now.
RIP Fraggy
RIP Gibby
RIP Botbait
Gone but not forgotten.
Don't forget about shit bird.
The existence of a fan art wall implies that Civvie either gets mail every morning (hopefully from a Hammer wearing a little postman hat) or that he finds the fan art online and prints it out himself, both of which are equally adorable. ❤
I think Katie makes it for him. Such a special lady.
He literally admitted katie isnt real
@@ltraltier6009which makes it all the more disturbing
@@purringc5552 Katie is him. He’s the editor and does all the voices for the videos. Katie isn’t a real person.
Man show Katie some respect.
Randy the greaselord's naked body covered in grease is an image that will haunt my nightmares forever, just like that USB stick left at medieval times haunts Randy forever.
Oh that Randy, always putting his stick in places it doesn't belong.
Agreed. Would love to see him in prison
Wait... I knew Pitchford was a creepy scumbag but I haven't kept up with anything about him in a long time. Apparently he got a countersuit filed against him by a former Gearbox employee over all of that, saying Pitchford liked to host parties where "adult men have reportedly exposed themselves to minors, to the amusement of Pitchford." He also said the USB had some content with girls of questionable age. Did anything ever come of this? Is Pitchford a kiddlerdiddler? Wouldn't surprise me.
Groose Woozard and Groose Mage. Only a FEW will get those references.
I see my comment got deleted. Thanks TH-cam overlords for protecting us from discussing such topics and for protecting the reputations of such fine, upstanding individuals like Randy.
man civvie doesn't even need to cover games, i can just hear him talk about the ins and out of game developers and gaming companies and who gets acquired by what and how
Now I want to hear him redub a Gaming Historian video vir Batum
@@zendell37 did you mean verbatim?
@@zendell37 Same, but a XboxAhoy video
@@axelprinoVibrator.
Man, do I have a series for you
its called What Happened
Being a kid in the early 2000's and now loving classic games it is always interesting to see something in these old games that directly and obviously influenced my childhood games. I grew up playing the Defender reboot game from 2002 and seeing a ship rescuing Astronauts in this game just like in Defender is nice. My favorite part about Defenders rescue mechanic though was how the first two Colonists would hang on to your wing and the third would hold onto an energy tow cable.
Hey I'm really glad to see Descent get some attention in this day and age, I think you captured the many frustrations people tend to have with these games brilliantly. In case anyone's interested myself and a few others from the Descent/Overload community actually made "Overload: First Strike" which is the whole First Strike campaign for Overload with the goal to modernise it and also to reduce a number of frustrations that Civvie mentioned in this video.
For someone who doesn't exist, Katie is a sassy personality construct that exists in the depths of Civvie's mind.
Oh god why'd you have to remind me IT'S AN ILLUSION THE PRISON ISN'T REAL
@@Mister_Typo smoke hard enough and we can believe it's real again.
For someone who doesn't exist, Katie does a lot of existing.
@@Shrapnel82 She's real, man. [hang on, I'm takin' a hit] Yep. She's real.
I was really young when Descent 3 came-out. So my Dad would give me an unplugged mouse and tell me that the guidebot was me and that I can to click to shoot. I had so much fun!
That's really nice, you had a cool dad.
I remember a time in 1999 my dad busting out a joystick from the top of a bookshelf I couldn't see along with his big box copy of Descent. He then tells me to hop in the pilot seat and buckle in. I exclusively played a handful of SNES games and a couple of GB games at that time in my life so this was the first time I ever touched a 3D game let alone a joystick. The difficulty and me trying to comprehend moving in a 3D space blew my 8 Year old mind so hard it traumatized me from playing any more 3D games lol
@@thevoidknownaskirby3382 Back in the 90s about 50% of people who tried the Descent demo had that reaction. It actually made some people sick.
Civvie giving me deep memories of watching my cousin play this game on a trackball mouse in the 90s and screaming in frustration.
This also gives me...deep memories, OF DESCENDING ON YE MUM
I'm sorry i had to.
@@thesaddestdude3575 You wouldn’t be the first
@@daemonofdecay Would i be the last :o
Folks used to play FPS games w/ a joystick in the 90s... That's part of the reason why the mapping seems so weird b/c there were no established standards yet.
