In the mid-90s, for some reason, we had "Terminal Velocity" on our home PC. It was a shareware version that didn't have the full game, just the first chapter. I just loved piloting the spaceship.

An updated version called Terminal Velocity: Boost Edition (opens in new tab) was released today, but by modern standards, the first level I played so much is hardly a video game: flying over alien planets and shoot enemy ships, tanks, and buildings, collect power-up orbs, and sometimes go through tunnels. The flight model gives the controls a similar feel to "Descent," but with constant forward momentum. It's not a big deal, but I still remember why I got so hooked on it. It felt like I could fly forever through the mountain ranges of the first planet. (The Steam page says there are "over 400,000 square miles of terrain.")

I was 10 years old and in 1995 3D graphics of all kinds were exciting. Playing it again reminds me a bit of that old sense of wonder; Terminal Velocity was my first "open world" game. But back then, even if an entire level was no more complex than a single eyelash of Kratos in the modern "God of War," the sense of freedom and the possibility of observing interesting mountains and valleys were enough to keep me playing.

The Boosted Edition has a few technical improvements for the modern PC, the biggest of which is the increased viewing distance, which I'm not sure you'll like. The fog in the original made it seem more mysterious, but now you can sometimes see enemy ships floating in the distance, waiting to approach before the battle loop is turned on. For the most part, though, it's the same "Terminal Velocity" I played more than 25 years ago, originally released by 3D Realms and developed by Terminal Reality (opens in new tab), the studio that made "BloodRayne". A boosted version is available from Ziggurat Interactive.

I took a quick look at a full playthrough of Terminal Velocity on YouTube (opens in new tab), and it has some cool-looking bosses and levels beyond the first world, some of which remind me a bit of Devil Daggers. Oh, and the music. I've heard the first level's theme (opens in new tab) so many times that it's burned into my brain, so I can't trust my judgment on whether it's good or not, but I love it.

Unless you're also nostalgic for "Terminal Velocity," I can't really recommend it, but if you do decide to play it, a couple of suggestions. One, the mouse controls in Boosted Edition suck for me: either make them so absurdly sensitive that my ship spins out of control, or make them so sluggish that I can barely turn. I finally settled on flying with a mix of WASD and dull mouse control (using the "absolute" motion setting). And second, if you keep getting bounced back at the entrance to the tunnel, it's because you're trying to fly toward the exit, and I don't know how long it took my 10-year-old self to figure that out, but it took a while.