Thank you, Human-Computer Interaction - you gave me back Descent 3.I had a group of people over to finish (start?) an assignment for said class when a good friend mentioned the good old days of playing Descent and Descent 2 in the computer labs in high school. Like war buddies and their tall tales, our stories were practically opaque to our other friend, who’d never even encountered network gaming back in 1998, let alone Descent.So of course we had to show him.A couple of things about Descent 3: first, you never really seem to forget the basics. I honestly picked up the joystick for the first time in at least three years and wailed on online players. Okay, so they mostly wailed on me, but I managed to bag almost as many kills as deaths. This is gold - if people are still playing D3 in seven years time, I could probably still make a go of it.Second, all the levels being played these days are kinda poor. You could do so much with the Descent 3 engine, but even levels built for today’s machines look only slightly better than Descent 2 offerings. People! Full vertex geometry! You could make some gorgeous levels that play obscenely well, but instead we’ve got lots of flat walls with hallways just punched out of them. And I swear this isn’t all bitterness from the fact that none of the levels I made back in 1999 are being played anymore. Really.Third, everyone’s enjoying this new set of levels called Hyperspace where all the weapons have been modded. You get into a game of Hyperspace and all of a sudden you don’t know what anything does. Apparently frag missiles track. Who knew?Finally—and this is most important of all—Descent 3 is one of those games you can apparently watch for hours at a time even if you’re not playing. Half the fun is figuring out what’s going on at any given moment, and many comments were made to the effect of, “My eyes hurt!” and, “It goes so fast!” We wasted three hours that day on Descent 3, and my two assignment buddies did nothing but watch and cheer.So thanks, HCI, for bringing back the love. (No thanks to three years of rotting skills and crappy levels—the reason why I probably won’t be playing much anymore.)