Apogee Throwback Pack

This pack is worth it for ROTT alone, although the price tag is a bit steep. Wait for a sale before picking it up. ROTT is one of the classic FPS titles that were forgotten by time. Basically it is the less well known cousin of Duke Nukem 3D, made by a different studio under the same company: Apogee Software, or as we know it today, 3D Realms. But it's nothing like DN3D. It's more like Wolf 3D or Spear of Destiny, and that is because it was originally designed to be a sequel to Wolf 3D, but those plans fell through and the game's direction changed. You have many levels filled with a lot of often hard to solve puzzles in order to progress, and challenging enemies to take on, who are surprisingly difficult to take down at times, with some feigning death only to pop up and shoot you or ducking and diving bullets and rockets you fire at them. Add deadly traps into the mix and you're going to have a bad day. Quicksave often in this game -- that would be my advice. Graphically the game has seen better days, but you can fix this by using WinRott or WinRottGL, source ports for the game that will at least allow you to run the game on more recent versions of Windows, and perhaps throw in a few high resolution models for you to boot. The game is worth it for the sheer lunacy and laughs you'll have while playing it, due to the fact that it never takes itself completely serious. This is evident just by listening to the soundtrack alone, which I have to admit is one of my all time favourites, composed by industry Legends Bobby Prince and Lee Jackson. That and the sound effects will definitely have your ribs aching. Or maybe that's just me... And not to mention the cheatcodes -- they add a whole new dimension to the craziness you'll experience. The multiplayer element of the game is also excellent, and add to all the different modes that you can use the source ports I mentioned earlier to play against bots, and you have an awesome package. It wasn't really necessary to throw in Extreme ROTT, seeing as the last time I checked it is freeware and was made so by Apogee some time ago (it does chuck in a level generator which is pretty cool), and the Blake Stone games... well, like I said, worth it for ROTT alone, really. They were really just put in to pad out the pack I would think.

I hadn't played this game in probably about 15 years, and even then it was the shareware version. It was a blast to go back to the game. There aren't any improvments in the game engine itself, no resolution increases, so enemies that are far away are hard to see, and the default controls are unintuitive in this day and age. After a quick reconfigure, I had a lot of fun running through it. The games themselves run in dosbox, and run very smoothly.

This set is worth buying just for the original Rise of the Triad, a ludicrous mess of insanity that simply never gets old, even after all these years. Pick from a selection of characters, each with their own unique traits, and blast the living hell out of some monks! You'll never have played an FPS like it. Also included are the Blake Stone games, which are weaker but still interesting for their additions to the Wolfenstein formula (such as a much-needed automap), but like I said, this is worth the price just for ROTT and its included expansion.

Apogee Throwback Pack is a collection of four awesome games: Rise Of The Triad and Extreme Rise of the Triad, which is an addon that has many extra goodies, such as some harder levels, map editors, a random level generator and many other things. Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and its sequel, the not-as-known Blake Stone: Planet Strike. These are really good and underrated games. These games are in their original form, and if you want, you could use, for example, WinROTTGL to enhance ROTT. The collection as, a whole, could be better, but it is good enough.