I just found this game for the Genesis - it's a precursor to Heroes of Might and Magic by the same company. And it's good! Below is a review I'm working on of it, but I have a question: have any of you guys ever played this gem?
Relegated to a bargain bin or fusty corner of a flea market, the name "King's Bounty" may not signify much by way of intellectual property, which could explain my hesitance to pick up the Mega Drive game for three dollars (scant, I know) at the nearby used games store when I first came I cross it. Later I did, and within a few hours of play and a few minutes additional research, its origins became less obscure, as if I had discovered a late-night pornography film that was surprisingly enjoyable was directed by Francis Ford Coppola during his apprenticeship: the game was actually created by New World Computing, and much of its gameplay - including two-dimensional turn-based battles, romps around RTS-style maps (this is pre-fog of war, mind you) with the goal of trouncing enemy castles, and the recruitment of units for your army in, uh, weekly increments later made their way into the famed Heroes of Might and Magic series; for my money one of the more critically underrated franchises of the nineties.
So is HOMM lived up to by its antecedent? The answer to that question is a decided yes, and probably for the same reason that Blizzard is beginning to realize that StarCraft was their best game: because it's basically Heroes of Might and Magic, without its wieldy complexities, and thusly reminiscient of a time when games were more innovative than today extant superflous detail. Of course, the metaphor isn't limited to developers whose profiles have dwindled severely: I suspect Shigeru Miyamoto thinks Super Mario Bros. is better than Super Mario Sunshine; atleast if we're to believe the interviews he gave prior to the Wii's launch that expressed an indifference toward the development of more and more "hardcore" games at the expense of attention paid to rudiments of design. And while HOMM, for its part, never dove off the tepid end with an unmanageable 3D camera or - as StarCraft 3 is rumoured to feature - depth levels for units (god forbid), even the ability to have multiple commanders touring the map at one time may have been regressive insofar as it made the game less accessible, without making its strategy any more immersive.
GAMEPLAY - 10/10
I'm not sure whether a title's gameplay should be measured in relation to the console or the industry - IGN favours the former, for example, but opinions vary - so if we're adopting the latter criteria you can dock a point, since Heroes of Might and Magic minus is about as good as it gets on the Genesis, lest you're playing Paperboy with revamped graphics or something. The premise of the game is that after selecting one of several cheez fantasy archetypes for a character, you control a single unit and travel around an real-time strategy-ish map in a fashion not unlike you would've if you played the missions that didn't entail contructing a base in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. This is mostly funner than it sounds, and diversions from the central goal of the game - which is to net baddies for bounty, all with appalling names like "Rob the Pirate" and "Murray the Miser" (complain all you want; it would've been more disconcerting if New World Computing actually took themselves seriously) include engaging in battles similar to those featured in HOMM - which is to say, turn based and from a sideview - recruiting new units weekly (there are no bases to deliberately build up in this, as in HOMM, just castles you recruit units from), and collecting various items that possess different uses. As you could probably guess, subtlety is not the focus here: siege weapons, for example, allow you to lay siege.
Of course, the gameplay in King's Bounty does, at times, differ from successive entries in the HOMM canon. Perhaps this is most obvious in that is it is not overtly turn-based - while you have take turns mauling your opponent with pitchforks or flame dispersed from the fingers of fairies in the game's second-person skirmishes, your regular movement is not partitioned into turns, owing to the fact that you're not actually working against any opponent that possesses similiar means to you; just random bands of skeletons and villains with nonsensical sobriquets. If this knowledge isn't enough for you to eschew the game out of an anticipated sense of loneliness - and indeed, because of its setup there's no multi-player - an apt metaphor for it is to consider StarCraft, with no bases just predetermined buildings you arbitratily recruit units from, and all with the purpose of exiting your domicile to go around killing hedonistic bands of Zerglings with no higher allegiance (monsters apparently organize tribally, like Africans).
GRAPHICS - 5/10
Simply put: these are MS-DOS graphics on the Genesis, with no improvements worthy of mention (and not Duke Nukem II MS-DOS graphics; worse): you can expect grass to be coloured green, and water to be coloured blue. I would still mention, however, that this simple stylization invites a modicum of critical mercy, since the straining of the Genesis' colour pallette in many other titles is reminiscient of messied eye makeup and suggestive of the awkward years of video game graphics (see also: PSX), whereas atleast this is lucid and doesn't feel like you're staring through tinted windows.
