Descent was and is amazing, one of the best and most inventive FPS series ever created. Much like sleeper hits Thief and Crusader, it's still a unique experience today. As a shooter fan, I give Descent 1+2 my highest recommendation.

Yeah I felt like a knob after posting that. Didn't mean it that way. :)
It's a very useful feature and I'm glad for it.
I wasn't interested in the games (normally don't like anything with spaceships hehe) until I saw this review on youtube recently..basically showed/explained how it was kinda like Doom except in a spaceship. I'm down with that. It's special, too, of course.
I'll be getting it sometime..unfortunately I'm sooo broke lately I can't even swing five bucks.

Can you please cover the Original War sometimes :)?

Seeing, for the first time, someone playing the Descent demo was one of the major jaw-dropping moments in my gaming history.
Doom was cool, but it was all so flat, and (sadly) I had yet to encounter the brilliance of Ultima Underworld and System Shock.
I vividly recall watching the player flying through a tunnel into a room, and then suddenly pitch up 90 degrees and fly towards a hole in the ceiling which opened into a tunnel indistinguishable from the first one. My brain did a double-take. I knew they were travelling at right angles to the first tunnel, but it was impossible to determine which way was up, and the transition had been completely seamless.
For me, at that moment, 3D gaming had truly arrived.
Descent is an absolute landmark in gaming history, and I'm thinking that Parallax blew a lot of minds with that particular demo :)

well i've just tried the demo and it wasn't that good :p
i have a 24" lcd and i couldn't force it in window mode , it didn't detect the sound settings and it was way to speedy (even on a single core)
i pressed space 1 time and i was out of missles 2 secs later the lowest drone shot me to smithereens in no time.
so i take it GOG arranged all of this already
then i'll be shopping this week again ^^

Descent is a hidden gem? It was about as big as Doom back in the day.
It was a great game, particularly for multiplayer over the university network. I'm pretty sure it got way more MP action than even Doom at that time.
My only issue with the singleplayer was that somehow shooting pew-pew lasers was never as much fun as things like shotguns and chainguns in doom/duke3d.
My vote for next hidden gem: Hostile Waters.
(or BG&E simply because i've been waiting for a discout for ages ;-) )

did you use dosbox? It should have the sound drivers, and allow you to limit the speed and run windowed.
Graphics are never gonna look great on a 24" lcd though... unless you use a mod/port.

Sure it was. But nowadays it's quite obscure; ask any of the modern folk; noone below 20 have ever heard of it.
And yeah, Hostile Waters would be sweet.

yeah i did but i didn't look very hard tbh. (+1 4 ur helpfulness)
I'll buy the game here by the end of the week and give it a go. I played it numerous times before and totally forgot about it with the years passing by. Strange that it's purely nostalgic and i actually don't care about how it looks graphiclly.
i immediatly relived my childhood again (voodoo gfx card 32mb + pentium II rocked :)
i think i'll run it in a window mode with the background blacked out.
Hell might even go to the cellar and dig out a 14" monitor :)

Makes me wonder how many games you personally have "shoplifted," I mean purchased from GOG?
I too think 59 cents savings would not convince too many people to buy the game to simply try it out. I also agree $4.99 would be more appealing.
By the way here are my purchases that I worked to be able to afford.

34, so you topped me here :). (I can post a screenshot if you like).
And yeah, your list sure is impressive.
Let us not forget that GOG does have some bills to pay,,,

Doesn't look like Descent 3 is on there! That one is also a steal.

Thanks for your response and I am glad you have bought so many games. But of course your a slacker with "only" 34! :o)
Again, thanks for the nice response, well done.

Played it a long time ago, never really cared for it, but good eye noticing it is missing!

Well I just downloaded these great games. I was playing Ultimate Doom & Doom 2 the other day on my laptop and I thought man it would be great if I could get descent. Now I find this and can download both for under $6.00 that is just awesome. The only thing I'll have to hook my full size keyboard to it there was a way I used the # keypad and asdf to play this game ha ha ha. Thank you so much for getting these games on XP & Vista keep up the great work!! I am also going to get Duke Nukem 3d Atomic Edition eventually as well!!
Mischa.

I realized nobody answered you. Not really, you are missing: Levels of the World Descent Mission Builder, and Vertigo.
Vertigo is the only thing really missing (though I love "Abyss" from LotW).
Still, getting both 1&2 for this price is well worth it.

My shelf only has 10 games on it! And you wouldn't even find any of the Descents because I have the definitive collection and D3 CDs. I am always tempted to rebuy things from here though, just to eliminate CD issues. Plus I don't have the Mercenary pack...
I enjoyed D3 quite a bit, except for the subway level (grr). The environments always just kept getting better and better. I never finished it, because my old system was always crazily unstable. I'd get to level 10, the thing would crash, and the savegame would never work on my next installation for some reason. I had to go through those levels again and again. Maybe if D3 becomes a hidden gem of the week I might try a non-DRM version ;)

It might be worth trying a frontend like D-Fend reloaded, as it's much easier to set up than messing with command lines and config files in dosbox itself.
http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/
Also, and i just discovered this myself, dosbox has built in graphics filters (like 2xsai), so you might be able to upscale without it looking too terrible.
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Scaler
GOG will have sorted it out themselves of course, though you might still want to mess with the settings to get it as you want it.
(off to mess with filters in System Shock....)