A game epic in scope, story and enjoyment is deserving of an equally adventurous and proud Mac heritage. And wild it is, spanning 15 years on the Mac if you go back as far as King’s Bounty. The following History of HOMM on the Mac comes to me from Richard Hallas (an InsideMacGames writer) from his post on the official HOMM•V boards. I’ve also spliced in bits from following discussion since Richard seems to capture a lot of what makes playing HOMM an event, rather than just another game.
More information on the history of HOMM on the Mac is also available on the good old Mac Heroes sub-site to Celestial Heavens. The old screen shots below are linked from there. Props to Rogue27 for keeping the flame burning.
HoMM1 [released in 1995] was a pretty good port. It failed to run a small handful of third party maps, but that was its only (minor) problem.
Images courtesy CelestialHeavens.com
HoMM2 was a dreadful conversion of an absolutely superb game. HoMM2 was one of the best of the series, so the fact that the Mac version was rotten was a terrible shame. The Mac conversion had major bugs with the spell system (some spells never appeared), and - unbelievably - failed to support in-game events, so the gameplay was utterly ruined for some maps, particularly story-driven ones. Truly the most dreadful game conversion I’ve ever seen, and such a pity because HoMM2 itself is one of the best games ever released, on any platform. The ‘Price of Loyalty’ expansion pack didn’t make it to the Mac either.
Images courtesy Richard Hallas
It’s a testament to the quality of HoMM2 that it still managed to be such tremendous fun on the Mac, in spite of the atrocious quality of the port. Because it was still a fantastic game, even with a couple of its most important features not working properly (or at all). There were a couple of third party utilities that helped, too, of course, but the experience was significantly less than it should have been on the Mac even so. (It really is the worst game port I’ve ever seen.) [Editor’s Note: HOMM2 was a great game poorly ported, but the Mac has certainly seen worse; Sierra On-Line’s Outpost was a hidous experience on the PC to begin with, but having spent month of allowance on it, I clearly remember that it barely ran at all in its Mac form!].
For myself, though, I actually played the RISC OS port of HoMM2 (I know, you’ve never heard of RISC OS… never mind!). Luckily that was a superb port (better than the PC original in some ways, in fact), and it was extended by a port of the Price of Loyalty expansion pack as well in due course, so I managed to have a wonderful time in HoMM2 without needing to own a PC.
In some ways, HoMM2 is still my favourite of the series. I’ve spent more time playing HoMM3, and HoMM3 really is a technically superior game (same as HoMM2, in effect, but more of it and better!), but HoMM2 definitely had its own characteristic atmosphere which has never quite been recaptured since. I can still enjoy a game of both HoMM2 and HoMM3 hugely when time permits, anyway, which says a lot, given their age and the amount of time I’ve spent playing them already.
HoMM3 appeared in an outstanding conversion for the Mac late in 2000 or early 2001. The only thing missing was the level editor, which was a shame but not a huge loss for most players. The game conversion itself, though, was top notch. The two expansion packs (Armageddon’s Blade and Shadow of Death) didn’t make it to the Mac on their own, but the final big compilation, Heroes III Complete, did. Again, this was a superb conversion (done by the same external programmer who’d done HoMM3), and lacked only the editor. So the Mac offers good support for Heroes III. All third party maps play fine in H3C on the Mac, with the exception of those few that have been made for the unofficial third party Wake of Gods hack. H3 and H3C run fine on Mac OS X in the Classic environment.
Images from IMG
Heroes IV is the only conversion that runs natively on Mac OS X. It’s a pretty good quality conversion of the original PC HoMM4 (once you’ve installed a bug-fix patch), but unfortunately it’s not the final release of the PC code, so there’s a handful of H4 standard maps that it won’t play. The majority work fine, though, and the editor was ported as well this time. Unfortunately, though, the expansion packs didn’t make it across to the Mac, and there was no Heroes IV Complete (3DO didn’t survive long enough for that to happen, I suppose), so you can’t play any H4 expansion maps on the Mac. [Editor’s Note: There is now a HOMM4 Complete for the PC, but it is inconceivable that it will ever see a Mac release.]
Images courtesy CelestialHeavens.com
So that’s the position. The Mac didn’t get versions of Heroes Chronicles (based on HoMM3) either, but they were reputedly not all that good.
Richard is bang-on in most respects except for the lack of disdain and vitriol regarding HOMM4. As he writes, Contraband Entertainment is not to blame — their port was actually quite good in the sense that the game was stable and ran smoothly. And overall, the production values of HOMM4 gave it a quality sheen, with nice map graphics, decent monster design, and a clean UI. However, the game was clearly rushed to release by 3DO in the attempt to remain solvent (then went bankrupt shortly after). Although the combat AI was competant, the strategic AI had to be compensated for with unbalanced map and campaign design that flavored the whole experience with artifice. I myself released a couple of “rebalanced” maps that hit as sweet a spot as possible to make the game at all worthwhile, but after the excellence of HOMM3, it was a bitter pill to swallow. The ugly map graphic for the Academy, a bland grey pyramid, pretty much summed the whole game up as little more than a placeholder for what could have been.
For those pining for days gone by, Richard also wrote an exhaustive Heroes III Complete Strategy Guide for IMG, and co-wrote another for Heroes II with Tim Fountain. Fire-up the way-back machine and enjoy some of his great archival images.