The Depths of Doom Trilogy

The Good
This is how I eventually bought Doom. It consists of Ultimate Doom v1.9 (with the fourth episode, "Thy Flesh Consumed") and Doom 2 v1.9, plus an extra CD with some new levels. The games were fundamentally unaltered for CD. The compilation came with the Windows 95 Doom launcher which offered the novel ability to play at 640x480, although in this day of Zdoom and Doomsday with GL support it is redundant.

The extra material was a mixed bag. There was a separate CD that contained "The Master Levels" and "Maximum Doom". I shall deal with Maximum Doom in the next section. The Master Levels was a semi-official wad pack that had twenty-one new levels made by independent designers under contract to Id. As a consequence they are, as far as I know, not available elsewhere. They're generally of a high standard, and in particular the ones by Jim Flynn and Sverre Kvernmo stood out most for me. It also includes levels by Tim Willits, Tom Mustaine, "Dr Sleep", and a person called Chris Klie. The Master Levels was released as a stand-alone product, and I believe the Playstation version of Final Doom had some but not all of the levels.

The Bad
By now this has been surpassed by the "Ultimate Doom Trilogy: Collector's Edition", which includes Final Doom, which was a pair of professionally-made 32-level megawads for Doom 2 entitled TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment. I am torn as to whether I would prefer to have the Master Levels or Final Doom, which disappointed me; Final Doom is larger than the Master Levels, but some of the Master Levels are charming and nostalgic whereas Final Doom is relatively bland and anonymous.

Maximum Doom was just a collection of random wads downloaded from the internet. Some of the levels didn't work at all, a couple of the levels were actually for Hexen/Heretic, and some of them were just sound and graphic replacement wads. A couple of these used copyright materials - from The Simpsons and Monty Python - which means that the entire compilation was, strictly speaking, illegal. Maximum Doom is now entirely redundant because the files are all available at Doomworld.com anyway.

The Bottom Line
This was for a long time a handy way to get hold of the two Doom games, with the Master Levels thrown in as a bonus. Even today the Doom games are not abandonware, and you need the wads to use modern source ports. Unless you download them illegally you could do a lot worse than buy this cheap on budget, if you can find it.