HoMM hits Good Old Games!

**frogbeastegg** · 08-21-2009, 17:37

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 is available now, with Heroes 3 to follow soon. Both games are the complete editions which include all expansions etc, and HoMM2 has the CD quality opera music which only featured in certain versions of the game.

I discovered this series when HoMM5 launched; I got the European special edition which included complete editions of all 4 previous games. They're exceedingly good games.

HoMM1 has been available for a while. I've never tried it, looks like it didn't age so well and the later games expanded on the concept considerably.

The Might and Magic series of RPG games set in this universe are also appearing. A pack containing 1-6 is already up, with the later games coming soon.

(On a completely unrelated but equally awesome note, Settlers II is available now too)

**Veho Nex** · 08-21-2009, 17:48

You know with all the good news you bring us, I'm starting to think you're an angel.

**miotas** · 08-21-2009, 18:18

I never did like the heroes games but I loved playing settlers back in the day.

Unless it's the lateness of the hour here, I don't think you mentioned where they are available.

**frogbeastegg** · 08-21-2009, 18:21

The site's name is in the topic header. Good Old Games. There's some real PC classics on there, legally available and fully compatible with modern systems for pocket change.

**miotas** · 08-21-2009, 18:31

Once again showing my relative ignorance when it comes to the internet

Looks like a nice site, cheers.

**TinCow** · 08-21-2009, 18:35

HOMM2 was one of my favorite games of all time. It had great atmosphere and music and was an all around well-balance strategy game. The AI was very decent and some of the single player maps were actively difficult.

That said, I've tried going back to HOMM2 and it just doesn't hold up. Not because of any failings of the game, but because of HOMM3. The third game was an improvement in pretty much every area it could possibly improve. I would put HOMM3 in my top 5 favorite strategy games of all time, maybe even top 3. I still play HOMM3 to this day. It is permanently installed on my laptop (which can't handle many modern games, but still runs HOMM3 perfectly) and it gets a regular workout whenever I am out of town.

HOMM4&5 are... meh. Then again, HOMM3 is so close to perfection for that format, that there wasn't really much they could do to improve it. I'll probably be playing HOMM3 for another 20 years, if not for the rest of my life.

**Tratorix** · 08-21-2009, 18:40

Yay! I never had a pc when these games were out, but I remember playing a crappy little gameboy port of the first game almost religiously. It stand to reason that I'll like these a lot more.

**pevergreen** · 08-22-2009, 13:52

*sees ground control for sale*

Its free!

*sees that it includes expansion pack, which was only mailed out to people who bought the original for a limited time*

I WANT IT!

**frogbeastegg** · 08-25-2009, 17:33

HoMM3 Complete is now up for download.

Much sooner than I'd expected; I haven't booted HoMM2 up once yet.

**mountaingoat** · 08-27-2009, 09:21

2 & 3 were great , i would say 3 is probably the better of the two .. the rest of them ... meh

the game was very similar to an older game called kings bounty , if anyone ever played that.

made by the same company .

**Meneldil** · 08-29-2009, 09:20

Am I the only who think HoMM5 is just as good as HoMM3?

I can't find anything wrong with the game. The gameplay is directly taken from HoMM3 with some improvements, the campaigns are interesting and offer living characters (first time ever in the HoMM serie - it's not Baldur's Gate, but it beats HoMM3 by large).
The soundtracks are very good (the best in the serie, once again - I have all of them on my Ipod)

**frogbeastegg** · 08-29-2009, 15:20

I like HoMM5 a lot too. I'm not able to give a completely fair judgement on the games as I've played most of HoMM5+expansions and only a little of HoMM2/3+expansions, however the fact that I got all of them at the same time and ended up playing HoMM5 most says something.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

I think 5 suffered from a situation where it couldn't get anything right for the hardcore fans. I saw it panned for being to similar to HoMM3, and, like HoMM4, panned for each thing it did differently no matter how minor that thing was. It lacked things that HoMM3 gained in its expansion packs - most notably the random map generator - and got panned for that too, to a degree understandably. It got panned for being 3D, got panned for being ugly, got panned for being too pretty and machine intensive. For some reason a portion of the community really had it in for the developers too; the treatment they got from some stands out in my mind as some of the most unjustly abusive that I've witnessed on the internet.

H0MM5 did have problems though. Its story is dire, as is the voice acting. The earlier games have it beat there. The AI of the release version was quite scripted and struggled if it was expected to act without a guiding hand from above, though most of the campaign was scripted so it wasn't obvious all of the time. The game was brutally difficult on release too; some scenarios became impossible to beat if you didn't rush and capture specific cities within the first week. The AI and difficulty were smoothed out during patches. The game as it stands now is very nice.

**Meneldil** · 08-29-2009, 16:43

Right, the AI was ridiculous before the first patches. I remember that the campaign AI would sometimes goes dead because I've been doing something unexpected. That was annoying indeed, but got fixed quite quickly, and while the AI isn't not as good as HoMM3 ones, it still is more than capable of quicking my butt on the hardest difficulty settings.
The voice acting was actually quite decent for the french version, as many professionals worked on it (many voices from Warcraft3, Age of Kings and such). Granted, the storyline isn't top-notch, but still way better than the usual 'Go and get this uber awesome artefact in order to save the world' HoMM crap.

To be honest, I found the whole HoMM5 bashing quite annoying. As said, some people bashed it because it was too similar to HoMM3, and then some people bashed the few new gameplay options. As for the graphics, maybe I'm a freak but I think the game is still today the best looking fantasy-based strategy game. The animations are freaking awesome and cool-looking, so are most of the units (though the whole recycling that came with Tribes of the East was kind of a killer.). The maps are very nice and filled with any sort of HoMM-like details.