Eurogamer Retro: King's Bounty
It's thanks to Alec that I played King's Bounty. Seeing turn-based combat in KB: The Legend my "Ew! Strategy!" alarms went off and I moved on to the next game on the list. But having read Alec's My Zombie Wife piece, I felt I should give it a go. It's fabulous. So when exploring the retro-weighed shelves of a nearby gaming store, finding the original King's Bounty for sale meant a guaranteed buy. Except, well, it was on Megadrive. "Traitor!" shouted Kieron at me, repeatedly, all last week as I played. I've written all about it, and it's almost entirely true for the DOS version too - a game I heartily recommend getting hold of. And the Megadrive version emulates beautifully on PC, I found out when taking screenshots after playing it for a few days on a real Megadrive on a television with a refresh rate low enough to give me a headache. There's no good to be found in traiting. You can read my Eurogamer retrospective here, where I find much love and happiness in the game. A game with the most brutal game over message I've ever seen.
"Oh Mad Mohan,
You have failed to recover the Sceptre of Order in time to save the land! Beloved King Maximus has died and the Demon King Urthrax Killspite rules in his place. The Four Continents lay in ruin about you, its people doomed to a life of misery and oppression because you could not find the Sceptre."
