The music of a Material Defender!

(Review for Descent: Game rip by honkstar82)

Three hundred and sixty degrees of freedom. That's what Interplay promised, and boy did they deliver. Listen to these tunes with your headphones on and you can hear how the drums move from side to side on the menu theme, or the swirl of gas around your head in the fifth level's music. Descent has a rocking space-techno soundtrack that really gets your mind in the mood for entombed combat against corrupted robots, but it's awesome to listen to all on its own. When you're in-game you won't notice all the little nuances that a good soundfont will bring out of these tunes, and I still get chills whenever I hear the opening bars of Descent's 'Briefing' music. It's a little like 'Grabbag' for the DN3D crowd, one of those pieces of music that defines your memory of a game by letting you know that soon you'll be knee-deep in the dead.

This archive is of great quality and organized well. Unfortunately none of the levels have their actual names listed, even in the MIDI data, just a number. This is unfortunate, since not every level in the game has its own unique music. Some levels share music, and when you are paging through your media list trying to find "that one song", it's much easier to remember 'Venus Nickel-Iron Mine' than 'Level05'. It would be great if the ripper had at least included the name of the first level to feature these tunes in the filename as well as the level number, but oh well. If you're the obsessive type, try looking up the songnames on Planet Descent. This is a great pack of songs from an amazing game, and still holds up well against modern music. Oh, excuse me, kicks the tar out of modern game music.

9/10