User Reviews (1 - 11 of 49)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

What can I say, if you don't already have it, Do so.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: September 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This "Collectors Pack" is great for those that have not yet had the chance to play Doom. It includes Ultimate Doom (Doom 1 and an aditional mission) Doom 2 and Final Doom. All 3 games for less than 20 bucks! Thats a great deal, Doom is one of the best games of all time and those who haven't had the chance to play it at all can get all 3 games in this bundle and see what you're missing. Sure, they're "old games" but the thing about Doom is, to me, even today the games seem fresh when I pop them in and play them, they're definatly worth it. Check it out, if you like first person shooters like Quake, or Half Life then you're gonna love Doom.

It's Doom!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: February 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Didn't matter if you owned a Macintosh or a Windows PC back in the early-to-mid 90's, Doom was it! The pixelated monsters and the bloody, dark, hellish levels and atmosphere was nothing like you had ever seen on your 13" monitor. The Midi soundtrack, the possibilities, the action, the fun, the immersion, Doom is what started it all in the FPS genre.

Doom is a nostalgic romp for those of us who got high on 3D graphics when they were first introduced back in the day, and if only they could release a boxed version tweaked to run on today's PC's without hassle, it'd be even better. If you buy this set, be sure to check out jdoom.com and download the 3D patches for the game to enjoy it in a tolerable 3D mode for today's PC's.

I don't know that younger people will feel as strongly about Doom I&II and Ultimate Doom as someone like myself and others in their late 20's and early 30's, but if you want to know what it was like back then, check it out.

Doom is a classic that compares to what Pac Man, Donkey Kong and Pong did for video games.

The best game ever made - period!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: January 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Of course you have to take a step back to the time it was published, but for the time period it was released it was the most revolutionary game ever made. Wolfenstein 3D came out first, and it was a good game, but did any game make you jump out of your seat like Doom? Plus, at the time it came out - what was the competition? Commander Keen? Epic Pinball? Doom was the first game that compelled people to rush out and buy a computer - simply for the purpose of playing this game!

Remember kiddies, there was no such thing as 3D acceleration when this game came out. In fact, video cards were rarely looked at when purchasing a computer. Now aside from processor power, it's probably the most important piece of hardware gamers look at. Before Doom came out, the PC wasn't even considered a viable gaming platform. That's saying a lot!

Don't forget, Id Software also revolutionized the entire idea of shareware. Companies like Apogee pioneered the idea but they included maybe one level of a game in their shareware. Id was the first to distribute shareware that was good enough to be considered a game in itself. The entire first episode was given out - for free! By the time you were finished, you *had* to buy the remaining two levels. It turned the gaming industry's arrogant "no return" policy on its head. Decision to purchase a game was (finally) based on the strength of the demo instead of slick ads or clever packaging.

It's a bummer this contains "only" Doom. As this was a DOS game, I would suggest Activision (Id or whoever owns the license now) come up with a real collector's bundle containing Doom, Doom 2, the Master Levels, etc... and revamp the startup software so it'll run good on current PC's. If they were really ambitious, they could even revamp the game to allow internet play.

That said, Doom is the best PC game ever made, not only for the game itself but for its impact on the computer industry.

Doom

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: April 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

First of all I won't tell you about the game, because we all know it's the best, I'll tell you about what comes in the package. Nothing, save the cd. No printed manual, no artwork, no key guide, I THOUGHT THIS WAS A COLLECTOR'S EDITION!... And if you plan on playing this with a mouse you'd better think again because doom95 (the windows 95 launcher) doesn't support usb mouses and practically all new computers come with usb mouses. However the great free program jdoom (jdoom.newdoom.com)adds mouse support, improved graphics, quake style console, and even updated polygonal graphics! The horrible part about this is that the average customer won't even think to download jdoom... The games themselves are great but the company didn't put any effort into this. This is in no way a "collector's edition" it's just repackaged old software.

