Catacombs Pack

The Catacomb (actually the 2nd game from the series) is a 2D action game developed by John Carmack. You have four type of attacks for various situation. You have potion to heal yourself. The game is about collecting key or reaching the portal to proceed to next level. It's fairly simple, but you can see how brilliant John Carmack were even at such young age. Then Catacomb 3D. This is one of very first game that introduce player's hand which has become a genre on it's own; known as first person shooter / perspective. Like many other mentioned it's about reaching to the next level by collecting key and there are tons of secret to be discovered. You have infinity ammunition, just shoot everything on sight, fairly simple. The game was developed by the famous Carmack, Romero and Hall trio. The sequels Abyss, Armageddon and Apocalypse while not developed by the original trio, it's still a good game on it's own merit. Unlike Dangerous Dave, it's definitely worthy sequels, some might argue the sequels are even better than the original Catacomb 3D. The sequels still retain the core of the original, which is collecting key and advance from level to level on a maze-like shape. The difference here is more variety. You have variety of location and enemies. So to summarize it's good game, with almost no flaw for it's era except bit repetitive. Oh and minus one star for making my head dizzy. Like many old school FPS, you'll have quite hard time if you suffer from motion sickness.

The first game already had the basic mechanics of all upcoming FPS, it's simple and fun. The second title, even better, only improved the gameplay and took us to hell and stopped time well in advance of what would become the bullet time. The third and fourth titles are interesting, but not so good. I played with CatacombGL, so I don't have all the time accounted for in GOG. I recommend it to all FPS history lovers.

Growing up in the 80's and 90's, I didn't really get into PC gaming until I moved back in with my mom and stepfather, while living with my dad and stepmother, I only played on the classic NES. My stepfather was always in the middle of either upgrading his own computer or building other PCs, and one day when I came home from School, my stepfather had me try out a game called Commander Keen, and the rest was history. I never played the Catacombs series as a kid, but one day while browsing older Id games for fun, found that John Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall, and Adrian Carmack had also worked on some games for Softdisk known as Catacomb, and I found a website to enjoy the games on way back in the 00's. Naturally when I saw the series for sale on GOG, my heart did a double flip and I purchased the games. Don't get me wrong, I love some modern games, but anytime I notice Catacomb, or Dangerous Dave, or Commander Keen, you can bet I'll spend hours reliving the classic games that have brought me so much enjoyment! If you're looking for modern games with fluid controls and smooth graphics, I'd keep walking, but if you need a throwback to simpler times with gaming, absolutely buy this game!

A great view at the beginnings of the FPS style, this game is both a history lesson and entertainment all in a single package.

These are terrible to play with the original executables, but there's a modern, open-source engine that will run all the 3D Catacomb games with a fairly current (and also configurable) control scheme. This makes all of the games much more enjoyable if you're looking to scratch the itch for nostalgia. The old idea of using the mouse for both movement and aiming is really cumbersome compared to keyboard+mouse, but first-person 3D games were a brand new concept. The engine I found (mentioned in the forums for this package) only works with this particular re-release, which is why I'm posting a review. I wasn't aware of the Catacomb series until after playing Doom, Doom II, and Wolfenstein. I remember being thrilled to find a 3D shooter that could run on my potato of a computer with 16-color graphics (had to borrow a computer to run Doom). There's a lot of old-school ideas here, and the game is simplistic at best. But if you're into retrogaming (or if, like me, you grew up with games like this), the Catacomb games are not to be missed.