PRESENTATION - 6/10
The presentation in King's Bounty surpasses the accessibility of later, more complex PC-console translations of strategy games (Command & Conquer for the N64, anyone?), and never frustrates with menus that have to be navigated in order to perform commands that ought to be done with a mouse. Alas, all is not roses and wine: the password system is workable, but barely, since a) the sheer amount of data the cartridge has to recall in order to manifest your save game in all its precision results in exhaustive, 64-digit password entries - really just another argument for why Genesis titles should've had widespread save-game batteries, as with the SNES - and b) the low resolution of the console and graphical style means it's easy to conflate the letters and numbers you're attempting to record; the most criminal example of this being the inevitable confusion that ensues when guessing whether the circular symbols included within the passwords are supposed to be zeros or Os. This is certainly a problem, but if I may offer a momentary apologetic, it's that if you enjoy this game as much as I do you'll have no second thoughts about beating it in one sitting (it's eight-ten hours long), or simply pulling the old overnight power trick with the Genesis, thereby ensuring sleep.
CONTROLS - 8/10
The controls lock up occassionally, if saying so isn't the result of either broken hardware or a broken memory, but are otherwise efficient; reduced as they are to the pressing of A, B, and sometimes C to navigate easy-to-use in-game menus, and variously press things while maneuvering around (with the directional pad, obviously). There are no tricks here, like in Forgotten Worlds or Ranger X when you have to press A and C alternatively to look left and right; though nor are there any clever uses of them as in Super Mario RPG, where tapping buttoms in timed sequence changes the outcome of the battles - a feature you wouldn't expect in a PC port, anyway. Come to think of it, the latter may be a good thing.
SOUND - 3/10
Bleep-Bleeep!-Bleep-Bloop-Bleep-Bleeep!-Bloop-Bleep. None of this has the character of the excellent soundtracks featured in Genesis titles like Sonic or OutRunners, and any 16-bit music imitative of either gregorian chant or medieval balladry is frankly lame.
LASTING APPEAL - 10/10
Like with most strategy games that aren't designed in Japan, King's Bounty can be beaten different ways, even after you've criss-crossed the game's various continents all with cringeworthy names like "Continentia" and "Forestria" (the designers' insistence on crude naming is so resilient it almost demands admiration; nothing here has the flinty perfection of a "Mordor"). Perhaps more to the point regarding replay value is the fact that the items, enemies, and locales in the game are distributed differently with each play, so the same place you recruited peasants one game (which is actually a barren field that looks like it's just suffered through the Dust Bowl, but figures - ninety-nine percent of your army dies, and that's in half an hour) you might recruit zombies. The benefits to this kind of design are mixed: on one hand, it results in a degree of arbatriness in both the difficulty and progression of the game, as in Diablo or HOMM; on the other, it encourages multiple playthroughs. Fortunately, the decision made by New World Computing to skew King's Bounty this way was fortuitous, since the gameplay is addictive enough to justify frequent revisiting, making the diversity of your playthroughs - even if it can make enemy strengths occassionally ludicrous - a welcome inclusion.
Another thing. King's Bounty includes minimal dialogue (this can only be viewed as a sign of integrity: the game's lowbrow tendencies would probably exhaust themselves it it featured any more storytelling than absolutely necessary), and the game is centred on dynamic design concepts, i.e. it's doesn't entirely follow a pre-planned game arc, but instead features a partially self-regulating world in the vein of Pirates! or Civilization II. And after plodding through Final Fantasy VI again while releasing a string of expletives each time I had to button-rush another dialogue box of high-fantasy character therapy, I think I can say without hesitation that New World Computing made the right choice in avoiding the pretension of most Square or Enix entries in the role-playing genre (and King's Bounty is, in many ways, a strategy-RPG hybrid); a restraint that's especially praiseworthy when you consider that the game's wedded to mechanics already far more intuitive than its random-battle brethren.
OVERALL - 10/10
In the end, I'm inclined to score King's Bounty perfectly (and justify it) for a few reasons. One is that noone plays Genesis games for the graphics or sound in 2008 anyway: the 'wow!' factor inherent in racing through the loop de loops or checkered hillsides of Green Hill Zone all the while noting that 7 MHz is what makes it possible is gone, and so what we're left with is - like it always is - the gameplay; an area that King's Bounty excels it in spite of its arduous password system.
