Might and Magic® 6-pack Limited Edition

I've beaten Might and Magic 6 twice now, once with a party of two knights, a sorcerer, and a cleric and the second time with a party that was two sorcerers, a cleric, and a druid. And it was fun both times, though way easier the second time (because I knew more). In the game you choose four charactes out of a possible six classes; three pure classes and three hybrid classes. The knight is all might and no magic. The sorcerer is all elemental magic. The cleric is all body/mind/spirit magic. The druid is a mix of cleric and sorcerer. The archer is a mix of the knight and sorcerer. The paladin is a mix of the knight and cleric. I'd say the easiest party to play for a new person would be a party of a knight, paladin, cleric, and sorcerer. The game can be brutally hard in the beginning if you're new, and it doesn't even attempt to hold your hand. Expect to die fighting goblins, but whenever you die you just restart with the same xp (but no gold) at the town entrance. You'll want to pick off one weak enemy here and one there until you're a high enough level. Your people won't have the weapons they need or the armor they need or the spells they need or anything. But once you get over that first hump it's a lot of fun. Don't hesitate to look things up online. When my sister and I played through this game in our younger days we had the strategy guide open next to the computer and it was still hard. It's a big world and they often don't explain much to you. It's an old-school hack-and-slash and dungeon-crawling adventure. Not much story. You kill things, you level up, you kill more things. Eventually you fly around like a god and drop meteors on your enemies. If you've got a few bucks and a lot of free time, this game is for you.

These are old games, both graphically and with design decisions made but if you grew up with them or can look past those issues there is a lot of fun to be had here. The most 'modern' of them is M&M 6 and by modern I mean it is from 1998!. Although I do wish it rendered at a higher resolution, it can be impoved visually & QoL with mods and using dgvoodoo. The mod combined mod for 6,7,8 does let you play the content but makes some small & some large changes as it follows the M&M8 rules not 6 even when playing that content. Expect changes like virtually none of the classes from 6 can identify objects, where you can learn skills is different & starting equipment is different. Both have their merits but I still like the vanilla M&M6 with mods more.

MM6 is the best game of the saga. You are totally free to go everywhere. Despite other M&M there's no level cap ( others chapters have a maximum level). What I suggest is to play without any patch, yes there are user patches that can fix a lot of minor things and details that you can forget unless you are a perfection maniac. This game is really near perfection, even the aged graphics have its own fashion, and you cannot still find other games with so detailed inventory. The version of the game delivered here on GOG is 1.2 wich is already patched (the most annoying bugs are already fixed). You can freely try of course other patches (guides on the forum), saved games can be easily backuped and re-installing the game from scratch requires ~1 minute. The replayability of the game is nearly unlimited. My first game took more than 150 hours, and I bought it again here after years. Best RPG of all times. You can play in relax mode and finish the game within lvl 50-60 or you can try to be perfectionist and try to reach higher levels before characters start to aging (by the way, your entire party is immortal, even with 150+ years you can still play). My advice is to forget abouy any guide and to explore the game yourself. First play should be mandatory Relax mode (that's not a game type, just a different approach to the game! :P)

I bought this because I figured that, at a price of under $2 per game for some of the finest classics in RPG history, how could I go wrong? I have to tell you that I'm amazed at how well these games work on my iMac which runs Vista in Boot Camp. There was only one very minor tweak I had to make in the DosBox.conf file for M&M 1 (and may need to make for 2 and 3 as well but haven't tried yet). If you set that file to be openable in Notepad so that you can read it, there are lines of settings with included explanations as to what they do. You may need to go to the one called "cycles", which defaults to a value of 2000/second, and drop it down a lot otherwise the game runs so quickly that text messages and pictures flash by quicker than the eye can make them out. I settled on a value of 200, saved the file, and when the game ran it was just like on an old 80286-based PC from 1988. Perfect! As for the games themselves, they're all HUGE, and have turn-based combat systems which are pretty simple but still effective even by today's standards. The mazes are daunting, and for those who want the challenge of mapping them out on graph paper one can certainly do that in purist fashion. Luckily, there are maps and hint guides available as additional free downloads, and these will be of great help for those who want to be able to get around in a bit less time. Might & Magic VI is one of the last generation of games in the series, and the action there is in a free-roaming pseudo 3-D world without the restrictions of a square grid. Again, the graphics are dated, but the sense of suspense over what lies beyond the next door, and the plethora of character customization options, will be very rewarding to those who forego the instant gratification of modern "eye candy" for a fun and highly challenging older game. If you're a Gen X-er like me, who saw and drooled over these games in a store such as Electronics Boutique way back when, but who lacked the computer needed to play them, now is your chance. If you're a younger gamer who is seriously into RPGs, and wonders how it was done "way back in the day", there is much here to entertain you if you can get past the simple graphics and 80s arcade style sound. Just about anyone will find themselves glad they spent the $10 to pick this up.

These games are fun to play, with some caveats. The M&M is a perfect RPG complement to Heroes of Might and Magic and that is how I got into the series: by playing HOMM2, then HOMM3, then MM7 then MM6, then the rest. The games in this collection are undeniable classics. Might & Miagic 1 and 2 are good but very dated: they do have old graphics (1 has CGA - 4 colors 320x200, 2 has EGA 16 colors 320x200) and are very difficult to play because of lack of auto-map, limited save capabilities and regenerating monsters between saves. Fortunately the guides are included so you might play them for completeness. Might and Magic 3 is where things start to get interesting. 3 to 5 are using the same VGA (256 colors out of 16m, 320x200) graphics with gradual improvement from title to title. The graphics is colorful and pleasant to look at. 3 to 5 have nice stories and 4 can be (and should be) combined with 5 into the World of Xeen. They have good stories and vast worlds. You have automap and you can save almost everywhere. It will take easily 50 hours to finish Word of Xeen if you want to complete every quest and kill every monster as I do. There is also bonus game Swords Of Xeen. Might And Magic 6 is prize of this collection. It got completely new graphics (which got further improved in M&M 7 and 8), full freedom of movement (you can even fly!), good story, about hundred of quests and enormous world. When I played it for the first time it took me more than 100 hours to complete it. While the game is great it is not without negatives, that got addressed in the next games: you can play only as human, if you can learn a skill you can master it, thus diminishing classes, and the game is difficult. You often surrounded by hundreds of monsters (like one moment when you clear temple of Baa but as soon as you get to the altar more than 100 skeletons are teleported in), some dungeons are very difficult (like Darkmoor). Nevertheless, it is an amazing game. Buy it. Play it.