muddysneakers: How does Wing Commander compare to Descent? I recently gave up on Descent because it was too difficult and disorienting. I haven't played any of the Wing Commander games or anything like them as far as I can remember. Is Wing Commander anything like Descent?
Descent is more a FPS in which you happen to be able to move in all directions.
I don't find it that disorienting, I suggest you get the source port DXX-rebirth and use that to play if you havent already. If you have a gamepad you can use that source to play natively with amodern dual analog gamepad and those help a lot (it allows for widescreen resolutions too). Also remember to consult the map, the levels aren't as complicated as they seem and I found myself lost only in Descent 3 mostly because they decided to ditch the wireframe map with something less readable.
Wing Commander is more like a simplified flight simulator, it plays like a mix of WWII dogfighting and modern jet fighter stuff like lock on missiles and radars but without winds, stalls and other weather complications.
Though keep in mind that WC 1 and 2 uses a 2D engine that tries to emulate 3D space and with speed depending on how fast the CPU is which means that pespective and scale are often borked and the game speed is highly variable even with DOSbox running at a fixed number of CPU cicles.
WC3 is the first game in the series to use a full 3D engine for gameplay. which is a huge improvement even if gameplay itself is technically largely the same.
Though the problem is that WC is very plot-driven compared to Descent, half the appeal of this series are the production values, from the luxurious 2D art of the first two games to the hollywood actors of the FMVs in the games from 3 onwards so playing the first two games does introduce you to several of the characters even if they aged worse in the gameplay part.
