Hexen II (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

1997

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Systems:

Windows, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures I've finally gotten around to replaying some of Hexen's slightly more three dimensional successor, Hexen II! It's been ages since I've played this one so I should be coming into it reasonably clueless. Plus it's a Hexen game so I likely didn't get anywhere in it the first time around anyway.

Hexen II is the last of the 'Serpent Riders' trilogy, following on from Heretic and Hexen, so there's apparently a story here to resolve and this game finishes it off. But just to make things confusing, Heretic actually branches off to another sequel, Heretic II, which tells the tale of the original game's protagonist returning home and fighting a plague. Plus there's the expansion packs like Deathkings of the Dark Citadel and Portal of Praevus which slot in somewhere.

But this is definitely absolutely the final Hexen... until Raven Software gets bored of making multiplayer modes for Call of Duty games and decides it's time for Hex3n: Beyond Heretic II.

Hexen (MS-DOS)

Today on Super Adventures I'm looking at the second game from Raven Software's Heretic series. It wasn't my original plan to play Hexen so soon, but after playing Heretic I had a sudden irresistible urge to see how the two games compare while the other is still fresh in my mind.

This is actually the very first PC first person shooter I ever played, my introduction to the genre, though I played it way back when games were still loaded from the DOS prompt so I've forgotten more or less everything about it. I do remember that it came out at the end of 1995, about eight months before Quake and just three months before Duke Nukem 3D, so the Doom engine it's built on would be looking a bit dated very soon.

Unlike Heretic, this managed to escape PCs and went on an exciting two year journey to the world of consoles, eventually making it over to the N64, PlayStation and Saturn in 1997, where its 2.5D graphics likely didn't look any less dated.

Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders (MS-DOS)

Today I'm going to be playing through the first episode of mid-90s first person shooter Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders by Raven Software. It used to be known as just 'Heretic' back in its mail order days, but when it finally hit shelves 15 months later in 1996 they'd appended a subtitle to it, along with two extra episodes.

I have played this before, way back in the distant past, but it wasn't for very long. All I remember about the game is that I was armed with a yellow wand and it wasn't a particularly awe-inspiring weapon.

For people like us who are living in the future with our future PCs it's a sensible idea to play Heretic using a source port like ZDoom or Doomsday (I'm not sure which is recommended these days), but I'll be playing it raw and unfiltered in all its low resolution DOS glory. Because that is the manner in which I tend to roll.