Zelda... !

[Tux]

Not related at all to raine, but for those who missed the news, zelda (a link to the past, the snes version) was recently reverse engineered, that is the rom was converted back to some C source, which is quite a feat, clearly the people who did that really loved that game to spend so much time on it. It produces some impressive result, take a look there : https://games.slashdot.org/story/23/02/05/0225219/legend-of-zelda-a-link-to-the-past-reverse-engineered-for-linux-switch-mac-and-windows
(and follow the links to the github site, for linux I compiled the thing in a matter of minutes, it's very small in today standards).

And sorry but lately I have been spending a lot of time on heroes3 (https://heroes3wog.net/heroes-3-launcher-download/)
I discovered that I missed a whole part of this game some 20 years ago, and I am doing some catching up ! It's amazing how this game remains so good after all this time !

Edited February 6, 2023 by Tux

[Gosseyn]

this is actually great, specially for the mods, qol improvements (widescreen, better controls and shortcuts) but i also expect some nice graphical effects XD (light and particles) i finished zelda once only, but i loved it soo much i finished it in less than a week, i was playing all day! so i will keep an eye on this to get an excuse to play it again.

otherwise, you dont have to be sorry! i tried to get into Homm many times but always something stopped me, but in every retro group/forum/subreddit its always praised for that, the game that is still amazing after all these years ! mb i will try it on the go on my phone, that's how i managed to finish land of lore !

[Tux]

Yeah for the zelda there are a lot of options already inside, maybe they'll add a few more.

For homm3, it's a huge time black hole. It started to be released in 1999 for its 1st version, but I got very busy around 2000 and totally missed its last chapter "heroes chronicles", which for some reason, was not even included in the so called "heroes of might and magic 3 complete" ! So it's complete, but without chronicles, go figure. And so I just discovered it now. But since it's been very long I didn't play this, I decided to start by replaying the biggest part of the game, which is the campaign "restoration of Erathia", and while playing I realized that I never actually finished it in the original game. It starts very easy to make you used to the game, and then gradually becomes harder. Maybe they changed a few maps in the complete edition, or maybe it's something else but it's probably the complete edition which does that, but some maps are really harder than in the original version, I verified that on internet, some walkthroughs are simply impossible to follow with these versions !
And the wog version (the heroes 3.5 portal linked in the post above) is full of extensions built by the community which offer an amazing number of options and things to play with. Just testing these take a lot of time.
But yeah it's great. I had been playing a little with heroes 5 lately, and there is really a huge difference in the realization of the game, the way the story is told. In h5 the story is only a pretense (I stopped at a mission called the trap, so you know from the beginning it's going to be a trap, but since there is no limit to anything here, you arrive at the end with an army which can beat anything, and despite that, scripted event, your commander is made prisoner, which doesn't make any sense, but it's their stupid way to tell the story). In h3, you don't have anything like that, you are deeply immersed in the story and it's hard to get away. I think the biggest difference is that obviously the creators of h3 played their game and enjoyed it, when the people who created h5 obviously didn't play it, or at least not enough, clearly !

So I'll be busy for still quite some time... !

For your idea to play it on a phone : there is a remake from scratch called vcmi which probably allows to run it on android. I find vcmi disappointing on pc, the latest version is called 1.1.0, but it really doesn't feel like a 1.0 versions, heroes3 was very close to perfection, and here there are some tiny annoyances everywhere. But the biggest problem would probably be that when there is a fight you often hover the mouse around the point you want to click to check the pointer you get, and you click only when you get what you want. I don't know how it would turn out on a phone or tablet, but it would probably be less convenient and awkward, you'd better at least check that on pc first before trying a portable version.

Edited February 11, 2023 by Tux