What the sound effects sound like

[Darth Wang]

When I played the Descent games as a kid I always imagined that the various sound effects and robot noises were actually words (often nonsense words), but here is how I interpreted some of them.

Class 1 Drone: Whiny
Medium Hulk: Hello-Kino-Meyya (or Heh-Loki-No-Meyya)
Class 1 Driller: Yeek!
Spider/Cloaked Lifter: Hey you!
Mini Spider: Erk!
Secondary Lifter: Aaoooaaoooh!
Class 1 Heavy Driller: Aaah-Ooh-Ox! (which is why I also sometimes referred to them as 'Aah-ooh-oxes')
Class 1 Platform Robot: Oh you eat? (I would often mentally respond to this with "Yes I eat, do you?")
PTMC Defense Prototype: Petrahedron! (This one is interesting as, while it's a nonsense word, it's formed from two Latin roots)
Fusion Hulk: Arooka Chet-Chet!
Reactor: Shreh!
Diamond Claw: Howmp!
Sidearm Modula: Rynemph!
Energy Bandit: Gotcha!
D2 final boss: Drown in fire!

Level 1 Laser: Flare!
Level 2 Laser: Pyaw!
Level 6 Laser: Rum!
Missile firing: Home!
Flare: Keet
Fusion Cannon: Chown!
Bomb drop: Purp!
Phoenix Cannon: Coweet! (or Cowcowcowcowcoweet! for rapid fire shots)
Mega Missile: Foomka!


Powerup pickup: Showwa!
Pick Up/Change primary weapon: Shun-gullet!
Switch Missile/Missile pickup: Cowwikum-Thrum!
Walls disappearing: Hao-Rinyu
One type of door opening: Totalrecall (as one word)
Another type of door opening: Worrisome
Energy center recharge: Kelnoorum
Another type of door opening/closing: Whirlu
Another type of door closing: Golombek (just because it sounds like the name of this guy)

I will post more as I remember them.

[Alter-Fox]

According to Dan Wentz the sounds from Descent 2's bots were distorted/re-engineered from animal calls, and probably mostly from the Panthera genus... which makes some sense.
Would be interesting to figure out what cat goes with what bot-- but they're probably too distorted for that, and all the big cats tend to have a fairly impressive repertoire of different ones, at least in my experience.