Nice to know I might be remembered, FWIW.KoolBear wrote:splintr, man if that's not a name from the past. Darn good to see you. I was away for a few years myself
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Welcome back to the mines!
Started my Descent experience by playing the AI for a few months which I thought was fantastic, but then when I managed to get Win95 working stably for a networked game... wow! I immediately understood what all the other network gamers (Doom/Quake?) were raving about. I was hooked!
Used a Netware protocol encapsulated or emulated in TCP/IP, as I recall. IPX/SPX, when that was practically the only networking prot' in town.
I used to play on a Pentium 90 with a 33.6 dial-up, letting KoolBear slaughter me for hours on end (damn that lag!). Started to develop carpal-tunnel from playing D1/2 late into the night, but didn't want to admit the likely cause to anyone.
To be honest, I was probably never good enough to be "ranked", just played for several hours a day, got my forward-slide-with-the-hat down pretty well, and spent most of my time in the UES map, or Stadium. Actually built a "huge-room" map myself with a few secret doors and one back wall covered in porno tiles, called "poof"; it was pretty amateurish, doubt it's floating around anywhere.
Come to find out, the PC game I spent more time playing than any other, exclusively actually, was developed by some guys right across town from me, in Champaign IL.
In the late 90's, for several years I also dated a woman that had previously dated one of the graphic designers that did a lot of the textures and art-work for D1/2. Champaign-Urbana was a hotbed of computer geek business spirit in those days, including games. The Silicon Prairie - even had a part-time job at Spyglass, as the one man shipping dept, building boxed floppies with manuals for a for-profit version of Mosaic. They loathed Marc Andreessen, let me tell ya. Man, the tech bubble days were a great time to be a geek, at last!
Then the bubble burst, the tumbleweeds blew in to C/U, and I had to move on. Stayed in tech, just not in the midwest any more.
Glad to know there are still a few Pyro-maniacs around to shoot me down, taunt, and launch ES's at. I tried a few free-for-all rounds by looking up addresses on d3.descent.cx, but I was getting killed even faster than I used to, and am way, way out of practice.
Plus the damned Sidewinder was constantly (virtually) disconnecting itself, no matter how many different spoofed config's I tried, which was driving me nutz!
Did anyone else ever find those "?-guard levels" (something noble or nordic sounding; the name escapes me now, "midguard"?). There were eventually like 9 or 12 of 'em, and they were absolutely beautiful, pure works of art every one, including the logic and layout, not just the art. The art was more medieval or castle-like as I recall. Just stunning. Spent a lot of time in those maps, too.
(Who else tried Forsaken, desperately hoping for an extension of the dying lineage of Descent?)
Happy gunning!
