Hey there old school gamers!  Remember when we liked playing video games on our PC?  I mean, sure we had our Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, but you couldn’t play the best games on those systems…no, stuff like DOOM and the original Need for Speed…those were PC games back then, and PC gaming was good.  I still miss playing games with my keyboard … those first person shooters have gotten better on the console systems, but I remember when the CTRL key meant shoot and the X key was for jumping!

While everyone loved Doom and Duke Nukem, I prefered some of the less famous ones – Shadow Warrior, Blood, Rise of the Triad, and, my personal favorite, HERETIC!!!

Heretic was a first person shooter created by Raven Software (they also did Jedi Knight II, the X-Men Legends series, and the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie game) back in the mid-90’s, from the Doom engine.  It incorporated some RPG conventions, including inventory manipulation.

The story, at least the story that Wikipedia tells me (not that you could tell from the game, is about the Serpent Riders, who have taken over the land of Parthoris, taking over the minds of its kings.  Because the Sidhe elves were immune to the Serpent Riders’ spells and mind control, they were declared heretics and hunted down by the Serpent Riders.  Corvus, one of the few remaining Sidhe, sets out to get his revenge on the Serpent Riders, starting with the weakest, D’Sparil.

Sequels followed, Hexen 1 and 2, following the Serpent Riders storyline, and Heretic 2, which brought the saga of Corvus to its end, but it’s the original Heretic that holds a special place in my heart.  It played like Doom, except that you could look up and down and, instead of guns, you used magic spells and wands.  It was a hella fun game.

I can’t get these older games to run on my new computer anymore, but I would sure appreciate a new Heretic game done with the fancy graphics that we’ve come to expect from the modern sequels to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom.

Anyone else remember this gaming classic?