Just got back from holiday and it turns out that while I was away, we fans of 90s first-person gaming received a double helping of exciting new re-releases!

Heretic and Hexen

Let’s start with these fantasy shooters from Raven, both using the doom engine. Heretic came first, swapping cacodemons and chainguns for gargoyles and magic wands, but otherwise hewing quite close to Doom’s simple run-and-gun format. Hexen was the sort-of-sequel that tried to be a bit clever with hub-based levels and puzzles, and also had three player characters.

Both are still highly enjoyable today, so it’s great to learn they’ve been re-released and remastered courtesy of those wonderful people at Night Dive. For a start you get high-rez graphics and widescreen support to rejuvenate these classics on your big fancy monitor. There’s also cross-platform multiplayer, some new episodes for each game and a unified launcher. Oh, and new remixed soundtracks. Even better, you get all of this for free if you have the originals on gog or steam.

(fun fact, these were some of the first games I ever bought on Steam, in a massive iD+Raven bundle).

So far this is similar treatment to what Doom 1 and 2 got from Night Dive last year. However it turns out there’s more: they’ve gone and tinkered with some of the weapons and levels, as well as adding entirely new features. For example in Hexen the Cleric now has a shield with his mace that can be used to block, parry and reflect fireballs. Time a parry correctly you can splat an Ettin (those troll-things you meet on the first level) in one strike of your mace.

They’ve also added markers on your map to tell you where to go next. I think players will be divided on this – some will be unhappy at introducing modern hand-holding, preferring the older days when you had to put in the hard work of searching for objectives yourself. I do think though that Hexen could get really obtuse at times – you’d flick a switch then spending an hour hunting around to find whatever the **** it actually did.

So yeah, as a time-poor dad gamer I don’t mind a little extra help. For what it’s worth you can turn off these new features. Also the DOS version is still included as an extra, which I strongly applaud. Even when the new features have a positive impact on the experience of playing the oldies, the original should always exist as an option.

You can find the remastered bundle on gog or Steam.

Azrael’s Tear

For a complete change of pace, how about this first-person adventure originally released in 1996, now again available on gog and Steam. Here you take on the role of a hi-tech thief in the near future, descending into a long-forgotten underground medieval complex in search of the fabled holy grail.

Turns out the place isn’t entirely empty. The knights originally charged with protecting the grail are still around, their lives unnaturally prolonged. They claim to be waiting for someone worthy to claim the sacred chalice but they may have their own agendas. Or may have just lost their minds entirely. There are further signs something deeply weird and disturbing is at work, and has been affecting both people and wildlife for a very long time. You’ll find not only ghosts and talking corpses, but actual dinosaurs. Maybe this grail thing isn’t so wonderful after all.

It’s a wonderfully atmospheric game – you get a real sense of descending into something ancient, haunted, and slowly decaying. It also a difficult one to categorise, since there are plenty of hazards, but not a whole lot of combat or anything requiring fast reflexes. There are only a few sections where something in a room is actively trying to kill you, and often it’s easier to just avoid them. In some ways it’s akin to something like Myst, but with a proper 3D engine instead of pre-rendered graphics. Then mix in a bit of System Shock, maybe.

This is definitely not a remaster of any sort, just the original game bundled with dosbox. I’m not complaining though – being a fairly obscure and commercially unsuccessful game, long consigned to the limbo of abandonware, I’m just glad it’s finally reached digital stores. Also in some ways that clunky 3D with its murky textures still perfectly suits the gloomy confines of Aeternis.

So it still comes with our highest recommendations – one of the true forgotten gems of 90s gaming.

Moments in Gaming is where we look back on gaming experiences that have left a particularly strong impression on us over the years: mainly for good reasons, but sometimes for bad ones.

I’m not really sure if demos are a thing anymore; I basically haven’t been short of games to play for a long time, but the last time I saw one for a new game that I was interested in, it had disappeared from Steam before I had the chance to download it. (Apparently, demos that are available for a limited time are a thing).

