![]() (Run and crouch? Something like that.) It was bad news, and I was doing just fine on the other side of the keyboard. The WASD folks were suddenly getting blasted out of the game by that blasted key, which ended up tucked between Ctrl and Alt. When Windows 95 rolled in, I was so grateful for my Numpad style. Man, sometimes it was impressive what games were able to do with storytelling when all they had to work with was text. The opening cutscene, which is a static picture of a corporate suit explaining the mission while your character inner-monologues about what he thinks is going on. There were plenty of extra keys around the edges of the numpad for whatever special actions were required by the game. ![]() Roll left / right keys became lean left / right when stealth games came along. Up / Down translated seamlessly into Jump / Crouch. When Quake came out, it felt natural to retain this keyboard layout, since it was now second nature to me. Descent, being a “flight” game, had mouse inverted by default. Since you were flying, looking down = moving mouse forward. I’d dabbled with it in Doom and Wolfenstein, but that was only horizontal. This was the first time I’d ever really used “mouselook”. EDIT: After making the above image, I went back and fired up the game to find I’d gotten several details slightly wrong. This is just the basic movement, and leaves out cruise control, weapon-switching, etc. (Although System Shock came close.)īy default, Descent used the numpad. At the time, this many inputs was unheard of in an action game. For sheer complexity of movement keys, it was surpassed only by real flight simulators and the like. This means you needed to be able to navigate and rotate in all directions. You flew your ship through weightless 3D environments. The other screenshots here were made using an updated open-source fan version that drags the thing into this century. Like making an action 3D first-person flight simulator set indoors. This was the early-ish days of gaming before the genres had been fixed in stone and developers were still running around doing crazy stuff with every new title. My first mouselook FPS wasn’t really Quake, it was Descent. Like most long boring stories concerning people of a certain age, this one begins a long time ago… When will you people learn to stop asking questions? Now I will punish you for your earnest curiosity by answering you. Shamus, why do you use the numpad for movement in videogames? Why do you use inverted mouse controls? Why are you always banging on about bad ports all the time?
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