Descent (video game)/YMMV

Descent

 * Abridged Arena Array: Did you want to play on something other than "Minerva," "Neptune" or "Ultra-Earthshaker"? Too bad.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome
 * Descent has awesome MIDI music. Unfortunately, it was very dependent on specific soundcard manufacturers. Luckily, the Mac version came with redbook arranged tracks.
 * Title Screen and Lunar Scilab.
 * Venus Nickel-Iron Mine (Mac) and Venus Atmospheric Lab (Mac).
 * With the proper soundcard, the original MIDI music could be amazing: compare Io Sulphur Mine on certain models to what it was supposed to sound like.
 * From the Descent II redbook soundtrack: Crawl, Cold Reality, Crush, Are You Descent?, Robot Jungle, as well as "New Song 1" and "New Song 2" from the Vertigo Series Expansion Pack.
 * The Descent II MIDI soundtrack is also pretty awesome. It is a pity that it only has six tracks.
 * Demonic Spiders
 * Lou Guards (green hulks armed with homing missiles), Diamond Claws (sharp claws of course, sneak up on you, often double team you, sometimes cloaked, and they shoot plasma back when hit with energy weapons), Sidearm Modulas (tiny and hard to hit, fire Macross Flash Missile Massacres and are produced when Sidearms are destroyed), Seekers (tough as nails, fire fast Mercury Missiles that take off a large chunk your shields, tend to camp around corners, major pain on Quartzon), the Energy Bandit, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin, draining both your shields and energy, and the dreaded Boarshead, the deadliest normal enemy in D2, which is armed with a gatling plasma cannon and Smart Missiles.
 * The BPER Bot's phase pulse cannon (same as the Sidearm's, but faster) drains your shields very quickly, and it also can kill from beyond the grave.
 * Omega Defense Spawn. Small, fast, tougher than they look, and they explode on top of you as their attack. Even when detonated well away from you, the shockwave is enormous, and tends to throw your ship violently.
 * Red Hornets are Goddamned Bats as individuals, but when encountered in swarms, they will quickly deal you a Death of a Thousand Cuts. They also have a tougher Palette Swap, the Spawns, which are produced by the also-demonic Green Spiders (possibly the worst Concussion Missile Massacrer in the series) when they are killed.
 * And good old Descent had Fusion Hulks, each one a Boss in Mook Clothing (an alternate name for them is "Mini-boss"), Red Hulks, which the aforementioned Lou Guards are identical Expys of (although Red Hulks seem more durable because Descent 1 doesn't have as many powerful weapons to finish then quickly), and Class 1 Drillers, who had the nigh-undodgeable Vulcan Cannon as their armament. To make matters worse, the Drillers later came in a slightly more durable cloaked variety.
 * The Class 2 Platform, which fired Macross Missile Massacres at you. Even a single burst meant instant death.
 * Heavy Drillers, which debut in large numbers in Level 12, creating a major Difficulty Spike up from the already hard Level 11. Vertigo Series has Class 2 Heavy Drillers which have returning homing plasma.
 * The Advanced Lifter in the first game was lightning fast, did considerable damage with its four claws, and was the only bot that never made a sound. Get used to turning around and seeing a pack of them right on your tail.
 * Let's just say that ANY robot in the first two Descent games will, in some way or another, play this trope or Goddamn Bats. Even the frickin' Guide Bot.
 * Game Breaker: Descent II added a few. The Omega Cannon is a homing weapon that blinds its targets. The Gauss Cannon is a massive upgrade to the Vulcan Cannon that deals tons of damage, uses the same ammo (whereas every other primary weapon draws from energy), has a very high rate of fire, and is Hit Scan in a game where most weapons have Painfully Slow Projectiles. No wonder the latter was Nerfed into the Vauss Cannon in Descent 3.
 * Goddamned Bats -
 * The Thief Bot in Descent II, one in each level. This nasty bot would come sneaking up on an unsuspecting player -- typically in the middle of a fight with other enemies. It would zap you with a special shot that made your view go all wonky, steal some powerups, and then zip off to the furthest corners of the level in an erratic evasion pattern. Incredibly fast and durable.
 * Internal Tactical Droids (which are Demonic Spiders on Insane difficulty), Sidearm Modulas (pesky little things that shoot flash missiles), ITSCs (like ITDs, but with missiles), Red Hornets, etc.
 * The Thief changes in Descent 3, in that it can cloak. As an upside, it can no longer screw your interface, but now comes with a weapon in the form of Seeker Mines.
 * Slightly less annoying is the "Old Scratch" robot in Descent 3, which tears off your weapons, but simply leaves them floating nearby. It's also much easier to kill.
 * Basically, any enemy in this series that is not an outright Demonic Spider falls under this.
 * Hell Is That Noise: Bosses in the series tend to have rather creepy sounds. The regular robots make some very... weird noises, ranging from low, mechanical droning to chill-inducing shrieks.