Wasted opportunity

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 18
Date: October 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I'm a big Doom fan, and I'm glad to see it back on the shelves in any form, but this bundle is nothing more than a wasted opportunity. It's The Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, and Final Doom thrown onto a CD with some PDFs instead of tangible manuals. That's it. No extras, no features, no new levels, no new anything. Generally "Collector's Edition"s have some sort of exclusive content which help justify their name; this package would be more accurately described as "Repackaged Edition."

To make this a worthwhile purchase, Activision could have done any number of things. They could have included the Master Levels; that's an omission I just can't understand, since they're not available in retail anymore and the CD certainly has lots of extra space. They could have included the early alphas and beta versions of Doom to show what the game looked like during its development. They could have included any of the Doom posters which were made, or a pewter Doom-monster figurine, or an updated version of the Book of id which was included in the id Anthology package years ago, or scans of concept drawings for the game, or, most notably, any of the new Windows or hardware-accelerated versions of the Doom executable which have been made since the source code was released years ago. Sadly, the package has none of these.

If you've never played any of the Dooms, then this certainly is worth buying simply because it's cheap. For people like me who own the games, however, it is nothing more than a waste of twenty bucks.

I thought the "wasted opportunity" guy was a big complainer

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: October 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

(...)picked this up at Fry's yesterday and they literally couldn't have done less. It's a regular game-sized box, with the following contents:

(1) CD

Yup, that's it. And there's nothing special on the CD, either. Just DOOM. Not even an accelerated port of it - not a problem for me, as they're all over the net, but c'mon. No 3d accelleration out of the box? Gaaaay. Just their last "doom95.exe" Windows port.

Again, they literally could not have done less. As "The Complainer" pointed out, they could have included a poster, or a soundtrack CD, or a T-shirt, or a pewter Cacodemon (oooo! I want that!), or a tin box, or FREAKING ANYTHING TO MERIT THE "COLLECTOR'S EDITION" MONIKER, but no.

Seriously, though, having said all that, I'm not bitter - it was (dollar amount), and I wanted the games. The price was fine, and I lost my original DOOM][ CD long ago - I needed these games and will probably play them more than most other games I own currently or that I get as gifts this holiday season. They're the real stuff.

Game(s): 5 stars
This edition release: 1 star

This is without a doubt the best game ever made.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: August 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I first played Doom when I was about thirteen or so on my Dad's 386 computer. We didn't have a sound card so we had to use PC sound and to get the game to run at playable speeds the screen size approached that of a postage stamp. It totally blew my mind anyway, and has continued to do so to this day.

What can I even say? The original. The very best. Yes, it's flagrantly simplistic at the core (shoot the bad guys, grab the keycards, exit level, repeat), yes the graphics are dated, and yes indeed the whole Demonic Invasion thing is a little cheesy. None of that matters. What matters is that the overloaded-with-enemies gameplay here is rock solid and it's one Hell of a lot of fun.

The Demonic lineup is extraordinarily balanced. Chaingunners, shotgunners, and plain ol' zombies are easy kills but have hitscan weapons you can't really dodge, Demons do lots of damage and are too tough to be taken down quickly with just your pump shotgun, but once you find the chainsaw (and in Doom II and Final Doom, the double-barrelled shotgun) you're golden. Barons of Hell are big, tough, and pretty damaging if they hit you. Et Cetera. There's really no massive gaps in bad guy prowess levels - unlike Halo, where on Legendary grunts were a joke but elites made me piss myself with fear.

Ah, the weapons. The perfect lineup. The fist is super weak until you grab the Berserk Pack, at which point it becomes an ammo-free way to splatter bad guys. The chainsaw is a fantastic addition. The pistol is perfectly balanced for the early levels, it's enough to get the job done against zombies but not much else, keeping you on edge until you get more shotgun shells. The shotgun itself is a workhorse, and in Doom II the mighty double-barrelled shotgun is perhaps the best weapon ever devised in a video game. It'll drop several weaker enemies in one blast if they're crowded together, drop demons in one shot, and drop midline to upper tier enemies in three to six shots, but that takes time. The chaingun makes pistol bullets useful against crowds of weaker enemies, saving you precious shells and cells, the rocket launcher provides the big bangs, the plasma gun liquefies everything in it's path, and the BFG 9000 is just the mother of all gaming firearms. This is the perfect weapon scheme. Every gun is simple, to the point, and of the maximum-damage-minimum-time school of thought.

