After writing this, retrospectively it almost seems like a review, but only because I had to explain the problem that I'm having, so please bear with me:

I'm not sure what to do about this: I'm playing Descent 1, and it's nearly impossible for me to progress! Basically, I have it on Trainee difficulty, but it's still a WAY too difficult game, mostly because when you get about half-way through it, there stops being very many healing blue spheres at all - they become very rare!

And the other problem is that it seems to expect you to collect a bunch of weapons and ammo and stuff as you go along, to make it easier in the long run, but ultimately, if you happen to die then you lose it all! Of course you can go back and get it, but what if you die in a timed explosion at the end because you don't escape the mine in time?

The REALLY infuriating thing is the places where enemy ships just keep appearing infinitely, so that you have to rush around and get the key or whatever you need to do, and get the hell out before they kill you (while they're all shooting at your back, so of course you can't really dodge them unless you want to look through your rear view, which makes it impossible to navigate). Ultimately, these are the easiest places to die, but then you can't go back to collect your stuff, because if you couldn't get through it when you had better weapons and shields, then why would you be able to do it with next to nothing?!

And then of course there are the extra lives. I'd have much preferred just having one life but with more shields and stuff, so that it would at least be easy enough to possibly get through the whole thing without dying. But by collecting a bunch of extra lives and saving them throughout the game, what if you use up too many of them too early? Some missions I use like 2, and I'm between a third and half way through the game, and only have about 10 remaining, so it doesn't seem like I'll be able to make it! Then I'll have wasted many hours on a doomed endeavor that I really can't possibly win, only because the things that happen early in the game affect what happens later, which is fine in an RPG, but in this it's not as though I can grind relatively weaker enemies for experience, and money, and then go buy everything I need.

And one of the stupidest things is that I did the first "bonus" mission, which was where everything really started to fall apart and I ended up much worse off afterwards! Some bonus, huh?! It didn't even let me skip the mission!

And it only gives 10 save slots, all of which I end up using several times in a single mission because I save every few minutes and like to be able to backtrack if necessary, so I usually save over a new slot. But then that means I can't backtrack very far. It takes me about an hour to do a mission and I have to redo many parts and save after I succeed, because the enemies just whittle my life down to like 8 points or something, and I'm hanging on by a thread, such that one hit will kill me, but it's almost impossible to avoid being hit, or even being reduced to that state in the first place.

I'm usually great at shooting games and pretty good at flight sims, but this one is just impossible! I don't think the controls are the issue, because I'm using a mouse to aim and a SpaceMouse to navigate, which all seems to work very well.

In any case, what advice does anyone have for me? I REALLY don't want to just give up - I'd like to get through the game, but it seems like they designed it to trap people into unwinnable situations, because of things having long-term effects, rather than starting each mission on a level playing field, and it's driving me crazy!

Are you playing the DOSBox Descent 1 shipped by GOG, or are you using a source port with the GOG Descent 1 data files? The latter offers a number of quality of life improvements.For us to offer more commentary, could you elaborate on the ways in which you cannot progress? I gathered from your post so far that you use up shields (hit points) and extra lives too rapidly relative to how often you can acquire more. Is that your only problem? Some people find the levels to be difficult to visualize or navigate, even when they are not being attacked. If you are one of those people, you're more likely to die in the countdown phase (because you need more time to fly to the exit than the game allotted) or to just get frustratingly lost. Some people find the 6-degrees-of-freedom flight disorienting or difficult to reason about, which impairs their effectiveness in combat. Poor combat effectiveness would lead to using up your shields / extra lives too quickly.Difficulty affects a number of variables, but unlike some games, there is no "story mode" that goes out of its way to make defeat impossible.I do not recall the levels well enough to comment on this. However, I will say that you should aim to avoid damage often enough that you can at least sometimes skip a Shield Orb entirely. If you are taking so much damage that you are using every Orb you find, then I think we need to work on your combat effectiveness first.For what reason are you dying in the mine countdown? Some people die there because they get lost and cannot fly to the exit in the time allotted. Others die because they started the reactor countdown before they knew where to find the exit. Others die because the robot resistance encountered during the countdown phase slowed them down too much. Players in this last group would have escaped successfully if there had not been robot opposition. Once we know which problem you have, we can discuss how to fix it. Broadly:

- Never trigger a reactor countdown until you know where the exit is, or have convinced yourself this is a level where the exit is only discovered after the countdown starts. You want to know where to go during the countdown, not waste seconds hunting for the exit door.
- Regardless of whether you clear every robot in the level, before you trigger the countdown, at least clear every robot on the path between the reactor and the exit door. You want to minimize the resistance you will face during the countdown.
- Practice flying from the reactor room to the still-closed exit door before you trigger the countdown. Measure how long you took to do this. If it's "too long", do it again until you can do it quickly enough. Every built-in mission should be should be beatable at Insane difficulty by an expert player. Insane offers far less time to escape the mine than does Trainee. Therefore, if you are running out of time, it is because you are not flying like an expert player. Once we understand how you are flying now, we can help you improve.Materialization centers have a limit on the number of robots they can spawn per activation. On difficulties less than Insane, they have a limit on the number of activations too. Combined, this means that eventually they will stop spawning robots. You may need to camp the spawn site and destroy everything it produces until it stops, then go back to your mission. This will avoid having robots spawn in behind you.

