I see a lot of people doing recreations of games (or simply new ones) but I've noticed that there's just some ick-factor (hard to explain), in addition to performance issues, and just plain old bugs.

It's amazing what can be built using vibe-coding, but it still feels far away from actually being able to create proper games with soul.

Or am I wrong?

I'm surprised that it's not very good. I'm working on an MCP for a Foss civ 5 reimplementation (unciv) and I find that 5.6 Luna is better than the built in AI, and costs about $2-4/player/game at API prices. I suspect Astra would blow humans out of the water, but I don't have $1k/player/game to spend on that lol

I have tons of friends who know HoMM III, it’s the game of our youth

I think it’s also popular in eastern Europe

HOMM was niche when it came out. The genre was always petite and a few studios here and there is all that the market could ever support. This is why a well-executed game like HOMM 3 for example has such a high stickiness factor. The brand loyalty is almost built in given the type of audience it attracts.

May be niche but I actually bought HoMM2 last week on GOG to replace my aged CD, what a coincidence.

Heroes 2 in particular and Might and Magic 2 (Gates to Another World, the RPG blobber) are some of my favorite games of all time. I also discovered there was a Mega Drive (Genesis for you Americans) port of King's Bounty, the predecessor to HOMM.

I may want to try what you did too, I managed to have a local Qwen 3.8 instance play M&M2 fairly successfully using dosbox-x and MCP, so I may be able to have it play HOMM2 too. Thanks for the idea!

I just started live streaming another game - now played by Muse Spark 1.3 (much cheaper than Opus 5.5):

https://www.youtube.com/live/jRi9cdo95As

Interesting. I did the same but with Police Quest 1 (the AGI version). I vibe-coded an AGI interpreter which my harness could drive an had it run the game. I gave it a scan of the manual for initial information. It's silly how much it fumbles whereas 15 year old me could beat the game fairly quickly. https://youtu.be/JIs1QCcmQIY

I did manage to give it information via. screenshots, planning and several other things. Harness engineering is fun to do and a worthwhile exercise. It finally managed to score 93 of 245 points and then just choke out. I figured that a large language model would be able to burn through a 1987 primarily text based game with a primitive parser but it's not as easy as it sounds. My takeaway was that the LLM is definitely intelligent but not "generally" so.

I think HOMM2/3 is pretty well known to mid thirties.

There’s not one but two major HOMM games in late development right now.

The demo of HOMM2 came with a map Broken Alliance. Just the free demo was a top 5 of my all time favorite gaming experiences. I still play it every couple years.

For HOMAM3 there’s also the amazing HotA: https://h3hota.com/en/documentation

VCMI is also available for Android. Mod support. New factions. Not that the depth or homm3 leaves anything to be desired, but it's really fun nonetheless to try new stuff :)

I also loved 3, "Songs of Conquest" has been an enjoyable spiritual successor for me recently even if the base game is quite limited on factions and a number of mechanics differ. I'm also keeping an eye on "Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era" when it eventually releases.

Oh yes. The number of hours burnt away by this...

I still enjoy Morrowind. And I've replayed Ultima IV, although it does get grindy at one point. (For one of my play-throughs as a kid, I got the grindy part and simply boosted everybody to level 8 by editing the save file.)

But, as an adult, I don't really make the time for games anymore. I've been sitting on Baldur's Gate 3 (maybe an hour or two in) for years.

I don't think this is universally true.

For instance, I still can play Masters of Orion 1. And simcity, to some extent; but specifically civilization 1.

Whereas those modern games with a 3D engine I can not play. It is always the same game. Just taking away my time.

People have been praising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Might_and_Magic:_Old...

Released this year. Homm3 mechanics, aesthetic close to Homm2.

There’s the mod homm3 succession wars that kinda do this. They recreate homm2 in the engine of 3, and thus also bring in a lot of the gameplay/qol improvements from 3 like the magic system and more tiers of creatures

Could The Battle for Wesnoth fit into that description?

(https://www.wesnoth.org/)

You are not alone!

Cheating AI players used to be the standard. Now they need to be hobbled.

I don’t think you develop this kind of things to be useful and solve problems. It’s more of a fun hobby project/homage kind of things. Maybe not everything has to have a purpose yk

What other OSS rebuilds?

If you are willing to consider Heroes 3, then Horn of Abyss has fan made factions that are as good as the originals.

There is this HoMM3: The Succession War total conversion mod for HoMM3 in the style of Heroes 2 which happens to have new factions for what looks like Heroes of M&M II.

https://heroes2online.com/heroes2/play

Frontier!!! I will now write a small script that keeps track of your github to see when it lands. Good luck, I've spent countless hours as a kid playing and also modding the game in various ways.