Interplay: 15th Anniversary

The Good
Price. At the time when I purchased it I picked this package up for 15 american dollars. That is a dollar a game! Two of these games are on the CGW Hall of Fame. Fallout for 1 dollar, can't beat that. I also think it is nice that they printed up a 500 page manual for the package. Too many publishers would have been too cheap (cough Microprose cough) and only put electronic versions of the manuals on the CDs.

The Bad
That said the manual isn't the best. Having one or two of the games already, I know that they didn't put all the documentation in for all the games. Fallout seems to have all the documentation, but others like Castles II, only have selections. Can't blame interplay for this though, the manual is already 500 plus pages, and complete documentation is on the CDs.

The Bottom Line
In this review, I am really trying hard to stay away from commenting on the individual games, and only talk about the package itself. So there isn't so much to talk about. There is a intergrated installer, and start screen that autoplays when you insert the cd in a Windows machine. It is rather well done. Most companies just throw stuff together on a cd to make compilations. This package shows that Interplay actually did put in a few minutes worth of though. The maunal is decently put together. The installer is welldone. The selection of the games also seems to have been done consciencously. Pretty much every genre is represented, and most of the games are good ones (I wasn't thrilled with Solitare). For the money this is a good package.

NOTE: I put my review in under the DOS version of the game because most of the games in the package run in DOS nativley. There is only one version of this pacakge, just different games run nativly in different environments. As I said most were orginally for DOS, but can run in windows as well. Some like Battle Chess are actually a windows version. The installer is windows based.