Daily Clarity from Hawkes: The good old days make a comeback
The Internet was still an early teenager. Nirvana was a long ago memory, and OJ was just about to get acquitted. My brother had moved to Virginia and had taken with him a rag tag group of mutual friends. One of them, Joe, I had only met on several occasions. A mutual interest in films and other topics of the time solidified the friendship, and several nights of drunken debauchery probably made my hopes of becoming President a long distant memory…
…that and the pictures of me licking some girl’s boot.
But I digress.
It was also the summer that I discovered “online gaming.” No where near what we know today, but effective for its time. It was the summer of Descent.
Descent was a space flying FPS, in the vain of Doom but with the addition of potential enemies in 360 degrees of space. Your exits could be in front, or below, or diagonal to where you were looking. Many people I know who played it complained of nausea, but not me, I loved the game with all my heart, and challenged my brother to dial-up matches.
Yes, I said dial-up. I hadn’t gotten onto the Internet yet, so the only way I was able to play was by either calling my brother’s modem, or having his modem call mine. We played so much that we had to take a month off because our phone bills went to the “Holy horses excrement!” area of expensive.
My brother was pretty good, but still relatively easy pickings. It didn’t help him that I had spent some extra bucks and picked up a Sidewinder joystick to really kick some tail. The day finally came that Joe decided to give it a go, and he too fell in love…
…it’s just such a shame that he wasn’t as good at it as I was.
I wasn’t mean. I tried to help. I showed him where power-ups were, the hidden chambers, the invisible shield and everything. He just didn’t get it, and it was sad because he really, really wanted to beat me till I cried like a 4-year-old with skinned knees.
Instead, I would get him to the point of wanting to toss my brother’s (then) $3,000 computer out the window. I would follow him while invisible and just nudge him, or send him text messages saying I was going to kill him in 3, 2, 1, then let loose a barrage that only Pearl Harbor survivors could possibly say was worse.
We talk about it once in a while, him with a wry smile. Again, he doesn’t suck at games at all, this was just not his cup of tea. Today I brought it up to him again, and though it was through an IM window, I could almost feel that wry smile on his face.
I couldn’t imagine what a snappy graphics version of Descent would look like today, and I’m such an old man that maybe I’ll finally get that nauseous feeling some of my friends had told me about.
Hard to say, but after reading this rather old announcement, and seeing the “Coming Soon” sign on Interplay’s website. I’m so looking forward to finding out.
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Yep, I remember Descent being the first game that ever gave me motion sickness. I got over it eventually and thought it was a great game.