Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Hawesome Sauces!

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/29/report-baldurs-gate-site-teases-beamdog-developed-franchise-pr

Let us Rejoice:

Yub nub eee chop yub nub
ah toe meet toe pee-chee keene g'noop dock
fling oh ah Yah wah eee chop yah wah
ah toe meet toe pee-chee keene g'noop
dock fling oh ah Coatee chah tu yub nub
coatee chah tu yahwah coatee chah
tu glowah allay loo t a nuv Glowah eee
chop glowah ya glowah pee chu nee
foam ah toot dee awe goon daa Coatee cha tu goo
(Yub nub!) coatee cha tu doo (Yahwah!)
coatee cha tu too (Ya chaa!) allay loo ta nuv allay
loo ta nuv allay loo ta nuv Glowah eee chop glowah
ya glowah pee chu nee foam ah toot dee awe goon daa
Allay loo ta nuv

EDIT: The blog isn't displaying the older posts. I shall fix this...

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Heroes one Retrospecitve














Heroes one is the very overlooked game that started it all. For its time, Heroes was definitely a very original turn based strategy game. It had a few scant RPG elements, a big fantasy world to explore, and four different factions to utilize. Heroes 1 established the formula that all the successive games would build upon. However, Heroes was not New World Computing's first stab at turn based strategy. Their first successful stab at the genre was a fairly obscure game called King's Bounty.















While my first stabbing landed me in jail, when Jon Van Caneghem released King's Bounty, he was able to test the market on turn based strategy games. While I've only watched King's Bounty being played, I've got the gist of what the game was about. You need to collect the 24 map pieces to find the specter of power in order to save your countries ailing king. To get these map pieces you needed to defeat villains spread out across the continent and return to your main town to collect the king's bounty on the villains. King's Bounty created was to become the core of Heroes of Might and Magic. You had limited resources and had to choose what creatures to spend it on. You could pick from 4 different classes each with its own special abilities and stats. A lot of the meat was there. What was missing was the town screens and the emphasis on resource management since I think there was only gold as a resource. The big emphasis of the game was how you assembled your army, which according to Wikipedia, remains a hotly debated issue among fans to this day, which reminds me of the eternal debate of Heroes 2: Are Titans or Dragons the best creature?

So when NWC was making a sequel to King's Bounty, they decided to slap the Might and Magic namesake onto the product and have it very tenuously tie into the continuity of their famed RPG series. They greatly expanded the strategic elements in HoMM 1. They added all the non-gold resources and took all the creatures of their previous game and threw them into the various factions, which as a side-note is why the knight town, even in HoMM 1 is somewhat weaker than the other towns since King's Bounty made the basic human troops weak so that the player would be encouraged to use the creature they found while exploring.

Both the town screen and the non-gold resources left the player with a lot meaningful choice to make such as whether or not to sit back and wait for your army to grow, or to go out and explore to find resources and enemies. Also the player had to decide whether to buy creatures or to build the next dwelling structure in their town. Surprisingly, as I found out, building up your town isn't always the best decision. The computer plays very aggressively in HoMM 1. They will almost always buy troops before building new structures. Usually, the first opportunity I get, I will build the top tier structure and computer will proceed to take over my town with 3rd level troops. Another annoying thing about the AI, and this seems to be true of almost all Heroes games, but this one especially, is that they always have way more heroes than they need or can afford. This leads to irritating mind fuck situations where two of your castles are being approached and your main hero can only defend one of them. When you do choose a castle to defend, the enemy hero proceeds to skirt around your castle and to take half your mines while your other castle gets taken.

Annoying AI aside, HoMM is very simple and addicting. This game progenitated several key elements that gave the series its addictive gameplay:











1)Unique Factions-
Long before Starcraft and Warcraft existed, HoMM 1 had 4 distinctive factions that were fairly balanced without sacrificing personality *glares passive aggressively at Warcraft 2*. (BTW peasants don't suck nearly as much in HoMM1 since the battlefield is smaller their slow speed isn't nearly as big of a handicap).











2) Resource management-
So many Heroes games are decided by economics. Generally, whoever has the most gold production tends to win. However, the other resources prohibit from players from building up too quickly. The resources also help to give towns personality, in that certain towns tend to eat through certain resources more quickly. For example, I always remember the knight town eats through a ton of wood thanks to crusaders and cavalries.











3) RPG Elements- Being called Heroes, heroes are kind of the center of the game. A good hero can change the flow of combat. While there are no skills in Heroes 1, the heroes of each faction are distinguishable by their stats, with faction focusing on a different stat. Even without skills to choose between, watching your hero slowly level up is still very satisfying. The heroes act as the ego for the player to insert themselves into the game. Who wouldn't want to be a badassed warlock bent on world domination or an armor clad knight defending his kingdom?











4) Schweet Loot-
Artifacts help to reinforce the fantasy conceit and also provide your heroes with a wide range of different bonuses. Most of the artifacts in Heroes 1 are stat boosts, but even so, they provide motivation for players to explore and to take risks. While an artifact might be guarded by some fairly tough creatures, the pay off is that your hero get signifacant boost to his or her abilities.

Overall Heroes 1 is fairly simple, but still very fun and rewarding to play. Heroes 1 is very much overshadowed by 2 and 3, simply because they are filled with many more features and far superior interfaces and graphics. Without Heroes 1, none of the other games would exist nor would any of the cheap knock-offs that came out in the early 2000's have been made.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Introduction to A Heroes of Might and Magic Retrospective

Since the blog is sort of dead and I have an intense addiction to Heroes, I've decided to do Heroes Retrospective and run through each game plus its expansions and discuss what was cool and lame about each game. After getting over my aversion to change, I've been playing Heroes 4 and 5 and I have found them to be quite enjoyable. After wracking my brain for years as to which Heroes game is my favorite I've come to this conclusion: Heroes 1 created a basic formula and each successive game is just a reinterpretation of the basic formula. Sort of like legend of Zelda where each game is a new interpretation of the same basic components. Where core of Zelda is dungeon crawling, exploration, and the acquisition of new gear, the core of the Heroes is resource management and Hero development. I think all totaled, I've sank more hours into all the Heroes games (mostly 2 and 3) than any other game series. I want to try and break down what makes these games so damn fun and interesting. Also, I want to analyze the different interpretations of the formula, particularly Heroes 4 and 5, which are considered black sheep of the Series.