[Fineus]

Hey all...

Just happened upon this rather interesting promotion. Interplay games are currently on sale here as a buy-one-get-one free promotion, meaning you can buy FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 for $5.99... And the entire Descent trilogy for a further $5.99! Plenty of other games are also available.

http://www.gog.com/en/page/1year_promo/

Have fun!

[Mongoose]

Wish I had a bit of spare cash.  I already own the complete Descent and FS series, but I'd love to snag a backup copy for that price.

[eliex]

Quite a deal. I've got D3, but have never played the preceding games in the series.

[Sushi]

Quite a deal. I've got D3, but have never played the preceding games in the series.

Single-player, I prefer D1 and D2.

Multi-player, they're all great, although I have to give D3 the cake. It was amazing in its heyday 10 years ago. I have very fond memories of Polaris CTF...

[Dark Hunter]

Quite a deal. I've got D3, but have never played the preceding games in the series.

You missed out.

Big-time.

As far as single player goes, D1 and D2 are far superior to D3, IMO.

[CP5670]

I spent much more time playing and modding D2, but D3 is easily the superior game. D1 and D2 were great for their time, but can't really compare to the variety and detail in D3's levels.

Still, it's certainly worth picking them up. There are a lot more fanmade level packs available for D2 than D3, many of which are better than the original levels, and the release of D2's source code has allowed the game to be dramatically updated in the form of D2X-XL and other projects. D3's source code was never released as far as I know.

I already have all the Descent and FS games, but I see a few others like MDK that might be interesting. I love the second game but never played the first one.

[BloodEagle]

I spent much more time playing and modding D2, but D3 is easily the superior game. D1 and D2 were great for their time, but can't really compare to the variety and detail in D3's levels.

I prefer the first, myself. It strikes the perfect pacing balance between the three. D3 always felt slow, because of the huge levels. And D2 always felt too fast, because of the flowing tiles and increased enemy movement speed.

[Mongoose]

D1 and D2 probably had the better singleplayer gameplay experience from an actually-fighting-robots standpoint (especially in the original...some of those enemies were freakin' scary), but that can be tempered by how willing one is to sit through the keys-reactor-exit pattern a few dozen times.  As for me, although D3 had its flaws, I found the range of environments in its levels and the tasks they had you performing to more than make up for them.  As far as multiplayer goes, each of the three games has/had its own fans, though D3 is the only one that still has a significant amount of people playing it for obvious reasons.

[Dark Hunter]

D3 suffered from too many puzzles, mission-based levels (half the time I didn't even know how I was supposed to accomplish the objectives, it all seemed very unintuitive), and an inferior set of weapons. And the Guide-Bot was made annoying. At least in D2 you could choose to stay away from him (or never release him at all), and he didn't have beeping as his "vocalization" (oh, how I hated that beeping. Shut up, GB, just SHUT UP!) 

Well, in my opinon, anyway. It's not all bad, though: I did like the inclusion of outdoor areas, and the levels where it was the good old formula of entering a maze and blowing **** up all throughout were awesome. I liked the bosses too, they had much more variety than the old bosses... I remember the Homunculus in particular being great fun to fight. And then there was that hilarious reversal of roles during the CED's attack on Red Acropolis, with you defending the reactor against the robots.

I pass no judgement on the multiplayer, as I never had an opportunity to try it.

[CP5670]

I liked the D3 guidebot better because you could stow him away in your ship, instead of having him get in your way all the time. The puzzles were one of the best parts of it and made the levels far more interesting than the key/reactor routine, which was good for its time but gets boring quickly by modern standards. Actually some of the best fanmade D2 campaigns use various tricks to make the objectives more interesting. I also thought D2's levels looked far too similar and were much less memorable than the levels of D3 or even D1. D3 has exceptional variety in its level environments, weapons and enemies even by the standards of today's FPSs.

D3's outdoors areas were a nice change but I thought those were the weakest aspect of the game. The very low invisible walls essentially made them just bigger versions of the indoor parts, and the low resolution skyboxes and popping terrain looked crappy even back then.

D3's multiplayer was much better due to the weapon balance, which was miles ahead of D2. The game modes were also a lot more interesting (entropy, monsterball, 4-team CTF), although I hardly see anyone playing them these days. I did like D2's basic flight model better though, with slower turning and faster movement. I guess they had to change that because mouselooking had caught on in FPSs by then, and it would have given too much of an advantage over keyboard turning at the D2 speeds.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Well I just bought 6-8 games I didn't really need. Hopefully they don't suck.
One of the games I got is Descent, I know I played #1 long ago but I never played through the whole thing. Was rather disorientating from what  I can recall.

[Locutus of Borg]

But we can all do the first level from memory!

[Ransom]

I could be persuaded to agree that D3 is the better game, but I'll always prefer the first two. The games were built on the thrill of escaping at the last second, flames licking at the wings of your ship - indeed, I'm pretty sure the whole affair was just an excuse to have that sequence in every single level - and the lack of it in the third title was always a bit of a disappointment to me.

[Roanoke]

I felt D3's outdoor sections detracted from the game as a whole.

[deathfun]

There goes that part of this thread

I've come to the decision to get Fallout 2 since I heard the first had a time constraint of 500 days (then switched to 13 years?)

That and there is a lot more stuff to do...

[Akalabeth Angel]

One of the games I picked up is Shogo Mobile Armoured Division. It's like playing through an anime series.
Gameplay isn't the best, and the combat is a little lethal but it's good fun. I wish there were some other giant robot games like this out there. Suppose the closest thing is Heavy Gear which I haven't played beyond a few quick deaths in the demo. (yes Mechwarrior, Starsiege etcetera are giant robots but it's a different style of game and robot).