Welcome to another episode of the semi popular segment, PatMan Picks classic PC games. My pick for this week is a title that I actually didn’t play until a good few years after it was released in stores. I remember finding the demo for Raptor Call Of The Shadows on a PC magazine CD. It was a “best of issue” and the CD had many game demos from the previous 5 years or so, some of which I had already played and purchased while others like Raptor, I had not even heard of. So, it was with great surprise that I discovered as I played this top down shooter that I really enjoyed the game. Obviously, I  had played top down shooters in the past, mostly in arcades so I knew the game play was going to be pretty fun, but there was “something” about Raptor Call Of The Shadows that I just couldn’t put my finger on that I really liked when I played the shareware for the first time. Maybe it was the arcade style gameplay on my PC, maybe it was the very pretty visuals for its time, or maybe it was the music. Whatever it was, I knew that I had to  buy the game after playing the demo. The problem was, as I stated earlier, it was a good 2 or 3 years old by the time I discovered this title. As a result I spent several weeks searching for it in used game stores, yes they sold used PC games back in those days, until I found a copy. This really was a perfect example of how shareware worked back in the classic days of DOS PC games. You would come across a shareware demo, install it on your PC and then after playing the lengthy demo go look for the full version if you were satisfied. Raptor Call Of The Shadows was a retro PC classic that I initially came across completely by chance , however, I am very glad I took the time to play it as I still have fond memories shooting it up on my good old 486 !

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