Classics collide in a Windows 95 formatted, buggy mess. The action shall redeem itself.

User Rating: 8.2 | DOOM: Collector's Edition PC
By bluesteelMeGaSE | Review Date:
The Collector's Edition of this trio of the classic Doom titles is a competent package. The games by themselves had been sold under a DOS ideal format, with inferior resolution and the lack of a launcher. Despite these little shortcomings, the Windows 95 version isn't any better really. Sure, it offers a launcher, so you can jump into any game with any difficulty, even change all of the audio/control/video settings at will, but other than the improved resolution, the game is unstable in some ways. For every computer that I have played this collection on, the saved games would become corrupted. I'd save a game right in the middle of the super-difficult Plutonia Experiment episode (at Ultra Violence or Nightmare difficulties), take a break for a day, then try and load up and the game would crash upon load. Talk about a waste of effort and a way to ruin the experience! Also, the game is not developed with mouse support, especially on Windows 2000 and Windows XP (either versions), in mind. Yes, it does work on Windows 95 and Windows 98 (not sure about Windows ME, since I have never used it), but the lack of it in the aforementioned OS's makes the game mildly frustrating at times. To have the mouse available to use at any time in the game can really save your butt, or make it much easier to avoid conflict with the nasties in the game. Therefore, if you are one of the many to have the newer Windows operating systems, then do not look forward to playing with a mouse. If you have the older ones, then kudos to you for keeping them, and I hope that you enjoy the mouse support.

Each game plays well though. There are no removed levels or content really. The Windows 95 launcher allows you to jump to any level that you can think of. If you have a custom .wad file available, then you can browse your computer to load and play it. The improved resolution can help not only to make it a more immersing experience, but it makes things look better. The audio is intact here, especially with the superb music found in the original Doom, and in both episodes of Final Doom. Do not worry about removed secrets that have been encountered in many other versions of Doom; they are all found here. If you want a version of Doom that plays a little like the newer FPS games, especially with free looking, higher polygon counts, jumping, a console, and other features, then you should enhance this game by acquiring jDoom, a converter that allows you to play the game with enhanced features and visuals. This collection doesn't really offer any of those, but that is perfectly reasonable, as jDoom is not an Id Software product, and the said converter totally improves the game beyond what Id wanted perhaps.

Conclusively speaking, if you want a total experience with the classics, then you should either convert what you have in this collection, or avoid it completely and track down the classics so that you have no bugs or full mouse support. However, this collection offers a lot for the price, and you may not find yourself removing the game either, as it takes up a very modest 85 megabytes of hard disk space. If you can tolerate or work around the mess-ups of the versions of Doom that you find in this collection, then you may as well forget about the original versions.

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