We knew a GenXer who frequented our LANs and he always used SHIFT+CONTROL like we used W(A)S(D).
Trackball mouse with Descent 😂😂😂
I used to play descent on an acer computer when I was a kid, I got pretty good at the easy mode, but my favorite part of it was shooting a ton of flares and trying to write my name on the walls. Volition also was headquartered near me, and they were really cool, would let people come and playtest the games they were working on. It's a real shame what happened to them.
I have all the decent games and original box art from years ago.
Pretty sick intro of that dude getting slashed by that assassin bot.
Great memories. I got Descent for free when it was released because they used a comment I made in their magazine ads. Something along the lines of "Descent is to Doom what Doom was to Wolfenstein!".
That definitely sounds like the kind of marketing angle they were going for, so kudos to you for coming up with that.
I wanted to play Descent since I was a kid in the 90's. My parents never let me. They still don't. Thanks for posting this and letting me know how what I missed in my childhood.
Your parents never let me either
@@AB0VETHALAW They were tough.
On what grounds? Are they Dravis and Dravis in a wig?
"My parents never let me. They still don't." I feel your pain, I'm 30-something and my mom still won't let me play Doom because of satanism or violence or was that Diablo?
It's never too late, and what they don't know won't hurt them.
If they're willing to disown you as a "satan worshipper" for your own grown-ass choices, even if you're (presumably) living on your own away from them, then you need to tell them to make like spitting geese, and duck off.
They don't respect you as a person, and in turn you don't respect yourself as a functioning human being.
It's disgusting...
"You're goin' down" - Rodney Dangerfield popping his Devil Trigger about to smoke Dante
No respect
No Respect End
We just celebrated the (almost) 30th anniversary! Great video, thanks
You're a legend!
I grew up on Descent, and I love it. But it also broke my spirit as a kid. I finally beat it a few years ago on Hotshot by save-scumming, and it required *a ton* of cheesing.
That “elephant” noise the Class 1 Driller makes is burned into my psyche and can instantly trigger anxiety in me.
Civvie you can't hide from Shade Wrath of Angels forever
Fuck, I could never remember the name of this game as an adult. A flood of memories just came back to me as I played this as a young 6 year old as my parents were fighting in the background. Thanks Civvie.
Freespace and Freespace 2 were high water marks of my childhood. I can't even express the feeling of SCALE the first time you meet the Shivans, and one of the best desperate endings in sci fi. I really hope you come around on playing them, even if just for the narrative.
Some of the best space sims ever made.
Freespace 2 is still untouched.
the guide-bot arc is the most beautifully tear-shedding moment in all of recorded history
I remember weeks of playing Descent 1 and 2 with a long serial NULL model cable between my PC and my brother's PC, we would fly around in the levels killing eachoter :) Such nostalgia...
"Then you jet off to Mercury..."
I feel a particular emotion knowing what's coming. It's like how I'd imagine Satan feels when a particularly righteous soul gets sent down to him. A heady mixture of anticipatory glee and empathetic schadenfreude. _Now_ my pain will be shared.
So I'm glad to see you giving the montage to the Class 1 Driller, that tablesaw sounding hitscanning fuck deserves it.
When I was first watching "Pro Blood" years ago and was introduced to the cultists I remember thinking, "Oh they're like Drillers but they graciously only shoot you twice instead of 12 times and you actually have tools to deal with them."
As compensation for introducing the game's Demonic Spiders, level 6 does at least have the best music in the game.
"YOURE GOIN DOWN" ~ Rodney Dangerfield
...and up, left, right, then diagonally backwards head over heels... :)
"I'm using DXX-Rebirth which comes with its own number of issues"
You may have been hiding from Descent, Civvie, but as the former lead-dev of said port, I've have been dreading you saying something like this for years now. ..... alright, I had this video on pause for an hour now, let's do this.
EDIT: Okay, I am still alive. And that Guide-Bot RIP sequence made my laugh tears. Awesome video!
Oh hey man.
How do you feel?