Relegated to a bargain bin or fusty corner of a flea market, the name "King's Bounty" may not signify much by way of intellectual property, which could explain my hesitance to pick up the Mega Drive game for three dollars (scant, I know) at the nearby used games store when I first came I cross it. Later I did, and within a few hours of play and a few minutes additional research, its origins became less obscure, as if I had discovered a late-night pornography film that was surprisingly enjoyable was directed by Francis Ford Coppola during his apprenticeship: the game was actually created by New World Computing, and much of its gameplay - including two-dimensional turn-based battles, romps around RTS-style maps (this is pre-fog of war, mind you) with the goal of trouncing enemy castles, and the recruitment of units for your army in, uh, weekly increments later made their way into the famed Heroes of Might and Magic series; for my money one of the more critically underrated franchises of the nineties.
So is HOMM lived up to by its antecedent? The answer to that question is a decided yes, and probably for the same reason that Blizzard is beginning to realize that StarCraft was their best game: because it's basically Heroes of Might and Magic, without its wieldy complexities, and thusly reminiscient of a time when games were more innovative than today extant superflous detail. Of course, the metaphor isn't limited to developers whose profiles have dwindled severely: I suspect Shigeru Miyamoto thinks Super Mario Bros. is better than Super Mario Sunshine; atleast if we're to believe the interviews he gave prior to the Wii's launch that expressed an indifference toward the development of more and more "hardcore" games at the expense of attention paid to rudiments of design. And while HOMM, for its part, never dove off the tepid end with an unmanageable 3D camera or - as StarCraft 3 is rumoured to feature - depth levels for units (god forbid), even the ability to have multiple commanders touring the map at one time may have been regressive insofar as it made the game less accessible, without making its strategy any more immersive.
GAMEPLAY - 10/10
I'm not sure whether a title's gameplay should be measured in relation to the console or the industry - IGN favours the former, for example, but opinions vary - so if we're adopting the latter criteria you can dock a point, since Heroes of Might and Magic minus is about as good as it gets on the Genesis, lest you're playing Paperboy with revamped graphics or something. The premise of the game is that after selecting one of several cheez fantasy archetypes for a character, you control a single unit and travel around an real-time strategy-ish map in a fashion not unlike you would've if you played the missions that didn't entail contructing a base in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. This is mostly funner than it sounds, and diversions from the central goal of the game - which is to net baddies for bounty, all with appalling names like "Rob the Pirate" and "Murray the Miser" (complain all you want; it would've been more disconcerting if New World Computing actually took themselves seriously) include engaging in battles similar to those featured in HOMM - which is to say, turn based and from a sideview - recruiting new units weekly (there are no bases to deliberately build up in this, as in HOMM, just castles you recruit units from), and collecting various items that possess different uses. As you could probably guess, subtlety is not the focus here: siege weapons, for example, allow you to lay siege.
Of course, the gameplay in King's Bounty does, at times, differ from successive entries in the HOMM canon. Perhaps this is most obvious in that is it is not overtly turn-based - while you have take turns mauling your opponent with pitchforks or flame dispersed from the fingers of fairies in the game's second-person skirmishes, your regular movement is not partitioned into turns, owing to the fact that you're not actually working against any opponent that possesses similiar means to you; just random bands of skeletons and villains with nonsensical sobriquets. If this knowledge isn't enough for you to eschew the game out of an anticipated sense of loneliness - and indeed, because of its setup there's no multi-player - an apt metaphor for it is to consider StarCraft, with no bases just predetermined buildings you arbitratily recruit units from, and all with the purpose of exiting your domicile to go around killing hedonistic bands of Zerglings with no higher allegiance (monsters apparently organize tribally, like Africans).
GRAPHICS - 5/10
Simply put: these are MS-DOS graphics on the Genesis, with no improvements worthy of mention (and not Duke Nukem II MS-DOS graphics; worse): you can expect grass to be coloured green, and water to be coloured blue. I would still mention, however, that this simple stylization invites a modicum of critical mercy, since the straining of the Genesis' colour pallette in many other titles is reminiscient of messied eye makeup and suggestive of the awkward years of video game graphics (see also: PSX), whereas atleast this is lucid and doesn't feel like you're staring through tinted windows.
