Planet Descent
Community => Mess Hall => Topic started by: CrazyEnzo03 on January 12, 2013, 10:44:06 AM
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I'm taking a class as a free elective this spring semester. It is a Composition II class with a special topic called 20th Century Gaming.
Here is a list of the games covered:
Black Isle - PLANESCAPE: TORMENT
Sierra - PHARAOH
Black Isle/Interplay - FALLOUT
Interplay - DESCENT
Square Enix - TOMB RAIDER
Cyan - MYST
Id/Apogee - COMMANDER KEEN
Origin - ULTIMA IV
Sierra - KING’S QUEST I, II, III
Sierra - SPACE QUEST I
Infocom - ZORK I: THE UNDERGROUND KINGDOM
I will be expected to write two papers, take a couple of exams and do weekly homework, not to mention about 3 hours assigned gaming per week.
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Keep us posted with what you "learn" :P.
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Man, I wish I could've taken something like that at my college. I'd say "Have fun," but that's pretty much a given. :)
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Whoa, Descent AND Commander Keen? :o
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You sure you didn't just die and go to heaven? :P
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Every game in that list were either very significant to the 'gaming community' or (in most cases) were groundbreaking with the technology/methods used.
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I have never played Commander Keen. I have never even owned a copy of it. I had Jazz Jackrabbit but it wouldn't install on the old computer I played games on when we got it. A large chunk of Masters of Doom talks about id developing it and how Adrian Carmack got so pissed off for having to draw cute stuff. =]
There's a lot of games in the list that I have, sadly, not played, including the original Fallout (!), though I have Fallout 2. Still never played that one either.
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Guys
There's a chance that because of this class, all of the games on this list might be installed on the gaming computers in the student technology center.
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I hope none of your classmates get motionsick...
:P
The scary thing though, is that I care about that news. And I'm not sure why. I'm pretty sure it doesn't make sense. ;D
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Commander Keen is the only gaming title I've ever shown interest from id, so I'm somewhat bias on that matter. :P
Please let us know how the class handles these individual games, especially Descent! :D
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Please let us know how the class handles these individual games, especially Descent! :D
My guess, a third of the class will report motion sickness, a third will claim the controls are too hard to learn. The other third will be fans for life.
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XD.
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Kind of predicting that myself, but hey, a guy can hope. :P
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Here's to "Fans for Life"! Cheers!
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It's good to see Descent getting the recognition it deserves for being the groundbreaking game that it was.
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Progressive trailers mostly noisily perused umpteen botulisms. One
chrysanthemum extremely annoyingly marries quixotic Klingons.
Five putrid Macintoshes gossips, because two televisions grew up.
One irascible sheep easily sacrificed five Klingons, and the trailers
perused Tokyo. Poisons grew up.
Five televisions gossips. Umpteen partly putrid elephants
tastes one almost silly sheep, because chrysanthemums abused five
very quixotic botulisms, and Quark incinerated two tickets, even
though one orifice partly lamely towed pawnbrokers, yet Santa Claus
you can move many llamas into arranging all of the primary statistics.
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Eh? Someone hacked your account?
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Slight hint to what game we just covered. ;)
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So for this weekend we were to play Descent.
...I don't think very many people cared for it.
It's funny though, over half the class is made up of non-gamers, the rest are casual gamers and then me and a couple of others.
So about half the class bashed it on its "annoying music" (we were told we *had* to have it on because of our online journals/blogs for the class) but it seems a lot of them are hooked, a couple of them saying they'll definitely play it again in the near future.
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Music? Annoying?
BLASPHEMERS!!!! :P
Did everyone have to play through the entire game over the weekend?
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Annoying music? Nonsense! This is how video games are supposed to sound!
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I know, right? I'm betting most of them prefer that dubstep garbage I've heard so many great things about, but you can't go wrong with the classic midis or the balls-to-the-wall metal of the Redbook soundtrack.
I'm also wondering how much of the game had to be played. The main campaign for either Descent 1 or 2 still takes me somewhere in the ballpark of six or seven hours on the two hardest settings, which definitely sounds like a lot of time to spend when you've got to still make time for other classes and assignments over the course of about four days. So my guess would be to at least play up to Level 7 of Descent 1 or something, but feel free to prove me wrong. :P
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And that's 6-7 hours for someone who's played the game many times before.
