The XCOM Complete pack was only 14.99$ and contains:
- UFO Defense
- Terror From the Deep
- Apocalypse
- Enforcer
- Interceptor
The Id super Pack was a monster package. I was able to purchase it for only 34$ as part of a special limited time deal. It currently sells for 69.99$ and has:
- Quake III Arena
- Wolfenstein 3D
- Ultimate DOOM
- Final DOOM
- DOOM II
- QUAKE
- QUAKE II
- QUAKE II Mission Pack: The Reckoning
- QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
- QUAKE III: Team Arena
- HeXen
- HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
- Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
- Spear of Destiny
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity
- QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon
- DOOM 3
- HeXen II
- DOOM 3 Resurrection of Evil
- Master Levels for Doom II
- Commander Keen
The importance cannot be understated. When you play old games, you often have to jump through multiple hoops just to get things to work. Right off the bat, when I tried playing terror from the deep, I found that the mouse scroll speed was way too fast on the battlescape screen. I googled various forums, and found that others had this problem too, especially those with a laser mouse. Workarounds were avaiable, such as downloading Turbo and slowing down the effective CPU speed. The other XCOM games ran fine, as they were set up with DOSBOX (a DOS emulator that is a godsend for anyone who wants to play their beloved DOS games) - the config files and ISO images of the game CDs were already set up too. This was a nice touch by Steam. Unfortunately, DOSBOX did not have support for Terror from the Deep, hence the scroll speed problems.
In addition, I found that many of the games did not come with the game manual. Terror from the Deep did contain the manual in PDF, but others did not. I do not know if this is for legal reasons, but the XCOM games have always had a steep learning curve, and having a manual to refresh my memory after not having played these games in years would have been nice. Luckily, the various faqs on the internet were able to get me back up to speed.
I ran into a few hitches with the ID Super Pack as well. When I tried launching the Doom 3 expansion pack, Ressurection of evil, it gave me an error saying that my Doom 3 key was invalid. Confused, I launched Doom 3 first, and then launched Ressurection of Evil, which then worked. Games like Quake 2 and Hexen 2 do not allow you to change the resolution in game, and require you to do so from the command line. It was not immediately apparent how to launch these games from Steam to set the appropiate resolution. After experimenting around, I found that by right clicking the game from Steam, selecting properties, general tab, set launch options, and typing: "-width 1280" I was able to get it to work. Probably the worst problem I encountered is that the really old games such as Doom were run in Dosbox, and not being able to set the resolution made it look absolutely horrendous. Why didn't they include their Doom95 engine instead? Or better yet, package it with some of the newer open source Doom engines out there, such as Doomsday? Luckily, I can access the wads and launch them via the previously mentioned enginers, so its a moot point.
So while it is true that I was able to work around these minor issues, they really detract from the user experience. If there had been some minor patches released that allowed these packs to work better with Steam, that would have been great! Naturally, there are probably legal reasons and other issues that prevented this from happening. After all, the original Microprose has long since been disbanded, so not much could have been done there. Still, attention to detail seperates the excellent products from the good. Issues such as this should have been addressed or dealt with in some way. Having the games preconfigured via Dosbox is a great step in the right direction. As I said previously, perhaps when companies see how well loved these games still are, they will have financial incentive to provide some more support for them in the future.
Steam does have forums for each of the games, which is nice. However, they fall short there too. For some reason, the forums are not integrated with the steam accounts. I soon that I had to register seperately for their v-bulletin forums. This is pretty inexcusable. But whatever, I'm having too much fun with XCOM to continue complaining. Cydonia and T'leth await!
