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.

Star Wars: Jedi Knight - Jedi Academy (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

2003

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Systems:

Windows, Xbox, Mac

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This week on Super Adventures I'm talking about Star Wars! I saw everyone else doing it and I felt left out. If you're reading this in five years time, then I'm talking about everyone going crazy over the release of 'The Force Awakens' last week. I know it's weird to think back to 2015, when people were enthusiastic about Star Wars movies again and the series hadn't been utterly driven into the ground by a succession of annual sequels, but that's where I'm at right now.

But I'm not talking about a film, I'd need some kind of Super Adventures in Sci-Fi website for that... no I'm talking about Star Wars™: Jedi Knight™ - Jedi Academy™! I'd make a joke about it being Star Wars: Dark Forces 4: Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Outcast 2 - Jedi Academy, but for once they've resisted sticking a number in there and making things more confusing than they have to be.

Jedi Academy is the last game in this prestigious sci-fi shooter series, but to be honest it's always felt more like a stand alone expansion pack to me, like Mysteries of the Sith was to Jedi Knight. Honestly I doubt I'll be able to say much about I didn't already say in my Jedi Outcast article a few months back, but it's Christmas so I thought I'd treat myself!

WARNING: CONTAINS NO SPOILERS FOR THE FORCE AWAKENS.

Star Wars: Jedi Knight II - Jedi Outcast (PC)

Developer:

Raven

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Release Date:

2002

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Systems:

Windows, Mac, Xbox, GameCube (but not PS2)

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Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, the third in the Jedi Knight series. Poor Dark Forces: it was the one that started the games off in the first place but Jedi Knight was the name that stuck. Because it has 'Jedi' in it and every Star Wars fan wants to be a telekinetic space samurai.

I've played this before, but it's been so long now that all I remember about it is that the lightsaber combat is a step up from the last game and it probably does the shooting better. I mean you'd expect it have decent gunplay considering LucasArts passed the series on to FPS veterans Raven Software for this one, who were coming off Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force at the time. It seemed like Raven were getting around to all the big space sci-fi franchises in turn and giving them each a shooter, but instead they switched to making Marvel action RPGs weirdly, and now they make Call of Duty DLC.

The game has a 'mods' option right in the menu, which is cool, but I won't be touching any of them. I want the pure, unedited, non-Special Edition Jedi Outcast experience. Well, the single player experience anyway, I won't be showing multiplayer, and I won't be turning it off until I get to a proper Jedi duel.

Warning: This may contain spoilers for the earlier Jedi Knight games, including the fact that the hero becomes a Jedi Knight.

(Click images to expand them into bigger images.)

Quake 4 (PC)

Today, at last, I'm taking a quick look at the first few hours of Quake 4. Though it should really be called Quake II-2, as it breaks the series' long tradition of each game having basically nothing to do with each other, and instead continues the tale of Quake II.

The game came out a year after Doom 3 and is built on the same engine, but it was actually developed by id's sidekick Raven Software, who've used id's tech in the past to bring the world first person shooters like Heretic, Soldier of Fortune and Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force. But not Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that was actually someone else (though Raven did make the next Wolfenstein game... called Wolfenstein.)

Anyway I've played (and finished) the game once before, but thanks to my superpower of being able to completely forget pretty much anything and everything (aside from bad pop songs and 16-bit game tunes), it'll be just like I'm seeing it all for the first time!

(Click the images to view them in a larger resolution.)

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.

Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force (PC)

The Star Trek franchise hasn't quite done so well as its arch-nemesis Star Wars when it comes to games over the years, perhaps because Trek has always been about working through problems and moral dilemmas, something that's tricky to adapt. On the other hand Star Wars is more about using the force and locking s-foils in attack position, things that can directly translate into straightforward action games like Jedi Knight or TIE Fighter. Though I'm sure the fact that George Lucas owned his own top tier developer probably helped.

For Elite Force though the Trek license was entrusted to Raven Software, the people who brought the world Heretic and Soldier of Fortune (and would later go on to make Jedi Knight II). So of course they decided to take a series about a group of enlightened pacifists who travel through the stars trying to solve problems with diplomacy and reason, and turned it into a first person shooter with the tagline "SET PHASERS™ TO FRAG".

They could've made a Mass Effect style RPG or a Walking Dead style adventure game, but nope, it's a pure FPS built with the Quake III engine. So let's see how well that worked out for them.

(Most pictures can be clicked to enlarge, though they'll still be covered in ugly nasty jpeg compression artifacts.)

Soldier of Fortune (PC) - Guest Post

Let's get as far away from The Sniper 2 as possible.

I've heard good things about this one.

You can click the images to make them slightly bigger (800x600)!