DescentBB

Today, I picked up a copy of the original Descent, in the box, and in pristine condition. $5. Bargain. First time I've EVER actually seen it for sale - anywhere!

Anyway, there's a few news articles recently about the predicted massive growth in mobile gaming. Many are considering 3D games as well, and it seems to me the the old-style 3D games like Quake and Descent would lend themselves superbly to the mini-screen, mobile environment. At 640 x 480, on a 3 inch screen, Descent would actually look damn good I reckon! (It's certainly ugly as all hell on a 19" - that's for sure.)

So, what you do think? Will we ever see Descent 1 resurrected to be playable on a phone? I know the controls would be a bit tight, even with a joystick-phone like my samsung: could you get all the controls working somehow?

Would the new generation of mobile 3D game phones require additional control devices? i.e. 2 mini sticks?

What would be the absolute minimum controls required to make a good game of Descent on a phone/PDA?

It could probably be done on the GBA but controls would suck. I was actually thinking about that this morning (I was also a bit inspired by MS's new protable video player prototype)... a trackball-type input device that was limited in its travel distance. I believe the Genesis had a 3rd-party controller with such a device.

I wish I could find the receipt I scanned in of my $.29 copy of D2.

I saw a website where someone had ported D1 onto some type of PDA. He got it working, too, but the lack of controls made it hard to play. If you could play with a keypad/D-pad, some of the newer PDAs would probably work.

If you could play Descent on a cellphone, I would actually have to buy one of the damn things.

Descent would own on the new Nintendo DS. One screen for the game, and the other screen for Weapons/Shields and 3D map!

I remember seeing a post on the old Interplay D1/D2 board where some dude got D1 to work on an old Ti calculator. It took three seconds to fire the lasers, but it worked.

Yes that is correct, D1 got ported for pocketPC. Unfortunately the controls are not that good, plus you'd have to reset your PDA in order to kill the game (appearantly it couldn't shut itself down - note that programs don't close the way they do on normal PC's, they just stay in memory till you use them again).

Another thing to look forward to with my ordered PDA though!

http://www.bitsemantics.com/sideprojects/descent/

here it is..

Descent2 also here:
http://icculus.org/d2x/images/

Tri, what's weird about the PPC is that programs can close, but they don't by default. Unlike the Palm, whose one-app-at-a-time interface I find more intuitive, on the PPC you can switch between and close apps using the task switcher.