Overlord’s been sitting near the top of my Backlog of Shame for a while now. You probably all have one of these: it’s the large stack of games you knew you wouldn’t have time for for a while, but which you bought anyway because your brain doesn’t work.

Unlike you, though, I am almost guaranteed to run into the people who made my backlog games sooner or later, which is usually really, really awkward. I hereby apologize to Codemasters and Triumph, and I swear, I’m playing through Overlord right now.

Of course, as often happens with Backlog of Shame games, a new, improved version of Overlord is getting ready to come out in a couple of months.

Raising Hell is sort of Overlord version 1.5, combining the original game, the downloadable content from Xbox Live, and a host of improvements into a single package for the PS3.

If you never got the chance to check out Overlord on the 360 or PC, you managed to miss a whole lot of black humor combined with a surprisingly flexible gimmick. You play as the titular Overlord, a despot who was deposed and slain by a band of heroes years ago. Since then, the heroes have become corrupted by their own power, and your followers have brought you back to reclaim your throne.

Overlord is sort of an RTS, although the screenshots can make it look like an action game. By committing evil acts, you can summon a posse of goblins up from the depths of hell to do your evil bidding. It’s easy to control your goblin army on the fly, once you get the controls down. The real fun comes when you can sweep across a map like some kind of malevolent force of destruction, especially when your violence is directed at a full cast of fantasy cliches, many of which have it coming.

Raising Hell, in addition to the new singleplayer campaign, also adds a few new multiplayer maps, a Legendary difficulty setting, and the ability to play through the game in co-op splitscreen. The game’s also received a fresh coat of polish from the 360 version; PS3 gamers can look forward to Dolby 5.1 sound, a better framerate, smarter AI, easier-to-read text, a new minimap, and handy tips during the loading screen.

Overlord was sort of a sleeper hit on the 360; it received good reviews and has quite a few fans, but it didn’t become the meme-generating monster one might expect it to be. With Raising Hell, it has a second shot at stardom on what could politely be called a slightly less populated console, and it’s a genuinely better package to boot.