Showing posts with label Heroes of Might and Magic III. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heroes of Might and Magic III. Show all posts

The lost Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might and Magic III has been released!

We recently covered the fundraiser that was set up to release the long lost Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might and Magic III for the Dreamcast. If you're not sure what that last sentence even means, here's an info dump: Heroes of Might and Magic III was a best-selling PC strategy game featuring a fantasy setting in which players could command armies across a vast campaign and was scheduled for a Dreamcast release back in the early 2000s before Sega ditched the Dreamcast, everything was cancelled and the entire house burnt down...or so you might think.

According to the developer it was actually because the game was too big for the Dreamcast system to handle:

"Heroes of Might and Magic III was not canceled because the Dreamcast was discontinued or anything, but because it failed due to the technical limitations. The game was technically too big for the Dreamcast, and since 3DO / NewWorldComputing and thus Ubisoft only wanted to see it published as a 1:1 conversion on the Dreamcast, eventually a point was reached at which the Dreamcast was basically just technically overwhelmed."

Read the full thread at Dreamcast Talk here. Regardless, Heroes of Might and Magic III was once categorised as one of the most famous 'lost' Dreamcast games - of which there are many - but now, thanks to the awesome Dreamcast community, it is now available to sample (in beta form, that is).
This is down to the work of Dreamcast collector and YouTuber FatalistDC and Dreamcast expert Jan Baumgartner. We salute them both, naturally. After a small fundraiser (which was achieved, again due to the Dreamcast community), Heroes of Might and Magic III has been dumped online after 20 years in the wilderness. And you, dear reader, can download it and play it either in your actual Dreamcast console, or using an emulator. Unfortunatley, I'm unable to run the game myself through an emulator as I use an Apple Mac, and lxdream seems to have been abandoned (it doesn't run on Catalina); while ReDream doesn't recognise the GDI or CDI version. Maybe you'll have better luck.

Update: As the links previously featured in this article have since gone dead, please go to the Dreamcast Talk thread about this release to get all the latest links.
The Dreamcast Junkyard is but a messenger in this tale, and takes no kudos for this release. That all goes to FatalistDC, Jan and those who donated to the fundraiser on GoFundMe. Awesome work indeed, folks!
If I manage to get the game working, rest assured you'll get a post-mortem review very soon! Have you downloaded the game and played it? Have you got it to run in an emulator or on Dreamcast hardware? If so, what are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.

Hark! The lost Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might and Magic III could be released soon...

Heroes of Might and Magic III is another one of those PC ports us Dreamcast owners were promised back in the day, but which was then pulled from release lists and chucked into the big wheelie bin in the sky. As with any wheelie bin, this hypothetical trash receptacle was raided and the contents squirrelled away into a private collection. And there Heroes of Might and Magic III stayed for several years until Dreamcast collector FatalistDC purchased it for $600 back in 2005.

For those not in the know, Heroes of Might and Magic III is a turn based strategy game that features armies of the fantasy/Medieval persuasion, lots of knights of the realm and horses and stuff. And probably trumpets. And shields. Oh, and knaves. Probably.
It transpires that FatalistDC is now looking to release this long lost Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might and Magic III, and is about to launch a fundraiser in order to do so. This is most probably because he paid $600 for the disc in the first place and while this is likely to incense some people, we'd rather see a fundraiser than see the disc go back into another private collection.

Update: the fundraiser is now live on GoFundMe, with a target of €250.

All things considered, the Dreamcast port of Heroes of Might and Magic III is - not unlike Ron Burgundy - kind of a big deal, and is one of those mythical cancelled games that hitherto has never seen the light of day. Here's some Dreamcast gameplay FatalistDC uploaded to YouTube:


The game FatalistDC is looking to release is actually a beta version and as such isn't 100% complete and not totally free of the odd bug (random crashes and freezes), but for many Dreamcast fans the opportunity to get their hands on yet another 'lost' game is a pretty exciting prospect, regardless of how complete the build is.
The full story of this potential release can be read over at the Obscure Gamers forum, and you can find the fundraiser at GoFundMe. There's also talk of FatalistDC releasing a very early build of the similarly 'lost' Test Drive Cycles, which will apparently also be released following a fundraiser. More on that when it happens, though.

Thanks go to Jan Baumgartner, creator of the Compact Flash-modded Dreamcast, for this information.

Will you be backing this fundraiser? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter.