How do you make flamethrowers underwhelming? You're about to find out... Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Depth Dwellers, a first person shooter developed primarily by one guy, Bradley Bell, under the business name of TriSoft, self published on floppy disks in 1994 though ultimately got a CD release through World Wide Software in 1995. To be frank, this game isn't "bad", but it's nowhere near "good" either. It's average... VERY average... so average it's almost not even worth talking about, but seeing as it came from a person who primarily did work for NASA, some of the design decisions are notably unusual, plus there was a VERY heavy push for this game to be featured with anything to do with stereoscopic 3D, which is partly why the shareware version was so ubiquitous in the 90s. ------------------------------------------ Additional Information and Corrections: * So... the game is amazingly, now available on Steam for dirt cheap! Reading the details on the Steam page, it seems the game is being re-released by a relative of the original creator, going under the business moniker of "TriSoft Legacy" and that there's plans to update or potentially remake the game going forwards... Given how far we've collectively come in terms of game development a remake could be... interesting... In any event, follow this link if you want to grab it on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3607690/Depth_Dwellers_1994/ * One thing I didn't mention is that I noticed the save files for this game are over 100 KB each. A small chunk of that is because of the screenshot it saves, but most of it has to do with the fact that not only is the entire state of the map saved, it's saved in its LOADED state, as in, what's been stored in memory to process it. A quick check of the map data in the save file shows the 64x64 tile map is taking up SEVENTEEN BYTES per tile! That's... just insane! o_o * Another thing I didn't mention is that many of the sound effects in the game are clearly vocal effects, as in, someone made a sound effect with their mouth and then used audio editing tools to make those effects sound more unnatural. I've mentioned before how this is often a good way to produce your own sound effects if you don't have access to a proper sound library, but it's a little TOO blatantly obvious here. :P * By the way, even though the game has both red keys and blue keys to find, the blue key is almost NEVER used. In fact, I don't think I found a single blue key or blue door throughout all of the second episode! :o ------------------------------------------ Pixelmusement Website: http://www.pixelships.com ADG on Pixelmusement: http://www.pixelships.com/adg Alphabetical Index of ADG Episodes: http://www.pixelships.com/adg/index2.html Kris' Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/kasick @Pixelmusment on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pixelmusement