What is Heroes of Might and Magic?

As a hero of Might and Magic, you have the usual stuff on your plate: Explore the realm, recruit armies, build towns, learn spells, and find artifacts. So far, so good. Play is entertaining, the various armies grunt amusingly as they fight or die, and the resource management makes sense. We can see why Heroes of Might and Magic won awards as the best turn-based fantasy game in its PC incarnation.

As a Macintosh application, however. Heroes of Might and Magic performs horrendously. To start with, the tutorial... gosh, it isn’t there! The manual devotes a good 10 pages to explaining how to play (without actually having to read the entire manual) by walking you through a tutorial scenario. Said scenario, however, does not exist: It was not installed and could not be found. Then, to get the game to launch on our Quadra, we had to decrease the game’s preferred memory size so it wouldn’t bump into the system.

We also found small interface boo-boos throughout the game, but the most egregious problem is that the game sometimes just stops running. The screen fades to black, and there’s nothing to do but restart your Mac (we couldn’t even drop into the Mac’s debugger). This happened on 68040s and Power Macs. Fortunately, an auto-save feature takes you back to the last turn before the crash.

These faults are a shame, because we like playing the game. When it runs. Heroes is engaging. But we’d rather not experience the frustration of waiting for the game to crash.

Tafel, Kathy. (March 1997). Heroes of Might and Magic. MacAddict. (pg. 79).

Download Heroes of Might and Magic for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68030 processor
• 12 MB RAM
• 27 MB hard disk available
• 640 x 480, 8-bit color display
• System 7.0

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II