Monday 21 December 2015

Descent: Underground - PC Game... ....Tabletop Inspiration

Equip your nostalgia goggles, and sit back for the ride....


Yeah baby, Descent is back!  For those who have no idea of what the original Descent is, I sincerely hope you don't play PC games, you filthy casual.

For those still on dial-up who didn't watch the trailer, it is a PC game where you pilot a space fighter through tunnels within an asteroid, a disorientating blast where up and down have no meaning. 

I'm always trying to shoehorn more terrain into my space games (I hate empty space boards - if space was empty, why would anyone bother to fight over it?) to add interest - and what could be more interesting than flying space fighters underground?


So my EM4 fighters (an awesome bargain @50c each), fresh from their services as 300-knot submarine fighters in SubWar, resume their traditional starfighter role...


They could also mine for minerals to make different missions/objectives, as well as destroying reactor cores and infected robot ships....

Although the original Descent had rather precise controls, I'm thinking about using vector and drift a la Delta Vector the Game to give less cautious players a chance to "wipe out" into the sides of the caverns....

10 comments:

  1. So casual am I, I initially assumed this was going to be about the dungeon-crawling boardgame. No, I'm not familiar with this, bu then I've not played computer games since they cam on floppy disks.

    My sole reason for posting is to attempt an answer to the query, "if space was empty, why would anyone bother to fight over it?"

    Possibly for the same reason naval fleets have fought for millennia over the equally empty surface of the sea, and air forces have contested control of the skies in more recent times: i.e., to name but three, to defend routes to bases or areas of economic importance, threaten those of the enemy or attack their commerce, or simply to destroy the enemy's fleet in order to prevent it continuing the war.

    Space being, by definition, empty, objectives are presumably found elsewhere. Even on land, battles, unless last-ditch efforts to prevent the loss of a city or fortress, are rarely fought purely for possession of the ground on which they take place.

    Agree, however: an empty battlefield simply looks dull, so logic may have to be stretched somewhat in search of a rationale.

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  2. "Possibly for the same reason naval fleets have fought for millennia over the equally empty surface of the sea, and air forces have contested control of the skies in more recent times: i.e., to name but three, to defend routes to bases or areas of economic importance, threaten those of the enemy or attack their commerce, or simply to destroy the enemy's fleet in order to prevent it continuing the war."

    None of these have access to warp/lightspeed travel, which comes as standard in every space setting - you know, the sort that skips the boring wide open bits....

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  3. Point taken, though as you may have inferred, I am not really a space gamer (I do, however, have fond memories of the eponymous magazine, the house organ first of Metagaming, and then of Steve Jackson Games).

    There is, I would argue, nevertheless one possible reason for an empty space battle: a pre-arranged showdown in neutral - albeit economically and aesthetically worthless - 'territory', selected to avoid collateral damage. It's purely theoretical, of course, but no more so than warping one's way to the enemy's base, which itself raises the logical brick wall of why they aren't doing it to you as the same time as you're doing it to them.

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    1. Handwavium of sci fi allows you to do as you wish; I like the idea of "jump gates" or "jump beacons" as choke points to focus combat; most warpspeed devices do not work too close to a gravity well; which has the same effect as a beacon (i.e. jump in x distance from the desired target/planet etc)

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  4. Ah, handwavium - that old chestnut. (Actually I'd never heard of it before discovering this blog). Anything warp - or jump-related is, to be frank, entirely outside my areas of interest, let alone expertise, as must be all-too apparent. But I do see the logic of choke points, thus satisfying my intellectual vanity.

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  5. Vector piloting through confined environments? That sounds like Bolide, an abstract racing game (or math puzzle in disguise?)

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    1. Also: Subspace Continuum has been released on Steam - the game's what.... 20 years old??? I remember playing it on dial up...

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  6. I played Descent a lot back in the day. I remember it took me a long time to beat the level 7 boss. I'll have to look out for the new version, the old game won't play on my new PC.

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    1. I recommend Steam - it's a digital distribution program, wildly popular. They often rejig old games so they run on modern computers.

      Also, at the moment many games are 50-75% off. I.e. you could probably pick up a copy of the old Descent for $5...

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  7. Descent was the first game where I had friends get motion sickness :)

    I never got very far in it. It was way ahead of its time though.

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