 * Mini-Mecha: If the size of the ship in relation to the hostages in the original game is any indication, your ship has to be pretty damn dinky.
 * Its in-game size is 4.78 meters, the size of a midsize car. You could park it at Wal-Mart.
 * So how does it have room for all eight of the hostages in Level 19?
 * Most Wonderful Sound
 * The little "Doink!" sound in multiplayer when someone dies. The little chirp the Guidebot makes can also be this, if you were lost at the time- which you most likely were.
 * The pickup sound. It can't be put into words.
 * Nausea Fuel - Think Mirrors Edge was disorienting? Think again.
 * Nightmare Fuel
 * Remember those bosses which teleport around the arena, often shoot homing projectiles and make an eerie ticking engine sound?
 * In Descent 3, the "Old Scratch" type robots have a dark gray paintjob that blends in extremely well with the game's frequently gloomy environments, and they're quite stealthy aside from a quiet, creepy noise they make occasionally. Hearing that noise in a dark cave tends to result in player panic and frantically looking around for said robot... which has a nasty tendency to then pop up right next to the player and scare the living daylights out of them.
 * Descent 2's Diamond Claw did this, too, except they didn't make that idle clicking noise. Just silence between the periodic hrumphmm...hrumphmm as it slowly approached the player. By the time you figure out where he i- CLANG! OHMYGOD!!!
 * That One Boss - Many of the bosses, due to being armed with the most powerful weapons in the game on top of being accompanied by a small army of Mooks, and some of whom are Mook Makers to boot.
 * In Descent, the Super Hulk was tough enough, until you learned that its shots don't track well when circling around the center pillar, and that it's possible to move freely in all directions without turning. Regardless, both bosses in that game tend to land a One-Hit Kill without a direct hit.
 * The available powerups made the Super Hulk in Level 7 a lot harder than the End Hulk in the last level, though. By the time you face the Super Hulk, your strongest weapons are the Spreadfire Cannon and Homing Missiles, but you get Smart Missiles and Mega Missiles (which the respective bosses use) within the next few levels. You also have a lot more available invulnerability and cloaking powerups in the final battle, instead of one each and a few shield boosts in the Super Hulk battle... and did we mention you're locked in the boss room upon entry in Level 7, but in the final level, you're not?
 * The Ice Boss from Descent II takes the cake for pure frustration. He fires homing Flash missles (which blind you) and an Omega Cannon (the strongest primary weapon in the game) which has been haxxored so that it also blinds you. Meaning that unless you stay up in the passageway leading into the Boss Room (which protects you from most of its attacks), you'll likely be flying completely blind for the entire battle. It's also immune to energy weapons, meaning that the only two primary weapons that even affect him are the Vulcan and Gauss cannons, for which ammo is rather limited.
 * The Homonculus in the third game: it's ridiculously fast for its size, it can rip the player apart in seconds if it gets close, it can spam powerful homing projectiles from afar, it's accompanied by a whole damn swarm of other robots (including the aforementioned Old Scratch type), and there's no place to hide in its chamber. Oh, and it's just a little over the third of the game in, when the player doesn't even have any powerful weapons.
 * That One Level - Level 6, Level 11, Level 19 and Level 26 tend to be this in the first game. All are chock full of Demonic Spiders and none have all that much hiding space— for example, Level 19's circular design means you could be attacked from any direction, and in Level 26, you're forced to retrace a narrow set of tunnels whose crossroads trigger the only Fusion Hulk Mook Maker in the game... and they can shoot at you from outside the tunnel. There are token cloaking devices or invulnerability globes, but predictably in hard-to-reach places.
 * Level 16 and Level 23 in Descent II also qualify, overlapping with That One Boss and Drought Level of Doom respectively.
 * They Changed It, Now It Sucks - Descent 3's addition of gravity and change from flight-sim style aiming to FPS style aiming prompted revolts from fans of the first 2 games. Some gamers also cried this because most of the weapons in Descent 3 were either useless or much weaker than the ones in Descent and Descent II.

Players who preferred to play with joysticks didn't like that players who used their mouse and keyboard to control (read: almost everyone who played a First-Person Shooter) were a lot better at aiming and rapidly switching targets. The default configuration for a Descent 3 multiplayer server did not allow people using mouse and keyboard to play.
 * Descent 3 defaults the turning system to "Flight Sim", not "Mouselook", so there's some latency to the turning.
 * What about the increased turn speeds that Spacetec Space Orb 360 users had access to in the first two games?
 * That was considered Cheating/a Scrappy Mechanic back then too.