Now, the games themselves. Ultimate Doom is old-school, but sort of simplistic compared to later Dooms. Thy Flesh Consumed is hard as Hell. Doom II is amazing. The level design gets better, more unique, and more sinister - traps get sprung on the player when you least expect them, enemies teleport in on you with alarming frequency, and the last boss is absurdly creative. The new enemies fit right in (and indeed became instant Doom standards) and the combat shotgun is, as I said, simply wonderful. Final Doom is insanely difficult but sooo satisfying to complete on Ultra Violence difficulty.

Everyone is complaining about the difficult controls or difficulty with Doom95, and they've got legitimate gripes. However, the fix for both problems is actually very simple. User-created programs like ZDoom, Doom Legacy, and BOOM! enable mouselook, limited 3D acceleration, and fully remappable controls. These programs also work flawlessly in Windows XP and are available on the internet for free download. Google the program names, they're easy to find on various websites. All you need are the original .wad files for the programs to run the game, which are what you've got on this compilation CD.

Another note, I don't know what people are talking about when they say the program CD doesn't come with a jewel case. Mine did, and it's pretty nifty looking. I did buy this compilation when it first came out three years ago though, and the guys at Electronic Boutique told me it was a limited run when I picked it up (I have no idea whether that's true or not, it's just what they told me). Maybe Activision dropped the jewel case from re-issues?

In short, you can't go wrong with Doom. It's the original and best for a reason. Give it a shot. This is one of those games that will always be around because it's just that good. I've been playing Doom for ten years now, and it's a fair bet that people will be playing it ten years from now. That will be partly because Doom was so revolutionary when it came out, and partly because the game is just that much fun.

Vigorously recommended.

Doom

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Doom is a very good first person shooter and next to wolf3D it is the greatest game ever made. Wolf3D is the grand daddy of morden 3D games but it was Doom which made the world sit and take notice. Without Doom there would be no multiplayer tournaments, I think doom is the game which started the multiplayer games with co-operative and deathmatch gameplay. You play a soldier sent to another planet to destroy the aliens and save the world, The gameplay is very good and the controls are very easy to use. The length of all the games are very good. Finally i think an OpenGL patch for Doom called GLDoom was made by a gamer using the doom source code. I read that on the net a long time ago. They could have included that patch in this edition. If you like doom then get Heretic, Hexen and Wolfenstein3D you will like them too.

Boundless hellish gaming heaven for a very low price

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: January 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

DOOM Collector's Bundle(2002). A compilation containing Doom 1, its expansion "Thy Flesh Consumed", Doom 2, and two of the three Final Doom scenarios: "TNT" and "Plutonia".

This is it. THE granddaddy of all FPS games. THE second (don't forget about Wolfenstein!!). The game which started an online multiplayer revolution. The game which introduced us to 3-dimensional virtual environments. The game that has spawned countless clones. The game that supposedly influences people to violently attack each other in real life (riiiight...). The game that manages to successfully combine Mars, Hell, and chainsaws in a way that makes sense to the objective of the game. Onto the review...

I've been playing DOOM for 10 years like a lot of us here have, though I was introduced to it in a bit of a different context than most. Back in 1994, I started off with the crappy Sega 32X version (yeah, go ahead and laugh. It only had 17 levels, and NO CYBERDEMON!!). I also tried several other console versions (keep in mind back then I had NO access to a PC at all!). I fell in love with DOOM, but felt that the versions I had were waaay too short, so you can understand my sheer disappointment upon purchasing the official strategy guide (designed for the PC version), just to figure out that the version I had was poorly put together and missing a lot of levels/monsters. Then in '96 upon the launch of the Playstation, I bought DOOM and Final DOOM, which proved to be the best console versions out there, featuring a lot more of the PC levels and a creepy soundtrack. I was set for a while.