Not to mention if you had to play it above a certain difficulty...
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This does beg the question though of which version of Descent the class is playing, and whether or not they're playing it with the original midi-ish songs, or a redbook soundtrack (which some versions of the original Descent, especially Mac versions, did have).
Other than that, yeah, I do have to question what these classmates deem as "annoying" music. :P
Of course, we're all kind of bias on this aspect, aren't we? :P
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I thought you were going to call me ASHICR.
And of course we're biased. That's why this thread is so fun to post in. We're probably playing it up too.
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My guess would be they just had to play it for a certain amount of time. Honestly most people shouldn't mind spending a bit more time on this assignment than they would for most, seeing as it also fills the role of entertainment rather than just schoolwork.
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We have to play at least 3 hours a week.
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@ ASHICR: But I didn't refer to you directly in said post, now did I? :P
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To elaborate, we're having today-games generation college students playing the GoG edition of Descent with default music and sound settings (i.e. emulated OPL2/3/whatever) in a class taught by 80s-and-90s game playing generation instructor.
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@ ASHICR: But I didn't refer to you directly in said post, now did I? :P
Yes you did. Of course, we're all kind of bias on this, aspect, aren't we?
Oh. Unless you meant something else by that word. About half of the people in any non-descent game call me by it now :P. The other half call me Bizzare.
...class taught by 80s-and-90s game playing generation instructor.
Like one of us! XD
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I don't have too many soundtracks anymore, from movies or games. Descent is one of the few I have. I found the music great to be honest, and even the Descent 2 redbook music is cool.
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Especially the Redbook, you mean. :P
No, I'll admit the DOS soundfont is really only good for nostalgia for me, but it really only works for certain tracks. I actually stumbled upon Vignettes and tried it out on DOSBox before making the switch to Rebirth, and good god the music was unlistenable on that soundchip (especially Level 3, which became one of my favorites after hearing it the way it was meant to be heard).
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It's true, some of the best songs in the game (especially level 12, which probably either no one managed to get to or everyone got stuck at) didn't sound quite so great on the OPL2/3. On the other paw, some of the worse songs in the game actually sounded better on FM.
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@ ASHICR: But I didn't refer to you directly in said post, now did I? :P
Yes you did. Of course, we're all kind of bias on this, aspect, aren't we?
Oh. Unless you meant something else by that word. About half of the people in any non-descent game call me by it now :P. The other half call me Bizzare.
...Now you've lost me. ::)
As for the music, I suppose I can see where you guys are coming from. Some worked better than others. And changes in sound cards further added to this effect (personally, I think many of the songs sounded best on their original, intended sound card from back in the day, which I bet Enzo's class are not using).
I was always half and half on the D2 redbook music.
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depends on my mood on what I want to hear, D1 or the redbook version of D2.
I used to have D3 in my library/playlist for 5+ years. After a while, I sort of grew old of it. On some tracks, I tried to add in an "echo" effect when you hear someone talking, or to actually cut out some parts that are from the game. One example, Bread & water (Novis? prison). words at the beginning were changed to have an echo effect, like she was using the PA system throughout the prison. Some dialog later on, gun fire, I tried to remove. Sort of worked, but I sort of got tired of the music.
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Half of the people in, trackmania, say, call me Aspect.
The other half call me Bizzare. It's a tough call to which I like to be called better.
No one calls me Of The.
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Nobody in my class mentioned the boss. :( I'm going to ask them next time the class meets. This means only this one guy who watched me knows what the first boss is like.
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In only three hours' playtime, most of them may not have reached the level 7 boss. I remember playing through the demo (before the full D1 was released) the first time I played Descent, and I don't think I got past level 6.
I still remember the first time I reached that huge room, how small/powerless I felt against all those drillers and red hulks, and how much that first smart scared the crap out of me while I was hiding in the little entry hall... :D
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I remember WAAAAAY back in the day when Techpro would first go against a Descent boss (and pretty much any time since for years after) I was absolutely terrified of it.
Of course, this was back when I was, like, five or younger. :P
I've since mostly conquered that fear as I've moved to take up playing the game myself, but nonetheless, in the back of my head, some part of me is still scared witless of pretty much any Descent boss.
