Most of what comes packed with the 3D Realms Anthology is a painful reminder of the period in PC gaming when there were many, many stabs at trying to match what consoles were doing.
In a year that saw the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System along with Super Mario World, PC gamers were saddled with the likes of Arctic Adventure (a sequel to 1990's Pharaoh's Tomb, also in this collection) that starred "Nevada Smith." It was sad attempt at capturing the, oh, I don't know what... FUN! of 16-bit console games. And no matter how bad the games were, we PC gamers, at least around my neighbourhood, stuck it out hoping the playing field would level off. It took more than decade. All through the 1990s Apogee/3D Realms -- the evolutionary line between the two has always been blurry for me -- there were incremental differences and improvements to making a platformer work on a PC with the likes of Secret Agent (1992), Hocus Pocus (1994), Alien Carnage (1993), Dark Ages (1991), Bio Menace (1993), Monuments of Mars (1990), Monster Bash (1993), the horrible Truxton clone Major Striker (1993), Crystal Caves (1991), and even the the first couple of Duke Nukem games. Most of the games from this era are curio items your eyes would scan over at a garage sale and there's this momentary flicker of memory that makes you appreciate today's video games a whole lot more, even the terrible ones.