@@ashuggtube Oh I'm good. I think I died considerably less than Civvie did in Descent 1. Which means I did a good job keeping the game accurate. >:)
@@memoriesin8bitgamedev Thank you for your work on this port! I'm curious, do you remember how you determined what the movement speed of the homing missiles should be? The fact that the original game tied it to the framerate is a downer because there's technically no definitive answer. Do the demo playback files just record input actions? Synced playback is the only accurate thing I could think of. Otherwise, maybe the homing missile movement speed is effectively the same for machines at the time of release in 1995, up to a Pentium 166mhz's performance?
@@teranokitty Thank you. As for the homers, I pretty much settled myself at 30 FPS. This was also what most players who gave me feedback agreed with, so we took that sort of as a baseline. But the game has a LOT tied to the frame rate. From the mouse input, homing missiles (their turn rate, how many frames until line of sight is broken and more), collision responses (how much damage a Lifter does grabbing you or damage from a piercing fusion projectile), even little things like how long enemies dodge in certain directions - all tied to frame rate.
Unfortunately demos were only helpful in limited ways. Unlike Doom, the demos in Descent record the positions of everything you see on screen. And guess what: It does that PER FRAME. So when they're played back, their recorded FPS needs to be interpolated to the playback FPS. So in the end, they could only tell me the FPS rate at which they were recorded.
In the end, I gave it all my best shot, but I cannot guarantee if Civvie died so much because the original devs were balancing for 20 FPS.
Ahhhh descent 1 and 2. Descent2 was one of the very few games that eventually provided a 3dfx accelerated binary for use within MSDOS. 60 FPS buttery smoothness.
Also, with the melee bots in D2, you can prevent the green blobs by killing them with physical weapons. Didnt learn this until decades later.
Oh yeah, that's one of the best uses for the Gauss Cannon. I used that thing as much as I could, the damage and that *chug-chug-chug* rare of fire was so satisfying.
I'm quite sure the 3dfx patch for Descent 2 was unofficial. And it was tricky to get it when internet was not that much available. (got mine with some videogame CD fanzine I think)
@@V3nom7 There are two 3dfx binaries for Descent2. One official from interplay (d2voodoo.exe) and the other is the community created d2_3dfx
Holy crap, I thought I imagined this game! I've been searching for this for years, thinking it was my imagination playing tricks on me and that it didn't really exist. I played it when I was really young but remember almost nothing about it except a little bit of the first level.
I'm just going to assume that I never beat it, and that's why the memories are so vague.
Thank you for helping me rediscover old memories!
Time for Civvie's descent into the realm of six degrees of movement
Civvie's being indoctrinated into the drone warfare sector.
0:57 You can't hide from Shade: Wrath of Angels forever, Civvie.
My first ever Boomshoot! Bought it back in the day, after convincing my violence-shy parents that it was about killing robots. SO many memories! SO many hours! Thanks, Civvie!
IS Descent a boomershooter?
I mean I'm no expert on them, but I don't know whether I would really count it as one or not.
@@MrQwertysystem it's not
@@oz_jones yeah it's kinda a convergent-evolution, it's first person, and it's shooting, but it's as much flight game as corridor shooter.
@@InnuendoXP When you say flight game are you thinking of Descent: Freespace? I'm not familiar with flight games having circle strafing as a core combat mechanic.
@@saffral and I'm not familiar with FPS games having pitch, roll & yaw as core movement mechanics.
14 year old me putting the Descent 2 CD in a CD platyer and realising I could make a tape of the music to listen to on my walkman is one of my core memories.
Using "Spray" from ROTT as the music was a great way to hammer home the difficulty of the final boss.
Which, after seeing this, I can say I'm glad I've never actually gone up against.
Came into this neither expecting a mention of "Shade - Wrath of Angels" nor Rodney Dangerfield.
Nobody expects Rodney Dangerfield!
@@Bluecho4 and nobody respects him, either!
@@Bluecho4 Classic misdirect. Shade on "Shade." Well played!
Master Shake, on the other hand, you would expect.
@@bigjohnsbreakfastlog5819 Aqua Teen Hunger Force is too rooted in the minds of todays society to not expect it.
