In baseball, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes it rains.

In a computer game, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes Windows pops up a box saying the game has executed an illegal operation and will be terminated.

And that's happened to me the last two times I tried to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It rather takes the fun out of the game. Yeah, the game auto-saves, though I don't have the slightest idea how often, but that's no answer. The second time I was only about three turns into the game when it died. It isn't worth dealing with something that unreliable. (I'm also really tired of the game locking up for a second or two every time it decides to play a special sound. At least that's what I conjecture it's doing; I play with the sound muted.)

The crashes may not be the fault of the game; they may be the fault of the "high definition" modified-version of the game that I'm using, which permits me to run the thing at a reasonable size on my 1920*1080 display.

If I run the standard version, it goes into full screen mode, and the aspect ratio is crap so it looks weird. If I hit F4, which is supposed to switch it from full-screen to windowed mode, it tells me I can only do that if my Windows desktop is set to 16-bit graphics mode.

And I'll be damned if I'll change my display settings just to play this SOB.

There's one last chance here: I also have HOMM4. It was created later, and maybe, just maybe, it plays nicer with modern Windows computers. But I'm not really very enthusiastic about trying it. I'm feeling just a bit gunshy at this point.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 04:19 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 303 words, total size 2 kb.

1 If you have XP Mode, it might circumvent these problems.

Posted by: RickC at April 17, 2012 07:07 PM (WQ6Vb)

2 I actually remember the game being pretty unstable when it was released.  Of course *everything* was unstable back then...  If I'm remembering right, it was pretty picky about a lot of things such as video driver version, certain processors, etc.  There was a period when XP was fairly new that I had three computers, and some games would only run reliably on one of the three, and which one it was varied from game to game.  I don't know how you'd correct for those kind of issues when trying to run such a game on a modern machine, although XP mode might help, and certainly couldn't hurt.  But I certainly wouldn't jump through that level of hoops when I could just move to the next iteration of the game.

Posted by: David at April 17, 2012 07:22 PM (Kn54v)

3 Sorry to hear about the stability problems. I suspect you are correct about the HD modification being the problem. I run the GOG version of HOMM3 in fullscreen with a lower resolution (which is how I remember the game anyway, so it does not bother me) and have had no stability issues at all.

Which as David noted is certainly a nice change from the original release, which was quite buggy way back when. HOMM3 had at least 4 patch versions that I remember and maybe more. (Just checked, and I still have the patches! )

I am not sure if HOMM4 would be more stable or not, as I have not tried the GOG version of it.

Posted by: haphazard1 at April 18, 2012 10:33 PM (9yBYR)

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