Different rules apply to boss encounters.Fly backward, so that you can see them shooting at you? Are you using side-strafing? Some new players make the mistake of always flying in the direction of view, and turning the ship when they want to change their direction of flight. This is not a car. Your ship can fly up, down, sideways, or backwards just as well as it can fly forward. Advanced combat nearly requires that you use these other movement modes to dodge incoming fire effectively.Generally, I agree with you. However, I will note that if you got killed while trying to stand and fight, then on your next life, the better course might be to run in, grab what you can, and run out, without attempting to fight.You are using up your lives much too quickly. When last I played, it was normal for me to finish some levels without dying at all. I didn't keep track of my exact death count, but it was definitely lower than yours. We need to find how to have you die less.You could cheat. I think there is a cheat to increase your count of extra lives.This is true, however there is a caveat. You enter each new level with a minimum of 100 shields and 100 energy. If you finished the prior level with less, then you are raised to that on the new level. If you finished the prior level with more, you get to keep the excess. For some levels, coming in with extra can be a big help, so you should try to conserve excess shields and energy as much as you can. Conversely, once you realize you won't get out of the level with an excess, you may as well waste as much as you need to get out at all. That could mean spending all your energy during the countdown so that you get shot less. If you are feeling daring, it could also mean the reverse. You realize you have 99 shields and 200 energy, so you try to run the countdown without firing, so that you start the next level with 200 energy, and the game boosts you back to 100 shields.The bonus mission is triggered by using the bonus exit instead of the regular exit.I understand why you would do this given your other problems, but this seems like it creates another problem. However, you can cheat here, at the expense of some inconvenience. Each savegame is one file on your computer. When you run out of save slots, pause or exit the game. Go to the directory where saves are kept. Move aside the save(s) you would overwrite next. Now you have an empty slot to save into. If you decide that you need to reload all the way back to that game that was moved aside, go back to that directory and swap in the older savegame. For single player, saves are named pilot.sgN, where N is a single digit. You can use a different N on restore than it had on save.Can you provide a demo of a playthrough? A few minutes of combat should be enough.

Actually, I started with the DOSBox version from GOG to play the first three missions, and then noticed a note in a review about Descent DXX Rebirth so I've been using that since then (I also tried D2X XL but it seems to have some weird lighting/fog issues).

Well I don't really get disoriented, and I have a map, so I can find where I need to go, but that doesn't prevent me from fighting well. When I said not being able to find an exit can cause a life to be lost and then starting the next mission with minimal provisions, that was just an example of the problem, and it only happened to me once, early in the game. But you seemed to imply that at some point there are missions in which I won't be able to find the exit until after destroying the reactor. Is that true?

In any case, that's not really the same problem (I'm sorry if I implied that it was), but the information you provided about it is good, though I pretty much already have been searching for exits and making sure that I have a clear path to them.

The main problem is just the lack of healing blue spheres, and the tendency to be injured and killed far too easily. It just seems like there are a ton of very tough enemies and I sometimes get surrounded (even though I don't charge into a room, but rather, carefully open a door and pick them off from a distance whenever possible).

Seriously, the ships don't keep coming after me indefinitely?! That's great news! I just saw them keep appearing and figured that it would never stop, so I've been rushing by them and trying to avoid them as much as possible! But it still might not get me out of the problem of there being just too many enemies for me to take on with such extremely limited resources.

And yes, I can fly backwards and sideways and in all directions; I know all about that (I've known about it since 1994 when I first played the game, so I'm not new to this sort of thing, but it just took a very long time for me to finally get around to playing it more than just experimentally), but it's just that if I'm flying backwards then I can't see where I'm going, so I can either fight or flee, but not really both simultaneously.

As for your statement about running in to get the stuff that I lost in my previous life, what happened to me on the first bonus mission was this: I went into the place where the ships kept appearing and I flew through quickly just to get a yellow key, and was killed right after I got the key. I think I had most of my life when I entered the place (I think I had more than 100% shield if I remember correctly, but I'm not sure), and I flew through as quickly as possible, straight for the key, so that's an example of how there would be no way to go back and get the stuff that I lost. In any case, I've done several more missions since then, so I really don't want to go all the way back there, and I'm not sure I even have the save data anymore.

There are cheats? Is there one for invincibility? Normally I like to play any game the right way, but at this point, I'd just like to be able to finish this one, just to see what all there is to see, but not have to worry about impending doom. It's like with AVP, I just could NOT get through it!

I noticed the refill of shields, but it seems like I'd do much better with something near 200 shields rather than 100 at the start, though I can't hope to have more than about 20 or 30 if I'm lucky by the end of the previous mission, and then the next one may be the one that I just can't win starting with only 100. Also, ammo gets low, which is a problem too, but not as much of one, since there are more commonly ways to refill that. I swear, there were plenty of blue spheres early in the game, and then suddenly they became extremely rare from one mission to the next.

