[michaelteter]

I absolutely LOVED this game when it first came out. I played with a trackball + keyboard, and the 6 degrees of freedom, paired with an environment where there often was no natural sense of "up" or "down" (zero gravity, inside tunnels) really blew my mind. I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body.

For example, you approach a "T" junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up/down or left/right. But since there's no natural ground or sky, you can either maintain an orientation memory (I usually did automatically), or you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.

Occasionally you reach an area with some signs or printed panels, and then you realize what the regional up/down orientation was; but it didn't matter in zero gravity.

[sen]

I used to consider it a form of flow-state when you’ve played Descent/Overload long enough that up/down stops being a thing.

It always took a while each session to get to that point, but once you were there it all just starting flowed so damn well, and manoeuvring the tunnels became so much faster/easier.

[michaelteter]

Yes. Especially when deftly rolling 90 degrees before taking the next turn to arrive with the desired orientation.

[cbdevidal]

I used a joystick with a four-way hat that allowed simple and intuitive strafing in all directions along with thrust in four directions from the joystick itself. I got devastating with that combo. Spent hours mastering it.

Logitech Wingman Extreme Digital: https://ebay.us/m/Hxi8Wh

[ralphc]

I had a Spaceball Avenger which made it so intuitive to play.

From my old reddit post about it, "The Spaceball Avenger is a gaming peripheral. It has the usual buttons, but the big ball is used for six degrees of freedom movement. With pressure sensors the ball is pushed up/down, left/right, and in/out for X, Y and Z axes. The ball can also be rotated for pitch, yaw and roll.

Plugged into the computer's serial port it came with drivers for games such as Doom, for which it was a good controller, but the Spaceball really shined for the Descent family of games. Descent is a FPS with no gravity, where your ship moves in ALL directions, and controlling with with the Spaceball feels like you're holding the spaceship in your hand and you're just moving it to where you want it to go."

You can see it here https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/gmusxs...