But over the years I kept hearing people say that the PC versions were the best ones, so out on a whim a few months ago I found this collection for 10 bucks and figured, "Why not?". And now I know what everyone was talking about. Wow. This is perhaps one of the best game purchases I've ever made. Simply put, these games were meant to be played on a PC (seeing as it was where they started from in the first place). The fast pace, the surprisingly excellent keyboard interface, and all the other stuff that I was missing out on... all here.

But enough about that. Onto the games themselves. So what's Doom about? Well, you're a marine stationed on a martian moon base who managed to get caught up in the middle of a hellish invasion of demons spawning out of "gateways". These demons killed everyone already and are still up to no good, so it's up to you to destroy every last one of them just to be on the safe side. That's the premise. No lengthy cut-scenes, hour-long tutorials, plot twists, shops, experience building, friendly characters or anything else that's useless when it comes down to simply taking everything out.

Most new-generation gamers might glance at Doom and slag off the game for its "archaic graphics" or "mindless key collecting simplicity". Sure, the game may not seem like much on paper, but DOOM's true bright spot often escapes them. It's something that not even the new DOOM 3 successfully touched upon. What I'm talking about is the ingenius design of it all fit into one incredible package of solid gaming. EVERYTHING is designed to be memorable! The monster variety, the different weapon strategy interplays, the mind-bending scope of the labyrinthine level designs which vary enough to always keep things interesting... hell, even the sound effect of a door opening is easily distinguishable and you can tell it came from DOOM.

Besides that, the best things about the games are the dark hallways with scares lurking around every corner, large open environments that let you strafe around and take out legions of monsters, the berserk pack, folding 10 zombies with the double barrel shotgun, and the Barons of Hell. Those guys are tough. Same with the Arch Viles. I was going to take off a star for the exclusion of the "Master Levels" Final Doom scenario, but it more than makes up for the fact that YOU CAN DOWNLOAD COUNTLESS #s OF EXTRA LEVELS ONLINE! All this even after finishing the 120+ levels between the 3 games for just 10 bucks... sign me up!

So what has DOOM taught us? Let's quickly run through the games:

DOOM 1
-The martian moons apparently have vast mountain ranges and breathable atmospheres, despite their size.
-War-hardened undead zombie soldiers always make cuddly teddy bear sounds when you kill them.
-Cacodemons are really just hugely inflated horned crunchberries. (My chaingun says, "GET BACK IN THE CEREAL BOWL!!")
-The Cyberdemon's presence is ALWAYS overwhelming.
-The master guardian of Hell (a.k.a. Spider Mastermind) is apparently Krang from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, only he's sitting on top of a mechanized quadra-ped machine gun mounted vehicle, and he's really ticked off at you.
-Hell's ultimate plans for Earth are to dismember a poor field rabbit. (just watch the ending)

DOOM II
-Nasty room full of imps = Hell. Double barrel shotgun blast to the face = Heaven.
-Fire hurts. A lot. Especially if it's coming from an Arch Vile.
-The Manacubus needs to cover up. Seriously.
-The Revanent's rocket launcher is the best gun in the game that you'll never have.
-If the Cacodemons are crunchberry look-a-likes, then Pain Elementals are the equivelent of Reece's puffs cereal.

FINAL DOOM
-...Is really not "final" at all. Good, because I've been playing this nonstop for 4 months now, and I don't want it to end!

So there you have it. One of the best gaming deals that money can buy. There's 5 difficulty settings, so it'll certainly keep you hooked, though the only true way to play DOOM is on Ultra-violence or Nightmare. This will be enjoyed for generations to come. Recommended to all who have even the slightest curiosity about DOOM.

Great Classic made better by using Jdoom

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: January 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

After installing the colelctor's edition, i found that my mouse and joystick would not work. After searching for help, i found references to jdoom (jdoom.newdoom.com). After installing and configuring jdoom to use the doom iwads, its like playing a new game. jdoom uses hardware accelaration and 3d models for the monsters. i am enjoying doom all over again.

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 Next 

Actions