Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We try to steer clear of rote “game x now available on Steam/Impulse/etc” posts, but we make an exception for special occasions like this. RPG-strategy wonder King’s Bounty: The Legend has been one of RPS’ cause celebres for some time now, and also something of a cult favourite for those who adore this old platform we call the PeeCee. That it wasn’t available on what’s arguably the world’s leading digital distribution service was proper weird – perhaps even tragic. In five days, it finally will be.
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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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Quick post on this one. News reaches me from staring at forums that King’s Bounty is on sale this weekend from Gamer’s Gate for twenty Euros. As much as we love the game – it’s Alec’s favourite of last year, after all - after the cheery collapse of the Pound Sterling, forty Euros is a lot for anything. At twenty it’s a total bargain. Hurrah for advanced capitalism.

That King Herod, eh? Mass killings of youngsters? Both a king and totally mental is highly biblical, if not Christmasy. I wonder if there’s a game anything like that?

For the tenth game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
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A few kindly readers have mailed me about this strategy-RPG, having noted my mildly terrifying obsession with King’s Bounty earlier this year. I’ve never dabbled with the Disciples games before, but certainly this Russian fantasy hybrid appeals to my unrepentantly nerdier instincts.

Unlike KB’s cheerfully low-fi Warcraftian look, this seems pretty hung up on spectacle. KB was really a 2D sheep in 3D wolf’s clothing, but this one’s definitely making a virtue of that third dimension, and then slathering it with moody gloom. What this trailer seems to lack is the charm and cheer that made KB such a rare delight, but it’s entirely possibly the six shiny minutes of footage beneath the cut are solely trying to dazzle us with pixel power, and the brainier best is yet to come.
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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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So I gazed up at the mountain of games about guns due this Autumn, and I sighed a little. Did I burn myself out on all those FPSes last year? Are, heaven forfend, my baser instincts now somehow in check? I will play Far Cry 2 and Dead Space and Fallout 3, but right now they’re not what appeal. I made it about 15 minutes into Crysis Warhead before the oh-this-again tedium hit, and I blame myself more than I do the game for that. I wanted something a little different, something I could sink into on more than a purely visceral level, but I didn’t know what.

Turns out it was King’s Bounty: The Legend, the RPG-strategy remake/sequel from some of the good (mad) folks behind Space Rangers 2. I’m not going to review it or even describe it here. Instead, I’m going to tell two stories that aptly demonstrate the insanity-ingenuity of the thing.
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As we previously reported, there’s a demo out for King’s Bounty: The Legend. But what we haven’t reported yet is there’s an updated demo available which features improved text and translation, video card support and – perhaps more appealingly – new character classes of Demons, Orcs and Cyclops. We haven’t reported it yet, but that’s what we’re doing now. RPS Satanist Ed Says: Hurrah for Demons!