Brains - they're pretty useful, they can help you with remembering things like how to write an engaging post opener and to now eat Tide pods. We need our brains, we love them and why not give them a break and an exercise playing a game that you can find both, challenging and entertaining at the same time?
Now I would not expect the "Grateful Dead" reference in the title to be picked up by a lot of people, but in any case this is a second post in a new post series about "Heroes of Might and Magic", with the first one being about the predecessor of the series - King's bounty, which you can check out here.
Before we dive into this - I would like to note that it is absolutely amazing to see what you guys/gals think about all of this, so if you will have anything to say, whatever that is, please share with all of us!
Heroes of Might and Magic: A Strategic Quest
This is 1995 and New World Computing releases their very first HOMM game, a spin-off of the Might and Magic series. The game is inspired and has a lot of resemblance to the earlier King's Bounty game.
The King's Bounty post already has a comparison with HOMM 1, so here we will use HOMM II.
HOMM strongly keeps to the turn-based concept same as other HOMM games to come, however the concept of playing through days/ weeks/months was introduced here.
The general interface will also stick around with us for quite some time (with some enhancements and additions, of course), although here we will just have a quick side-by-side comparison.
Unlike in its prototype - in HOMM individual enemy units (not to confuse with enemy heroes) do not move on their own, which will remain the same for quite a while.
Now taking a look at the combat - it adopted the same concept as you might have seen in King's Bounty, using stack based units in a turn-based combat, yet this time it is on a bigger scale and more delightful visually. (Although a bit goofy if you look at it through a prism of today's gaming :) )
The number of possible units has also drastically grown compared to the game's predecessor, here's a breakdown of all the units each faction can recruit in their cities. As you can see a lot of these creatures are consistent throughout the series in one way or another.
In 1996 New World Computing released an updated Windows 95 version that also included a map editor, a random map generator and some new campaings.
I believe it's now time to wrap up the post, so it would not get too long, since the game itself if we were to go into all the details about each aspect might take up a whole book and the point of all of this is to get someone who is an "outsider" into the series. So if you are still not convinced HOMM is worth picking up, stay tuned and I am sure you might just change your mind at some point, in the meanwhile though be sure to let us know what you think.