I’d possibly argue that the 90s were the peak demo era, once we got past the cassette tape days (infrequently released and often annoying to get working) and to the floppy disks that came attached to the front of most 16-bit computer magazines back then. (The CDs and DVDs, of multiple different demos, patches and bits of software, were also good, at least until the internet rendered the whole enterprise rather pointless and they only persisted out of a stubborn notion that readers would view their removal as a downgrade).

But there was something special about those days of the covermount that featured one or two ‘headline’ demos, offering a chance to taste a forthcoming full-price game and build some excitement for it. This, they often did, mainly by virtue of being so short that you couldn’t help but wonder what the full thing had in store. At least, this was the experience of an enthusiasm-rich but cash-poor child, and risked being immediately undermined if the magazine itself contained an underwhelming review of the game in question within its pages.

Looking back, it now feels vaguely shameful that in a household that was always furnished with a decent selection of games, they were frequently ignored in favour of a series of 10-minute samplers that arrived free of charge. I can’t remember my Dad ever being swayed even slightly by my desperate entreaties to get excited about whatever was on the cover disk that month, and he would studiously rebuff them using the logic, reason and world-weariness of a tired adult: there’s no sound on this, how can you tell from the first short level, the review gave it 51% etc.

For a period in the early 90s, we would be invited to a neighbourhood Christmas party held by the parents of one of Jo’s friends. As the other attendees were either girls that were a few years’ younger than me or adults drinking wine, I was given free reign to go upstairs and play on the Dad’s Amiga for the duration. Unfortunately, he didn’t actually have any games.

What he did have, though, is demos: an absolute shit-ton of demos. “I love demos,” he would chuckle. “I don’t know why anyone would pay 30-odd quid for a full game when you get all these demos for free.”

I don’t know how many demo disks he actually had: it felt like hundreds, and certainly more than could be sustained by a single monthly purchase of an Amiga magazine (in which case, the financial outlay involved would probably have funded a few decent full-price or budget games instead).

But still, I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store, cycling through dozens of Amiga demos over a few hours, getting a little taste of all those games that the Atari ST couldn’t quite pull off, and to which the DOS PC was not particularly well-suited. [Is that a belated first compliment for the Amiga on this site? – Ed.]

And while it struck me as odd at the time, and even more so the more I thought about it over the years, to not have your interest sufficiently piqued by any of these hundreds of demos to make a commitment to a complete game, the fact is that I don’t recall ever coming away from my annual demo sugar-rush with a concrete suggestion for a purchase of my own. (There was a tennis game… Passing Shot? Tie Break? I can’t remember, but I think it didn’t work on the Atari STE and we either didn’t buy it or had to take it back).

Most likely, as a full-time arrangement, frustration and boredom would have overtaken me as a kid, but as an adult, I can now imagine sitting down to blast through a couple of demos on a weekday evening for half an hour. However, with a large backlog to work through and this site’s legions of loyal readers clamouring for new content, the process of choosing the next game for review has arguably become a little too serious and self-important: once the choice is made, Rik, you must push through.

This is probably itself an overreaction to my early gaming flightiness, a hangover from the demo days, which involved me too frequently playing little more than demo-length portions of some new games and swapping between them instead of getting my teeth into any one of them properly.

But, staring down the barrel of a lot of old games (and some new ones), there’s no harm in embracing a slightly more fickle, surface-level assessment: flicking through some possibilities and rejecting them if they don’t really grab me. (It was the idea behind 2022’s Unreviewed feature, even if that did still represent an attempt to squeeze some new #content out of not very much gaming at all).

A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of hours picking out some possible games and firing them up: the one that I didn’t enjoy, I abandoned and uninstalled; the one that didn’t work, I didn’t spend hours trying to fix. It was all rather liberating. And when I eventually landed on something that I did like, it felt as if a positive choice had been made.

I’m hardly describing an epiphany heralding a radical change in approach here, but as I cheerfully rejected the two losing candidates, I couldn’t help but think back to those frenzied winter evenings trying as many Amiga demos as possible. Then – as now, and always – time is limited: best not to waste too much, if you can help it.