PRESENTATION - 6/10
The presentation in King's Bounty surpasses the accessibility of later, more complex PC-console translations of strategy games (Command & Conquer for the N64, anyone?), and never frustrates with menus that have to be navigated in order to perform commands that ought to be done with a mouse. Alas, all is not roses and wine: the password system is workable, but barely, since a) the sheer amount of data the cartridge has to recall in order to manifest your save game in all its precision results in exhaustive, 64-digit password entries - really just another argument for why Genesis titles should've had widespread save-game batteries, as with the SNES - and b) the low resolution of the console and graphical style means it's easy to conflate the letters and numbers you're attempting to record; the most criminal example of this being the inevitable confusion that ensues when guessing whether the circular symbols included within the passwords are supposed to be zeros or Os. This is certainly a problem, but if I may offer a momentary apologetic, it's that if you enjoy this game as much as I do you'll have no second thoughts about beating it in one sitting (it's eight-ten hours long), or simply pulling the old overnight power trick with the Genesis, thereby ensuring sleep.
CONTROLS - 8/10
The controls lock up occassionally, if saying so isn't the result of either broken hardware or a broken memory, but are otherwise efficient; reduced as they are to the pressing of A, B, and sometimes C to navigate easy-to-use in-game menus, and variously press things while maneuvering around (with the directional pad, obviously). There are no tricks here, like in Forgotten Worlds or Ranger X when you have to press A and C alternatively to look left and right; though nor are there any clever uses of them as in Super Mario RPG, where tapping buttoms in timed sequence changes the outcome of the battles - a feature you wouldn't expect in a PC port, anyway. Come to think of it, the latter may be a good thing.
SOUND - 3/10
Bleep-Bleeep!-Bleep-Bloop-Bleep-Bleeep!-Bloop-Bleep. None of this has the character of the excellent soundtracks featured in Genesis titles like Sonic or OutRunners, and any 16-bit music imitative of either gregorian chant or medieval balladry is frankly lame.
LASTING APPEAL - 10/10
Like with most strategy games that aren't designed in Japan, King's Bounty can be beaten different ways, even after you've criss-crossed the game's various continents all with cringeworthy names like "Continentia" and "Forestria" (the designers' insistence on crude naming is so resilient it almost demands admiration; nothing here has the flinty perfection of a "Mordor"). Perhaps more to the point regarding replay value is the fact that the items, enemies, and locales in the game are distributed differently with each play, so the same place you recruited peasants one game (which is actually a barren field that looks like it's just suffered through the Dust Bowl, but figures - ninety-nine percent of your army dies, and that's in half an hour) you might recruit zombies. The benefits to this kind of design are mixed: on one hand, it results in a degree of arbatriness in both the difficulty and progression of the game, as in Diablo or HOMM; on the other, it encourages multiple playthroughs. Fortunately, the decision made by New World Computing to skew King's Bounty this way was fortuitous, since the gameplay is addictive enough to justify frequent revisiting, making the diversity of your playthroughs - even if it can make enemy strengths occassionally ludicrous - a welcome inclusion.
Another thing. King's Bounty includes minimal dialogue (this can only be viewed as a sign of integrity: the game's lowbrow tendencies would probably exhaust themselves it it featured any more storytelling than absolutely necessary), and the game is centred on dynamic design concepts, i.e. it's doesn't entirely follow a pre-planned game arc, but instead features a partially self-regulating world in the vein of Pirates! or Civilization II. And after plodding through Final Fantasy VI again while releasing a string of expletives each time I had to button-rush another dialogue box of high-fantasy character therapy, I think I can say without hesitation that New World Computing made the right choice in avoiding the pretension of most Square or Enix entries in the role-playing genre (and King's Bounty is, in many ways, a strategy-RPG hybrid); a restraint that's especially praiseworthy when you consider that the game's wedded to mechanics already far more intuitive than its random-battle brethren.
OVERALL - 10/10
In the end, I'm inclined to score King's Bounty perfectly (and justify it) for a few reasons. One is that noone plays Genesis games for the graphics or sound in 2008 anyway: the 'wow!' factor inherent in racing through the loop de loops or checkered hillsides of Green Hill Zone all the while noting that 7 MHz is what makes it possible is gone, and so what we're left with is - like it always is - the gameplay; an area that King's Bounty excels it in spite of its arduous password system.
