Idk why but Interplay making a dungeon crawler out of a space combat engine, and then Bethesda 30 years later making a space combat game out of a dungeon crawler engine is really funny to me

Did they seriously name a game Dungeons & Dragons: Forgotten Realms: Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor? Wow

Even the most infamous games deserve to be remembered. Thank you for suffering through the jank so that others may experience these games.

Watching this also reminded me of an old, Finnish games magazine's review of this back in the day. For some reason, their description of the godawful monster models as "Mangled messes of random polygons even an opium-crazed H.P. Lovecraft couldn't dream up" has been stuck in my mind since.

Jim Cummings, Jennifer Hale, and Kath Soucie are pretty par for the course for cartoon and game voice acting in the 90s.  And Frank Welker is an industry legend, the man of a thousand voices, he's been at it since 1969.  Look up all their IMDb credits, they read like a who's who of popular franchises.

What made Descent special was that you moved freely in all three dimensions - there was no gravity. Who the hell thought that would translate well to people walking in a dungeon?

They used the engine for a 3D shooter that has no gravity, no NPCs, and you can move in all directions... for a Dungeon Crawling RPG. Not just any Dungeon Crawling RPG; a Dungeon Crawling RPG based on the rules of AD&D. At this point I feel like they would have had more success if they tried hacking the Doom engine than hacking the Decent engine.

Ironically, they probably would have done a ton better if they would have used a proper fps engine like the older but very robust and versatile id tech 1 engine. By the time they started this project, qake 2 was probably out, that would have been the  ideal engine for this project. Anyway, here my entry, probably not the worst but definitely one of the most boring dnd eye of the beholder for gba. Started it, invested some hours, never played it again.

thank you for suffering for our entertainment, this was a beautiful train wreck.

Hey, guess what? From one Jennifer Hale fan to another, she also voiced a couple characters from the first two Baldur's Gate games: Dynaheir the human sorceress from Baldur's Gate 1, and Mazzy the halfling fighter from Baldur's Gate 2.

11:49 Elite Dangerous uses Frontier's COBRA engine, the same engine used for Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and the Jurassic Park Evolution games, you could probably make a perfectly functional DnD game with it.

"I know some people have nostalgia for this game."

No, no one does. If someone does have vague emotions like nostalgia, call a therapist because you were most likely abused as a child. Mainly by this game.

In fairness, the re-make of Pools of Radiance in it's initial release would break windows if you uninstalled it. I think that's a special level of bad :D

It really tickles me they decided to go for perfect rectangle as the default face shape for absolutely no reason.

This is the same story as what happened with Mass effect Andromeda. They were also forced to use an engine (frostbyte) which was never made for rpgs and had to hack together everything on the fly.

Fun fact: Elite: Dangerous's engine - the Cobra engine - is shared by Planet Coaster. It's not actually that much of a stretch to adapt an engine developed for one game genre into another, though it's not necessarily ideal, depending on how the engine was originally built. Doom's engine was also used to make first-person action RPGs.

One correction on the mouse aiming; the modern standards were already set by 1998 - arguably done so by Quake back in 1996. Better yet, the first ever FPS title with modern style mouse aiming was... drumroll... Descent. Many people just don't count it for it being the '6 degrees of freedom' FPS.  My guess is that they just wanted to imitate the Ultima Underworld / System Shock control scheme, which was basically tossed to the side by '98.

Imagine your a kid in late 1997 your friends are all playing stuff like Goldeneye Final Fantasy VII Diablo and Ultima Online and you've finally saved enough allowance to get a new game. With no foreknowledge from online reviews to check you get to your game store and decide maybe you can finally brag to them by getting a new game none of them have yet and this one catches your eye. I have to imagine this happened to at least one person my heart forever goes out to whoever that poor child was.

Wow, you weren't kidding about the soundtrack.
A proper banger that one.
Added a lot of those tracks into my Oblivion's music folders.
The dungeon music does wonders for the atmosphere.

I love that the entire intro cinematic is just different angles of the same walk cycle.