Heaven

Not only heaven, but the Mandate of heaven. Also known as Might & Magic VI. Also known as “oh noes, shitty engine, let’s rate it below 80%”. Also known as “oh noes, can’t move in battle!”. Also known as “oh noes, realistic portraits are ugly!”. Also known as “oh noes, VII and VIII are cheap rip-offs!”. I can keep this up for a few more hours, but I’ll spare you that. So I recently bought the original Might & Magic VI box with a lot of goodie contents (reference, thick manual, cloth map!). I do have to admit I like VII a little bit better, or maybe even VIII for that matter. I started playing Might & Magic thanks to Day of the Destroyer, the 8th revision, which everybody seems to despite.

Well Look at that. A cardboard box! Golden Age.

Taking the chronological numbers into account, everybody probably agrees VI is the sole best Might & Magic game ever created. But the game has some (mostly minor) flaws here and there. New World Computing fixed these under the label “VII: for Blood and Honor”. It should have been an expansion pack, but hey, cash is cash. The ranger, thief and monk classes are gone in VI, there are some unclear Grandmaster skills (alchemy where art thou) and you cannot move while in turn-based mode. Fine, these things don’t bother me at all. But Arcomage is missing!
The only real bad part about any M&M game is the Roleplaying value. There is little to no choice to make, every quest is automatically accepted. Oh, and VI has a very nasty habit of labelling your party as heroes. Eradicate the complete village, donate 100 gold pieces to the temple and your reputation skyrockets again.

The engine has not been enhanced at all for VII or VIII, except the 3D acceleration mode which displays some lightning effects e.d. while casting spells. Not necessary at all, but hey, everybody loves 3D right. Honestly, I don’t really know why, but VI seems a little bit… sharper and such than VII. Probably a malfunctioning eye of mine. But still, the game is from 1998. To give you an example on how the game looks and plays, check out the first seven minutes of the game:

Jefklak’s Codex YouTube Profile >>

Okay, it mightlook “ugly as f*ck”, but it’s still awesome. Once you get it up & running under Windows XP with a lot of not so official patches, that is. (Google is your friend, I’m a lazy bastard) Take a closer look at the amazing sprites:

The starting town (n00b ville! - whatever) in M&MVI.