I used to have an early VR headset. With 3DoF headtracking, 640x480 at 60 Hz (combined, so actually every eye got only half of that). Descent supported stereoscopic 3D and the headtracking could be added to almost every game with a mouse driver. It was bad. Really bad. Descent alone could be nausea inducing. In VR it was a literal pukefest. Still I had to try it every few months or so, because it was so cool on paper.
I remember playing this on my Voodoo graphics card back in the day.
I always wanted to check it out again, but there are no proper discounts of this game anymore, and the price even increased to 20€ a couple of months back. Who thinks that anybody will buy Descent with DOSBox for 20€ in 2025? Might as well just use my old pirated copy on a burned CD I have somewhere.
Playing on a Pentium with 3D accelerator was a blessing and a curse. Multiplayer Descent 2 with someone who used one was wild. The game used client-side calculations that would break if your computer was fast.
Enemy homing missile trajectory was calculated per frame, so they were extremely difficult to avoid. At the same time, weapons like the gauss or plasma beam would shoot per frame, so you could kill an opponent so fast that it seemed instantanous on their end.
I remember spending hours configuring the controls to something I would like. Mouse aiming? Never heard of it!
All I remember from my scheme was that A and Z were for up and down. Orientation probably with the cursor keys. I know I had something on capslock and shift. Maybe forwards and backwards.
arstechnica.com
Aktywne