Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ooh, the first footage of the expansion for my favourite game of last year, the Heroes of Might’n'Magicky King’s Bounty: The Legend. So far, all we knew was it featured an impractically-dressed female hero, a grown-up version of the parent game’s Princess Amelie, a pet dragon, a pegasus and a race of angry anteater types. Can’t say I feel terribly threatened by anteaters, but presumably their master plan involves more than mass insect ingestion. A pair of new videos show the game off rather better, and while editing can often achieve miracles, they do rather suggest we’re in for a bigger, grander experience than the crawl’n'grind of KB’s latter half. Many bosses, many ultra-powers and the option to fly across the map should make it a leaner affair.
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I’m amazed that it took me so long to realise how I should really be spending the three weeks I recently spent offline thanks to a feckless ISP. Reading, walking, meeting exciting new people? Nah. Finally finishing King’s Bounty, my favourite game of 2008, but one that proved so long and so sadly short on its early hyper-enthusiasm in its later hours that I’d had to put it down long before its conclusion. If you wonder why I was quite so keen on this Vladivostok-developed RPG-strategy underdog, I’d much rather point you here, here and here than summarise myself again. Oh – it’s finally on sale at retail in the UK by the way, so you needn’t fret about the unreasonable Euro pricing for the download versions anymore.

Below is a slightly maudlin account of my final days with King’s Bounty – it includes spoilers of a sort, not that I can believe anyone was really in this game for its cheerfully incoherent plot.
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The RPS Klaxons sounded their loudest AWOOGAS in some time today, upon the news that King’s Bounty: The Legend, the mad, wonderful Russian strategy-rpg weird ‘em up, is to get the expansion pack treatment. True to the parent game, the details sound cheerfully batshit. So we figured that, rather than just post them, we’d go through each of its announced features and say clever/stupid (mostly stupid, really) things about ‘em.

Below the cut then, more details of the excellently-named Armoured Princess, and the sad sight of me attempting to have an actual conversation about it while Kieron alternately shouts nonsense and totally ignores me.
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Finding myself, for the first time in at least two years, with a weekend in which I didn’t have an insane amount of work to do, I idly returned to crazed Russian RPG-strategy delight King’s Bounty, which is continuing to entertain me more than any game this year outside of World of Goo. Without quite realising it, I managed to clock up something like 14 hours of play over the weekend alone, which I feel awful about – especially as that’s on top of the 25 or so I put into the game a couple of weeks back. I haven’t been this bad with a game since the height of my terrible WoW addiction a few years ago.
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Space Rangers 2 folks Katauri Interactive are releasing their new game, King’s Bounty: The Legend, in the US soon (possibly in the UK, but nowt confirmed) and the English demo is out already. Get it here, at a muscular 687mb.

It’s a shiny-looking Heroes of Might & Magic type fantasy RPG, albeit modernised and polished up in a rather Blizzardian fashion. The Russian press gave it a big thumbs up. Let me know what you think, I’ll be really interested to hear everyone’s impressions of this one.