Hexen: Beyond Heretic first haunted gamers back in 1995. It was an FPS game that features mythology-derived creatures and a trio-demon brothers known as the Serpent Riders. Actually, it was first ported to the DS August of last year. Rather in time for Halloween, developers Rich Whitehouse and Sektor update this hair-raising homebrew to v0.25.7z.

According to Sektor's site, much of the hard work was done by Rich and his participation includes adding support for more devices and modified the controls. While sound and touchscreen functions are now supported, the save game option still doesn't work. Saves are written to /data/hexen/ and trying to load them will result to error that reads: "Corrupt save game: Segment [108] failed alignment check."

Sektor added that the game needs the retail of hexen.wad and that it uses Chishm's libfat to read it. Accordingly, libfat is compatible with MK2/3, GBAMPCF, M3CF, M3SD, SCCF, SCSD and NinjaDS. Those who own a G6, EZ4Lite or a 256mbit flashcart will be needing the GBFS version (requires the .wad file to be attached to the .nds).

Another new feature is the special DS menu that allows for changing the gamma and other things such as level warp and cheat codes. Controls of HexenDS v0.25.7z are as follows:

• dpad to turn and move
• touch screen to look around
• A button fires
• Y button jumps
• L button cycles through inventory
• R button cycles through weapons
• X button uses objects (doors, switches)
• X button + dpad to strafe
• B button uses the selected inventory item
• Select brings up the menu and exits out of it (acts as escape)
• Start selects menu items, or toggles the automap when not in a menu
• X+Up/Down on dpad flies up/down while in fly mode