Fun fact: Tycho Brahe, the final boss of Descent 2's namesake, had part of his nose cut off in a drunken duel at 20
Descent!? LET’S F’ING GOOOOOOO
Edit: YOU PLAYED FREESPACE WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER!? Dude, you should do Freespace and FS2, especially if you can bring some attention to Hard Light Productions and FS2Open.
Dude! Freespace's lore is awesome. CV sould really check them
I concur with this recommendation. Blue Planet 2 for an extra boost of stress
YES FREESPACE 2, god that game was so amazing to play as a kid, so many moments had my jaw drop!!!
I absoultely love Freespace. I love it cuz the game tells you a story of facing insurmountable odds, and it does it through the story but also the gameplay. You suddenly find your entire armory replaced by the single weapon that can kill the enemy, and enemies that will just not go down no matter how much you shoot at them, it's fantastic how the gameplay 180º to show you how unstoppable the enemy is.
Total Shivan Death
I enjoyed this very much! Thank you, Civvie.
Descent was my jam back in the day, I spent many many many hours playing both Descent and Descent II. Even the Descent II soundtrack did a big chunk of defining my musical tastes that still stand. Our internet sucked back then but I was still halfway decent playing on Zone. I had also hooked in to the developer network and at one point was working on my own campaign that unfortunately never went anywhere, though I did provide some voices for one of the Freespace fan campaigns.
Man, been having a seriously hard time in RL lately and after a long bath listening to ambient thunderstorms trying to stave off my inevitable stress induced pre 40 year old heart attack I get in bed, pet the cat, and open youtube to see... my favourite channel is playing through one of my favourite childhood games. I really needed this, like, my god man. Thank you.
Dravis sends you good luck
Does listening to ambient thunderstorms help with stress? Also I'm sorry to hear that. May you find small comforts to help you through this stretch of darkness.
One of my all time favorite game series! Delighted to watch this.
The game had a few things that were tied to your processor speed, homing missiles being one of them. They were easily dodged on an old 486, but could turn on a dime on faster processors. The shareware version even had the subtle ship bob tied to processor power, and on fast processors would literally slap you into the walls fast enough to take damage. I'm surprised none of the source ports have ever re-tuned the tracking to be more in line with the original hardware.
Right? I remembered this game being a LOT more survivable. Still really hard, but not this hard.
I went to the current master github of DXX, and apparently the most recent public commits have fixed projectile speed; given that D2 changed the overall frequency and speed of homing misses, I would say that even the *ideal* hardware setup at the time would have meant that homing missiles were probably faster.
@@USSMariner Nice! I'll need to take a look.
Well, could have been worse. You should see how Wing Commander goes with faster processors... gods, those games have not aged well, and it's frustrating that it still has its loyal fans.
Then again, that may be my TIE Fighter and FreeSpace 2 bias speaking.
Descent 2's Redbook music is severly underrated, one of the best video game soundtracks of the 90s. It don't get no respect!
*fidgets, adjusts necktie*
Holy crap!
ED-209 scared the crap out of me when I saw it as a kid.
Thanks for the nostalgia, good sir!
Civvie you can't hide from Turok forever
"I'm _pretty_ sure there was something about riding talking velociraptors at some point"
That's from the _Enter the Dominatrix_ DLC, which is an in-universe making-of film about a movie dramatizing the events of the main game. Badly.
"LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE! BOOM, BOOM, AKALAKALAKA BOOM. BOOM, BOOM, AKALAKA BOOM BOOM!"
I somehow own all the DLC for saints row 4 and yet I somehow must have never played that.
Enter the Dominatrix was originally planned as a DLC for Saints Row 3 before the scope got so out of hand it turned into Saints Row 4. So afterwards they cobbled together a bunch of cut content from what the DLC was going to be and released it as a DLC for Saints Row 4 under the guise of being a documentary about what the DLC would've been if it wasn't the game that you're playing.
Saints Row, man, it's a series.
@@saffral It *was* a series, for many of us it ended at 3, more ended at 4, and the few left took whatever was left and tried to enjoy it.
The need to constantly out-do the last game in an overly dramatic flair resulted in enough DLC for them to do a whole new game, and then add more DLC. The third game was rather fun, but SR4 was way whack.