(Images sourced from Amiga Magazine Rack (https://amr.abime.net/)

The Vault of Regret is a very large place, which houses dusty old game CDs and boxes, untouched digital libraries, and the metaphysical concepts of remorse and embarrassment. Here we write about all the games we should have played but haven’t, or that we have played but didn’t enjoy, among other things.

The Thing is from a fine video game tradition of spin-offs from fondly remembered 80s properties that have been left fallow in movie-world for long enough that the prospect of a sequel, semi-sequel or sidequel in video game form seems like a reasonable way to breathe some life into it again.

Like the film, the spin-off game wasn’t exactly a massive hit, but it nevertheless received the modern remake/remastering treatment last year.

If the idea of remastering modern games that were big hits not that long ago baffles me slightly (and it does), then I really wasn’t sure what to make of this news.

Neither were the reviewers, some of whom were too young to play the game when it came out, or expressed understandable bafflement about this middling title from 2002 being thrust into the modern spotlight rather than remaining the preserve of retro nerds like ourselves.

Speaking of which, the original release of The Thing would be prime FFG fodder, in that it appeared and then disappeared quite quickly but achieved reasonable reviews on the way. “This could be quite a good game to review for the website one day” is a phrase that has caused a lot of plastic boxes to pile up over the years. (Sometimes, that just isn’t true, but in this case, I think it was).

The moment has come, though, to accept that it’s never going to happen. The main reason being, as has been documented previously: I am a total coward.

Back when the game came out, I decided to check out the film upon which it was based. It’s pretty good, from what I can remember, but also creeped me out so thoroughly I’ve never returned to it.

The basic premise, if you haven’t seen it, is that the titular ‘Thing’, discovered in remote and icy conditions on an Antarctic base, can successfully imitate other organisms, including humans, fostering a certain paranoia among the small group of American colleagues on the base that any one of them might be ‘it’. (And ‘it’ will at some point then assume some horrifying tentacled form and need to be destroyed with fire).

A successful recipe for a jumpy nightmare, certainly, and not a game that should be attempted by someone who couldn’t even get through Aliens vs. Predator, and stopped playing Resident Evil after the bit where that dog jumps through the window.

It’s also got elements of squad management, which are usually pretty stressful, and apparently your squad mates are prone to getting scared, even taking their own lives if not looked after properly.

How do I know this? Well, fortunately The J Man has reviewed it already, many years ago. Which doesn’t preclude coverage here, of course, but (despite my historic and earnest-sounding intentions in the comments section below his write-up) I’ve never even come as close as taking the discs out of the box.

And so, it’s off to the Vault of Regret with The Thing – where it will likely stay until it finds a way to mutate itself into another form and make an escape.

Hi there!

Hope you’re all doing well. Today we’re going a bit modern, by our standards, to check out 2013’s instalment of EA’s long-running racing franchise.

Here’s a review of Need for Speed: Rivals.

Hi there.

The urge to play a first-person shooter strikes me only occasionally these days.

But, for reasons that will be explained, I was recently motivated to go scrabbling through the games cupboard and dig out today’s game, first released in 2003: Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death.

Hi all.

Last time I posted here, I suggested that I might review a flight sim sometime this year. I’m afraid this rather ambitious goal has, so far, resulted in little more than me flailing around in tutorial missions trying to figure out HUD settings and firing missiles randomly.

So for today can I interest you in a puzzle-platformer instead? We’re diving way back to the earliest days of Blizzard Software to look at one of their lesser-known creations, The Lost Vikings.

Hello there!

Today we’re back in the realm of old football games (again). Here’s a review of Onside Complete Soccer.

Hi all, I’m happy to announce that after a long absence, today we have a new discussion review for you. This time, we’re off to a theatrically gloomy island housing a clearly unsuccessful psychiatric hospital, to trade punches with some costumed maniacs in Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Hello everyone.

The reviewing machine appears to be belatedly cranking back into life again in 2025.

Today’s review is of the Dragon Age: Origins expansion pack, Awakening.

Hello all.

I’ve not contributed much to this site lately, but today I have a new review for you! We’re looking at shareware scrolling shooter Raptor: Call of the Shadows.

Hopefully more to come in the future – maaaaaybe even a flight sim.