Topic: Descent is on Steam!

[Kaizerwolf]

Hey guys! This is awesome!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/273570/

It's 50% off right now. I don't think I'll be buying it, as I'm still happy with Rebirth. But it's still really cool to see such an old classic on a modern game market!

Kw

[PyroJockey]

Sure I already own multiple legitimate copies of Descent (original DOS 3.5 floppy, Definitive Collection CD, Good Old Games download), but what the hell, I threw another $3.49 in the kitty for the Steam (DOSBox) version just to show there are still people who see value in it. Gifted one to my son too. After-all, you can never have too much Descent.

[Kaiaatzl]

I don't have money to waste on something I already own a couple times over, but I'm stalking the discussion boards and trying to help with issues.
So a different kind of support .

As well as making sure people know there are two sourceports, not just Rebirth.  I'm still a fan of D2X-XL.

[Pumo]

As well as making sure people know there are two sourceports, not just Rebirth.  I'm still a fan of D2X-XL.

Amen to that!

[Kaiaatzl]

If the Steam's D2 release uses the original 12-song Redbook CD instead of the Infinite Abyss version (that GOG used) I might buy it.  Since the Infinite Abyss CD doesn't have most of the music that was actually advertised for Descent 2 (no Haunted, and only one of the Skinny Puppy tracks, which is truncated instead of extended!) and it doesn't have Cold Reality as a gameplay track (unacceptable!).

[Matthew]

I plan to buy it, if for no other reason than that we need to show Interplay that people are still interested in Descent, and the best way to do that is to buy it. Money talks! There's a surprising number of posts on Steam about it already, hopefully that holds some promise for Ye Olde Interplay and the future of Descent!

[-<WillyP>-]

My son says this is probably a 'Green Light', which according to him, is a game that was requested by Steam players to be on Steam.

[Kaiaatzl]

That's not exactly how Greenlight works...
It would have to have been Interplay who put it on Greenlight, and then convinced players to vote for it... possible, but not likely.

[Matthew]

This was not a Greenlight game.

[Scyphi]

Yeah, if it was a Greenlight game, it would be quite obviously advertised as such, judging from how some of the other Greenlight games I've looked at have been presented.

EDIT: was poking around Interplay's website just now, and found they had an entry for Descent on Steam on their site, proving that this is exclusively done by them and everything. Might be their answer to compensate for the failure of D1-4-Wii (which was why I was on there in the first place, to see if they still had that listed. They do. ), which might be a good thing in a way, because it shows Interplay at least has SOME interest.

That said, though I'm quite happy with Rebirth, especially seeing it's superior graphically, I've very tempted to buy this just for the nostalgia of playing the game as I originally remember it. 

I mean, all the additions and improvements are fun to try, but sometimes they do taint the original feel of the game, so it's nice sometimes to just play it "as-is." I especially feel strongly with this with original D1, as I have found it worked so well, it was hard to really improve upon it without making it a whole new game (as the developers quickly realized when working on D2, which, as it turns out, was initially conceived as simply a large expansion pack to D1 until they realized it'd just might as well be a game of its own).

In other news, Techpro found an article online today that was talking about twelve games that "really need" to make a comeback, for which Descent was one of. So was Freespace 2, but that's another story. Anyway, I thought of it because it mentioned Descent was on Steam too, but I didn't think anything of it at the time (silly me). I'd post a link, but I don't know where Techpro found it, and I don't feel up to go searching for it right now...besides, I have homework I ought to be doing. 

Anyone else notice that the person playing the game in the video posted on Steam isn't doing that great a job at it?

[Kaiaatzl]

But they certainly love their spreadfire.

[Scyphi]

Out of curiosity, I sat down and went through all the reviews that have been given for Descent on the Steam site. I was very pleased to see that, not only was there a fair number of them, ALL of them BUT one was positive, and the one that was not was only negative, because he thought getting the game through GOG was the better deal. Were it not for that, it seemed clear his would be positive too.

Also interesting information; it seems the Steam release is still compatible with Rebirth (and like) mods. This is good, because this means its yet another avenue through which players can get a copy of the game if they don't already, enabling them to make use of such mods.

Also, something I wanted to ask; anyone know if this Steam version still supports custom missions? I mean, it is pretty much just the original game from 1995 tweaked to run on modern systems, so I can't imagine why it wouldn't, I'm just thinking of how one would get the game to do it. How it handles files might have changed in order to be able to run it through Steam.

[Kaiaatzl]

I doubt it.  Considering all the games released through steam (many were not developed for steam, were no longer supported by their developers by the time steam got around to releasing them, and were not open-source at the time either), I don't know how steam actually implements its copy-protection but it's clearly not through the source code.

[Matthew]

The steam version is just a dosbox installation of Descent. It's actually a direct copy of the GOG package, from what I can tell.

[Scyphi]

So...yes then?

Aw, what the hey, it's three bucks, that's worth it.