🕹️ Play Descent online
#Descent
Hackaday Links: February 15, 2026
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/02/15/hackaday-links-february-15-2026/
Why I 🧡 the web.
Someone managed to remake Descent (one of the best early shooting games of my childhood)... in a browser.
Descent wird zum Videospiel!
Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent bringt 2026 taktische Kämpfe, Echtzeit-Erkundung und Koop-Gameplay auf PC, PS5 & Xbox.
#Terrinoth #HeroesOfDescent #Descent #TaktikRPG #DungeonCrawler #FantasyGames
Steering with a mouse is tricky. #Descent 3 has #mouselook as basically a cheat: it'll turn your ship much faster than your ship is supposed to be able to turn.
What I'm playing is DXX-Redux, which allows mouselook but does *not* implement this cheat. It does implement oversteer, so your ship will turn even after you stop moving the mouse until it's pointing in the direction the mouse says it should be pointing in, but it's still pretty jarring if you're used to #Quake style mouselook.
Playing #Descent with my #joystick injured my #wrist last week, so I decided to switch to a #mouse based setup.
Upside: aiming is much more precise this way. Dodge this, robots!
Downside: I don't think it's possible to tri-chord now. Most Descent 1 levels don't require it, and in Descent 2 I can use the afterburner instead, but still.
Biggest problem: my wrist is still injured! Even playing with a mouse hurts. Damn.
Guess I'll have to watch TV or something instead… 😖
After playing #Descent with a #joystick for a week, I seem to have given myself carpal tunnel syndrome. My wrist is slightly sore and my hand gets numb and tingly when laying down.
Big yikes. 😬 I hope this is temporary…
If and when my hand recovers, I'd better see if there's some way I can make the stick looser. My childhood Sidewinder was not this stiff.
Well, this is interesting.
The second secret level of #Descent features a lot of Class 1 Drillers (robots whose fire is almost impossible to dodge) at long range.
In the original version of this game (320×200) they'd be only 1 or 2 pixels when you first see them, so unless you already played this level, you won't know they're there until they spot you and open fire.
But at 1080p, you can see them and destroy them from outside their range, making this level much easier.
At the sound of the robotic whirring noise, it will be missile o'clock.
Self-OH (while playing #Descent): “Uhh. I think I might've taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque here.”
Big badass robots: swarming in front of the reactor to protect it with their big badass shields and homing missiles.
Me: shoot the reactor with the fusion cannon, whose blasts pass through robots, then leave the robots to question their life choices for the next 40 seconds until the reactor explodes.
😏
Pyro-GX: flies around and constantly generates enough thrust to effectively ignore gravity, without depleting its stored energy
Also Pyro-GX: rapidly loses energy if the headlight is turned on
It's now safe to turn off your Pyro-GX.
On a positive note, my spatial perception seems better now. I can actually make sense of the automap, whereas it was incomprehensible squiggles when I was a kid.
That's good because #Descent levels are maze-y af and the first game doesn't have a Guide-Bot.
Although to be fair, the automap wasn't rendered in 1080p on a 29-inch screen when I was a kid. It was 320×200 on a 15-inch CRT. Reading a complex wireframe under those conditions…yikes.
I'm playing #Descent, like I did when I was a kid, and now I'm getting pins and needles in my joystick arm! Elbow hurts too. Probably gonna give myself the elbow equivalent of carpal tunnel if I don't find some way to change my posture.
Getting old sucks. 😖
The *original* original soundtrack for #Descent 2, on an (emulated in this case) #OPL3.
This is what you'll hear if you're playing the Descent 2 demo or if you turn the CD music off.
As you can see, it slaps.
Why Parallax decided not to complete this soundtrack and hire some metal bands to record the CD music tracks for this game instead, I cannot fathom. They clearly got it right the first time.
#Descent mod idea:
* Energy centers restore shields up to 100.
* …slowly. If a robot corners you in there, you're still cooked.
* Extra lives are now exceedingly rare. Scoring points no longer gets you extra lives. The only way to obtain one is by picking up the extra life powerup.
🤔 Even with the rare-extra-lives mechanic, this is probably still significantly easier than the vanilla game, since you can just load a save and run to an energy center if you get wrecked.
Thoughts?
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