Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Okay, so as I mentioned, I've narrowed my gaming choices to only 4-5 these days.  Another one of my favorites is the Heroes of Might and Magic series.  I picked up Tribes of the East since I had already bought Hammer of Fate.  Man, what a mistake that was!  Something I didn't realize when I picked it up was that you need a  Radeon x1600 or higher video card.  Thinking that it was "just another expansion pack", I didn't realize the game maker decided to arbitrarily bump up the video card spec!  I mean, it's a fucking expansion pack and I certainly don't want to go out and spend more money just for a graphics card for a shitty game!

To be perfectly honest, Heroes of Might and Magic V and Hammer of Fate sucked.  There was nothing ground breaking about the game and obviously Ubisoft purchased the intellectual property to satisfy historical buffs like myself.  However, the results have been disastrous.

I dare say disastrous because Ubisoft only graphically re-created HOMM 3 and added nothing new to the game play.  Heck, even the graphics engine isn't anything unique (some say that they outsourced it from Blizzard's Warcraft 3!).  But the thing is that the HOMM5 was terrible in game play.  Very slow, especially as you progress further into the game.  The time it takes to perform one turn is absolutely ridiculous because the AI seems to have some lame algorithm deployed in just trying to make a simple decision.

Now, this game was released and so-called inferior video cards (which mine admittedly is about 3 years old now) is not even compatible.  I had to sift through hundred of messages on their crappy support board to find this out.  One of the people whom I believe is employed there admitted that only a few cards were supported and that in the future, PERHAPS, an update would be released to support other cards.

WTF!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I just got through playing C&C 3 Kane's Wrath, which is better looking and probably more sophisticated underneath the hood than a rehashed version of HOMM3 and it works just fine with my video card!  Certainly, it's not the fastest in the world, but at least I can play the game even though Kane's Wrath is "just another expansion set." 

Who the fuck runs Ubisoft?  This looks like another marketing disaster where the stupid marketing folks figured on making a quick buck by pushing out an alpha version of their game. 

Look people, gamers are fickle.  When we're playing a game and are locked intensely into it, we don't want a fucking bug creeping up out of nowhere, disrupting our fun.  More than that, we don't want to buy a game with the fine print saying, "oh and btw you have to use this state-of-the-art graphics card, even though our core engine ran fine with your older card."  This is just more bullshit from the crappy gaming industry.  They ought to know better.

I think of all the game makers these days only Blizzard understands what it means to make a game.

In the meantime, let me say that this was a real pathetic attempt by Ubisoft.  I love the whole Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic series.  But these bozos have fucked up the series pretty badly with a marketing attempting at recapturing the glory of the game.  Shame on you.