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Oh, I was the same way with my dad in Descent 1. Those two bosses were high-octane nightmare fuel for me at that age, especially with the engine ticking and the fact that they could reappear anywhere...
Not as much of that in Descent 2 aside from the Ice Boss and the Alien 2 Boss (though the Fire Boss was definitely added in when playing above Trainee a few years later). I also think it's a little funny that the Descent 2 bosses with the scariest sounds are probably Red Fatty and the Alien 1 Boss, which are among the least intimidating in the game. Kind of says how the Ice and Alien 2 Bosses didn't really need that effect... Instead, the sounds became scary from association with the harder bosses, rather than being scary by themselves.
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Seriously, the Fire Boss is much harder than the Ice Boss (although Xaihyv might disagree). Still, the Ice Boss is infamouser.
For that matter, Descent UDK may bring back more than just the two Descent 1 bosses... There may even be a recurring boss from D3.
I must be, like, the only one here in my age group who wasn't introduced to Descent by a parent. The closest my dad comes to playing video games is watching the Resident Evil movies (I watched one with him once and it wasn't bad at all, and not at all like the DOOM movie, but anyway) if I remember right, when I was 5 or 6 we borrowed the CD version of Descent from a neighbor to test out our first CD-ROM drive. I was allowed to try the game and I got hooked instantly. It took me 3 more years to realize there was more to the game than Lunar Outpost XD. Or that that strange four-paneled wall in the starting area of Lunar Outpost was actually a door (although I think I found most of the secret doors the first time I tried playing. I got D3 in 1999 from a school book order. And I quickly developed an irrational phobia of trains in video games because of a 2 fps framerate.
And I didn't manage to beat the level 7 boss until I decided to try the game again 11 years later. Which was also the first time I played D2 and decided it was my favourite Descent and I think I've got sidetracked from the point of this post which was:
@Naptha: You're doing a Vertigo on Ace too? :facepaw: I just started making Why Don't We Play Descent 2 The Vertigo Series On Ace!!! to judge how people like my commentary before I do an actual Let's Play of Lost Levels. I think I already made a reference to Ace as well... umm... the Seventh Doctor's main companion. Which means it's too late to stop. For some reason.
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Really? Fire Boss is harder, you say? Hmm, last time I fought him (which was, granted, some time ago) I didn't have much trouble with him. That big room provided plenty of room to maneuver around.
I got D3 in 1999 from a school book order.
Really? Geez, I must have been getting all the wrong book orders during grade school! :P
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I must be, like, the only one here in my age group who wasn't introduced to Descent by a parent.
Wrong. ;)
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I'm 30, was never told of any game by any parent, unless you want to go back to the Atari games, (2600 & 5200).
The only computer related thing I got from my dad was "Mandrake Linux 8.1"
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Yer not the same age group. Yer a slightly older age group.
I'z 22. And I wazz born the decade after you. It's zed, not zee. Zed sounds more professional.
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Maybe so. But I doubt that'd be much different. Maybe though. Parents would be younger, may have already started playing those games. It was my mom that was into Atari. I liked some of those games. They were fun.
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At some point, you guys will get to the age group where you're introducing your own kids to Descent. Lemme tell you, it's fun. :)
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I'm not sure, I don't think I'm ever planning to reproduce.
Maybe adopt, though.
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Yer not the same age group. Yer a slightly older age group.
I'z 22. And I wazz born the decade after you. It's zed, not zee. Zed sounds more professional.
I'm 20. I turn 21 in April. I consider you in my age group.
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At some point, you guys will get to the age group where you're introducing your own kids to Descent. Lemme tell you, it's fun. :)
True dat! (Personal experience, four times)
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Yer not the same age group. Yer a slightly older age group.
I'z 22. And I wazz born the decade after you. It's zed, not zee. Zed sounds more professional.
I'm 20. I turn 21 in April. I consider you in my age group.
Probably correctly.
But do you consider yourself in my sanity group?
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You're not in myinsanity group, that's for sure.
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I'm 30, and I don't know what will happen, marriage, kids, or just marriage, or no marriage at all. I'm not sure anymore. Whatever happens, i don't even know what games I'd introduce to my potential kids. I don't have a large collection now, and I'm guessing it won't get any bigger later on. I doubt I even have 10 games, and that's PS3 + PC combined.