“...The game does have in-app purchases, but it never once made me feel forced to get them to be competetive.”
troubling is the fact that some of the games are missing from the Steam edition of the anthology.
How on earth do you leave of the Commander Keen series from this package? I can only assume it has to do with copyright issues, but leaving out the series that put 3D Realms/Apogee on the map is almost inexcusable. Another thing to I noted is that the 3D Realms Anthology is compatible on Mac, so while I was on vacation last week with only my MacBook Pro on hand, I decided to check this claim out. The results were less than fantastic. While most everything seemed to work okay, there was just nothing I could do to get Duke Nukem: The Manhattan Project from even booting up. The problem lies in the fact the games haven’t been ported to Mac, instead they are running of the WINE engine that seems to simulate a DOC PC environment. The forums on many games are full of users on Mac’s having all sorts of strange problems that have yet to see any responses. I think this is more to do with the fact the 3D Realms Anthology has no dedicated hub on Steam where users can go, instead each individual game has its own forum which can make it a nightmare on users, and the developers trying to make fixes.
So, at the end of the day do I recommended this anthology on Steam? Yes! If you grew up with these gems then you are going to love playing them once again –probably fully for the first time– and you will no doubt find games that you were only lucky enough to know about from ads in the Apogee catalog, or from the purchase screen of another game. Yes, the pack has some problems on Steam, and since the games are scattered all over the place in alphabetical order –I couldn’t find a tab to have them all under a 3D Realms drop down menu– it can be a pain knowing what’s even in the pack after purchase. I really would have loved to see a dedicated hub for the anthology as you are pretty much on your own figuring out each game willy-nilly.
The price sits at $40 which is more than fair for the content at hand, as even if they charged $5 per game –a more than reasonable amount mind you– you’d be paying well over $100 for everything here. Yes, it sucks that some major titles are missing, and the replacement games, while nice, are no real substitution for them, but you are still getting a ton of content regardless. If for some reason this is the only version you can grab, then go for it, but I really recommend the non-Steam version as you are getting tons more content for the exact same price. My final score for the Steam version would be quite a bit higher if only for the fact that I already played/own the original anthology that offers up so much more content than what is given here in the Steam edition.
Included Steam Release Games:
-Alien Carnage / Halloween Harry
-Arctic Adventure
-Balls of Steel
-Bio Menace
-Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold
-Blake Stone: Planet Strike
-Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure
-Crystal Caves
-Dark Ages
-Death Rally
-Duke Nukem
-Duke Nukem 2
-Duke Nukem 3D
-Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project
-Hocus Pocus
- Major Stryker
- Math Rescue
- Monster Bash
- Monuments of Mars
- Mystic Towers
- Paganitzu
- Pharaoh’s Tomb
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows
- Realms of Chaos
- Rise of the Triad: Dark War
-Secret Agent
-Shadow Warrior (Classic)
-Stargunner
-Terminal Velocity
-Wacky Wheels
-Word Rescue
-Xenophage
J. Luis
@_ShadowGallery