@@saffralIt is honestly one of my favorite DLCs of all time just because of the way it was presented, and I wish more games would do something similar. It's really neat getting to see the stuff that was originally planned that got cut, and the "Behind the scenes documentary" style presentation with interviews with the characters fit in beautifully with Saints Row.
what the fucking hell, the Dangerfield "no respect" bars kinda slapped.
It's so weird
It is funny when you notice that he and Brendan Frasier lookalike now
@@Bitterman5868 Brenden Frasier in "No Respect: The Rodney Dangerfield story" when?
Go watch Caddyshack.
I loved Descent so much as a kid, and always wondered what happened to it after Descent 2. So I've learned a lot more and I'm getting Overload ~
Overload is great. It really feels like "modern Descent".
They nailed the optimization. The game ran so well and it was so simple there wasn't anything to go wrong.
I remember spending hours in a save file editor trying to create my own ultimate custom weapons in Descent, so that there would be bouncy splitting plasma everywhere with splash damage to basically kill everything
Dude, I'd forgotten about Drillers, then THAT SOUND activated some suppressed teenage PTSD.
*VREEEEEE!*
How DRG is here?
Those MFers were awful. But they were weak, one homing missile was enough to kill them and it was almost always worth it.
Even worse... remember those green robots in the final levels that fired volleys of concussion missiles?
I was obsessed with Descent when I was a kid and you put this out on my birthday. HOW DID YOU KNOW.
hey, happy birthday man!
I remember playing this as a kid and my dad could only watch for a couple minutes before he would get sick to his stomach 😂😂
I need Tanarus from you, Civvie. At some point!
I had this experience when it came to F-Zero
Finally, dude! I've been waiting for you to make a video on this game for so long. Freaking epic!
I love it!!! Descent and Descent 2 were amazing and completely underrated.
This is the earliest I have ever been to a CV11 video. Holy crap.
I have been waiting for this for years.
I never played Descent when i was a kid, but i did have "the Descent we have at home"... "Radix: Beyond the Void"
See also: Terminal Velocity
@@notquitee Fury 3 and it's on-CD banger soundtrack for me. I think it came with a sound blaster or a joystick or something for free? Good times.
@@notquiteeTerminal velocity was a banger
@@notquitee I died in Terminal Velocity as it saved and the load game would just load into me dying. That's my strongest memory of the game as a kid.
@@ariloulei814 It should teach you something very important, don't fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yourself like that. Fallout 3 taught me to JUMP in fallout games with every bit of knowledge because fkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkking Todd wanted us all to jump into Fallout 4 and get ourselves fkkjkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkked, sequence breaking, killing of whatever NPC not knowing who is important and who doesn't matter. DO you see my point? Do not believe anything he says at all, kay. Knowledge is power, power to not get yourself into a death loop, no pun.
In the tech support office I worked at in this era (I did Windows 3.x and '95 support for the After Dark family of screensavers) we had an OK to play games between calls -- since keeping games running on different PCs was a skillset, management believed that this helped us do our jobs. Also, being familiar with popular entertainment software helped us resolve issues when they arose.
Descent was pretty popular -- except that we had two joysticks. A CH Flightstick and a CH Flightstick Pro. Only the Pro had the "hat" button that you could use to slide/strafe. You could circle strafe at an angle with only one hand on the stick. It was awesome once you got used to it.
Main axis for cardinal direction on the X plane, "twist" for yaw and the hat for pitch and roll, all 3 axes in one hand.
You could fly through a door into an open area and then slam yourself down flat on the wall near the opening and smartbomb the other guy as he came through.
I don't even think modern controllers have features like the CHF Pro did.
Those were some times. Definitely times, those were.
I haven't watch your vids for awhile. Just now reminds me how good they are. Descent is one of my favorite childhood games. Your review style applied to it is brilliant. You could take most music tracks for descent 2 and have Trent Reznors voice in the back to match a NiN track.
There are games that pull off great, fewer that pull off amazing, but Decent pulls off spectacular, putting the gameplay and action front and center.
Gotta second that recommendation - Overload is just Descent But Better. Also it got a huge mod - Overload: First Strike - which is a remake/reimagining of Descent 1! But also better!
Civvie's first track since "Eat Lead" doesn't disappoint.
