Heroes of Might and Magic III is one of my most favoritest games ever. But the series really went into a tailspin around about when Heroes IV showed up – Which I own a copy of but haven’t been able to play for longer than 30 minutes for some reason?
When 3DO filed for bankruptcy in 2003 who would know what would happen to the series?
Well, Ubisoft bought the rights for $1.3 million dollars (peanuts) and outsourced a bunch of work to “Cheapest Bidders Incorporated” and produced Heroes V, in 3D. Reviews were mixed, and they released alot of patches.
Now I haven’t played Heroes V so I’m not going to pass judgement on it. It’s been out for long enough now that it’s probably stable. So I might see if I can pick it up at retail if my crappy old video card can support it (probably not) – There’s a demo available but at 660mb, who can be arsed?
However, this is all just background information to what I really wanted to say, as not one, but two pieces of Heroes related news has come to my attention.
First of all Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms has been announced, a massively multiplayer strategy game played in a browser. It looks interesting for sure, but I dunno? There’s an interesting beta-sign up process where you have to enter the barcode on your boxed copy of Heroes V 
As well as that a remake of the game that spawned the entire series is in the works – That’s right a sequel to King’s Bounty, entitled King’s Bounty Legends. Some screenshots available at gamespot. And a trailer here. The game looks quite good, and even though it’s in 3D, the art is quite stylized – I just hope I can speed up the attack animations, which probably look cool the first time but really, really get on your nerves after the hundredth.