Well I couldn't find the regular exit I guess, so I used the bonus one instead, because I thought it was the only one. And it ruined everything! That's where I lost a life trying to get the yellow key. Some bonus, huh?

I did back up my save files once, but you're right that it's very inconvenient.

I'm not sure how to record a demo, and I'm not sure if it would allow me to post such a (movie?) file on GOG.

Maybe? I don't remember all the levels in enough detail to say it is false, but neither can I think of a level where it is definitely true. I'm pretty sure there is a level where you get locked in the reactor room, and blowing the reactor lets you get out of the reactor room and fly to the previously discovered exit outside.How are you getting surrounded if you stand off and snipe? Are robots popping out in ambush positions after you enter a room?Descent 2 improves this, by allowing you to have an inset rearview while the main view is forward, or vice versa. D2X-Rebirth can play D1 missions, though its emulation is imperfect.Yes. For Descent 1, racerx will enable invulnerability. You may need to use gabbagabbahey to unlock cheats first.There is some story, but not much.As I noted above, it seems like you're taking far too much damage in battle. At higher difficulties, Shield Orbs add less to your shields than they do on trainee.Several years ago, someone ran a project starting each level with just starting equipment, at Insane difficulty, and trying to speedrun the level. He needed dozens of tries on some of them, but did most or maybe all of the levels that way.I routinely found ammo I couldn't carry because I wasn't using enough of it.F5, and it's a special format that only other copies of Descent can play back. GOG wouldn't let you upload it, I think.

The way that I get surrounded is that sometimes I have to go into rooms with multiple entrances or I get to a point that extra secret compartments open around me and enemies fly in - notice that I said "whenever possible", alas, it's not always possible to be that careful.

Good to know about the Descent 2 rear view mirror. I haven't had any problems with Rebirth at all, but XL is what causes the lighting glitches, though I'm not sure I ever tried it with Descent 2.

Thanks for the codes. And these cheats are something I can type into a console, like by pressing the ~ key perhaps? I can't test it right now because I'd have to restart the computer into Windows.

I'm not so concerned with the story (though in many games I am) because I already know there's not much, but I just want to explore all there is to see of the mines.

I'm pretty sure I have it set to Trainee difficulty, because I made sure to do so. I only worry that by copying the files from the GOG Descent into the Rebirth it might have changed the difficulty settings, though it seems like that would be stored in either the save files or the player profile, and either way, I copied all of that.

Well, what you say about the person who got through it all without any equipment is impressive, but I'm not looking to set a world record for getting through the game in the toughest possible circumstances; rather I'm sort of trying to do the opposite at this point. I may try again to get through each mission little by little, but it's a real drag to have to keep saving and loading every minute or so, to keep retrying each battle until I get through it with nearly no loss of life, so I may just use the invincibility cheat instead, because unless I start getting a lot more blue spheres I don't have many options.

Actually, I sometimes have more missiles than I need because I don't use them for fear of running out, which is kind of a contradiction I suppose, but then when I start using them I end up running out (they only give me like 10 or 20 of each and I could easily use about 2 or 3 against one sort of tough ship).

Thanks for the tip about recording, but if I can't upload proprietary formats (which I doubt I can, since it would probably block it, thinking that it might be malware or something) then I don't think I'd be able to show it to you, anyway.

Are you playing with sound? When robots get unleashed on you from secret doors, there should be a door opening sound. I'd fly away as soon as I heard a door open, and sneak back in. Don't stop to see where they are, if they aren't already in view.I don't know. I had to look up the codes just to provide them above.Rebirth is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.The pause dialog overlay shows the current difficulty level, if you want to check it in game. My point in mentioning that feat was that a well-piloted ship can beat each level under worse circumstances than you are facing. While the low number of Shield Orbs may be exacerbating your problem, I still think your basic problem is you take too much damage per fight.What makes the difference between getting through undamaged or getting hit? Luck? Foreknowledge of enemy locations?I also often hoard missiles more than I should.Because some shots miss or because the robot has enough health to survive multiple direct hits? GOG's forums are not a good way to host anything other than still images, unfortunately.

I noticed that I just type the codes without a console, which is weird, but it works. I also noticed that it turns them off at the beginning of each new mission, which is a bit annoying but oh well.

It may be compatible with Linux but I always play on Windows because that's the only way that I can use my SpaceMouse (it requires emulation for most games).

I never noticed anything that says the difficulty level, but that's good to know - thanks.

Well, maybe I'm just extraordinarily bad at it; I don't know. The only way I can get very far without being hurt is to save before a battle and keep trying until I get through unscathed, and then save again. This has gotten so annoying that now I'm playing with invulnerability, because it seems the only possible way that I'll be able to get the rest of the way through, so that I can at least see all of the environments and do everything, even if there's no challenge, because the alternative is certain death.

I don't think I usually miss a lot with missile, especially the homing ones, but some of the robots seem very tough, like certain red ones.

I think forums in general don't allow a lot of file posting, but that's to be expected.