12:30
Know what plays at about 35:42?
the fact that Civvie talk's about Talking velociraptors being in Saints row 4 and he is also technically correct is incredible. Because I was convinced no one remembered that on bit in the DLC.
They sang walk the dinosaur while you were riding them...... and then THEY PARODIED THE ENDING TO A NEW FUCKING HOPE!!!! The only way people would forget that mindfuck was to drink it away
@@Sonichero151 Which I imagine they did. Because there is such a thing as too weird.
I won't demand anything of you Civvie, it's your channel and already my favourite on youtube
What I will say is that I'm really looking forward to the Jedi Outcast video
Next level edging. Never played this game, have no stake in it, but hearing you talk about this one so much for so many years and FINALLY making a video about it? Instant bust. At some point you're going to need to stream. Cheers mate and thanks for the video!
The amount of effort put into your videos and rate at which they come out is amazing. I know that you usually don’t like to break character except for rare occasions, but I would really love to see a breakdown of your production.
Rodney Dangerfield inserts are the best possible improvement to a Civvie video, nice.
I vote for that this becomes a regular feature.
This with a Microsoft Sidewinder Precision Pro joystick was the greatest 6DOF experience in gaming history.
Wrong. SpaceOrb 360.
Oh how I loved playing Descent. Thanks for bringing back good memories Civvie.
Amazing and groundbreaking games, thank you for torturing yourself through it so I could reminice a little 😂 I haven't played Descent 2 in probably well over 25 years now but man the sound design is still firmly embedded into my brain. That damn thief bot noise gave me a jolt of anxiety and frustration as if I played it yesterday.
The best way I describe Descent to people who haven't played it.
Imagine if we made you spin in an office chair 500 times. Then we put you in a Tilt-O-Whirl. Once you get off, we put horse blinders on you and made you play a game of laser tag.
While I'm thinking about it, there was a third port of the original game to Mac. Instead of a MIDI soundtrack, it had full CD quality music on the disk. It was probably my first serious introduction to Industrial, and filtered through almost 30 years of nostalgia, it is amazing.
I used to play this game with a Saitek Cyborg 3D (not the Gold version) back in the day. Though I never beat it then. The controller, even with a throttle and HAT switch still just didn't have enough buttons. When I replay it with DXX-Rebirth, I was able to fully set up an Xbox 360/Xbox One controller for it. And let me tell you, that played amazing.
Way better than trying to play the RPG in the engine!
i was about to write, "wait, civvie plays this with a mouse? it should be played with a 4-axes-joystick" ^^ - but xbox controller i think is also ok :)
No way! Civvie11 is bringing my childhood back to life. And I'm all for it.
Now I must go back and replay the Descent series (yes, that includes Descent 3, Civvie11...bite me).
A shame Descent and Descent 2 weren't divided into two videos - would join the Thief Playlist as my "background noise" videos. Ah well. Now to just wait for Thief: Deadly Shadows, and even the 2014 reboot.
Hey! Civvie11! I have one and only one request: *RECOIL* and the BFT - "The BATTLE (BIG) FORCE (FREAKING) TANK!"
Thank you. I loved this game so much, and your analysis is very, very accurate
Saw the vid title and thought to myself, "No way is Civvie playing Descent 1 in PRO-MODE" because Descent 1 (or as I often referred to it as "FFFFFUUUUUCCCKKKKK THIS GAME!!!!") makes Doom Plutonia look like an episode of Paw Patrol.
The only thing missing from this video is the always hysterical sewer count bit. One could argue Descent 1 in its entirety counts as an entire sewer level considering how much shit is floating in this digital septic tank.
Kudos, Civvie for actually finishing the game. I'd never seen the end boss on this one before, for obvious reasons.
Descent may be the only franchise Civvie has touched that legitimately does not have any actual sewer levels, though, since the levels are all mines and research bases and military complexes.
whole fucking game is one giant lava sewer
Ah, the thief bot. One of the coolest, and most annoying additions to Descent 2. Its a perfect example of how the developers did some really simple but clever things with the enemies to make them interesting.
