doom II, ultimate doom for cheap on steam

I started playing video games on the PC about the time Wolfenstein 3D came out. For the 386 (I think) I had at the time, it was pushing the limits of gaming. When Doom came out, I played through the demo, then got the full version. My 486 ran it pretty well at low graphics quality.

Doom II is one of my favorite games of all time for the PC, though. Although it still lacked true 3d action(it has no vertical movement, other than stairs, or sheer drops) I think it was a major piece of groundwork for the entire modern first-person-shooter (FPS) game genre. One of the other nice features was that third parties could develop additional levels (called WADs) for it. This led to an avalanche of expandability.

Doom II game

Last night, I found that the Steam service was selling Doom II and Ultimate Doom for .99 ea and I quickly bought both. Doom II runs very well on DOSBox on my Pentium 4 system, and I remember a lot of the levels I ventured into last night. If you have $1.98 to spare, the old games are definitely worth playing.

On a side note, the Doom II shortcut the Steam service creates in your Start Menu requires you to login to your Steam account to play Doom, but if you just run the .bat file from your steamapps folder, you can run it without logging into Steam.