I found two effective ways to kill them, instead of just chasing them around with the Gauss forever. Either shoot it with flash missiles, because it will briefly stun it so you can keep up with it and hit it a little easier. With some luck, you can catch it in a corner and stunlock it until it dies. Or, you can set a trap. The thief always tries to sneak up behind you whenever it can. Find a dead end with only one entrance. Fill that entrance with smart mines or prox bombs. And then stare at the wall facing away from the entrance, and the thief will inevitably run into your mines trying to pinch that sweet Pyro-GX booty.
Also, in all the times I've played Descent 2, I've never actually seen the Guidebot die. I always figured it was indestructible.
Also also: PRO OVERLOAD WHEN CIVVIE? PRO DESECRATORS WHEN CIVVIE? PRO SUBLEVEL ZERO WHEN CIVVIE?!!? PRO FORSAKEN WHEN CIVVIE?!?!?!??!!!!1! PRO DESCENT TO UNDERMOUNTAIN WHEN CIVVIE!?!?!?!?!1111!??!GABBAGABBAHEY!?!
**gasp** You said the forbidden cheat code word!
hah been playing the Descent 1 levels in Overload so this vid was perfect timing
Bonus points for not only mentioning Dangerfield, but Austin Powers and Steven Seagal as well!
One of the first games I played (with a joystick, I might add). Thanks for unlocking a memory
"Look at him and tell me there's a God." Alright, Civvie, that got me good. Thank you for suffering that I might enjoy this tiny bit of nostalgia.
20:08 the song awoke deep recesses of my mind
I still have the original cd case for it. Thanks for making this video Civvie👍
If I could give this video 999,999,999,999 likes I would. One of my favorite games ever! I remember my IBM Aptiva had the shareware version bundled in with its optional software package. Tried it, got slightly motion sickness and stopped playing. A few months later I booted it back up again and was hooked. Beat the shareware version, almost immediately bought the full version and the strategy guide. Then I got D2. My brother also got into the game, and he’d be the type that would lean around while he was piloting the ship. He bought D3 and after he stopped playing it to focus on a bachelors degree he was going for, he gave it to me. I have many sheets of paper with pencil drawings of concept robots, including a driller with 3 Vulcan cannons that would have shrieked like 12:49 (CV11’s absolute worst nightmare!) and a robot that was a mobile robot generator, it’s intended purpose being used in remote areas of the mines far away from the built in generators and in emergencies creating robots that might be needed. I also have all 3 novels.
Same here! The family got an Aptiva Pentium 120mhz with 16 MB RAM in December 1995. The Descent shareware included was the bomb! I remember having a lot of trouble with the level 7 yellow Super Hulk boss. I had so much trouble that I was convinced that it was invincible and that the actual reactor core was hidden in the central column in the arena. Eventually, I killed it, but it took a while. We bought the full version via Descent: Anniversary Edition sometime in the next few years which had the base game, the 100 level pack add-on and 20 additional levels (user made?). I remember trying to play additional levels I downloaded, but the levels never showed up in the level select list despite my putting them in the same directory as the Descent AE add-on levels.
Thanks for playing Descent Civvie! now we'll for sure get a great Nightdive Port thanks to this video
I remember making my own levels for D1 using an MS-DOS level editor called Devil. It was a painstaking process but damn was it fun. This video is peak nostalgia for me.
This was a mind blowing game when I first played it way back when. Also the only time I ever felt a little seasick playing a game. Nightdive did a Forsaken remaster some years back too... RIP Volition
Descent was my childhood. This is the surprise upload I didn't know I needed until I got it.
Thank you, Civvie. You magnificent psychopath.
Rodney Dangerfield...
Fucking WHAT.
It is bizarre how they tried to make Rodney Dangerfield cool in the 90s.
Dude had his own cartoon movie FFS.
I remember experiencing this as a child... Somehow my Grandmother had both Descent and Are you Afraid of the Dark on her PC in the 90s, and I was sufficiently terrified of both. Now, 25ish years later I'm far more intrigued. I wish I had a Thruster and Joystick with some multi-monitor action XD.
Decent, the first game I played on the internet IN DOS. It was awesome. That game cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars in Logitech Wingman 2 joysticks. I used to use the 4 way joystick hat and would just break them off with my thumb.
Well Done Material Defender.