Heroes of Might & Magic 2 tribute in Retro Gamer Magazine

This is pretty cool. I've been getting Retro Gamer Magazine imported (from UK) for a few years now as I love their tributes and behind the scenes interviews on great games and their homebrew game tributes too. So I was very pleased to see a big 6 page HoMM2 tribute in there with an interview with JVC and others. I love background art and how it's been made to look like it's in the HoMM2 spell book with a HoMM2 GUI around the edges! I also like how it tributes the not so commonly known Game Bog colour version too.

UPDATE: Turns out the original article was 8 pages and included talking about FHeroes2 and even had an interview with them but the editors cut it out sadly. Not what the author intended and SirDranik is fine with it all, so never mind! Shame but at least HoMM2 got some love in a big mag again.

Original old man rant:
However there's just one thing that irks me. Please correct me if I'm wrong as I really hope to be, but the article states that HoMM2 was a higher resolution than HoMM1 and is filled with screenshots of what appears to be a higher resolution HoMM2. Both the DOS and Windows versions of HoMM2 run in 640x480 which is what HoMM1 runs in, there was no change. Hell I recently read a Fanstratics newsletter by HoMM3 designer Greg telling the story of programmer resistance to making the big change from HoMM2's 640x480 to 800x600 for HoMM3. Some people might think HoMM2 had a higher resolution due to the size increase of the battlefield however that was nothing more than an illusion created by talented artists shrinking the creature sizes down and packing more detail into less pixels.

As far as I know the only way to play original HoMM2 in higher resolutions than 640x480 (without stretching) is with the FHeroes fan project that recently passed the big v1.0 mark. If you look at the screenshots they used in the article you can see there's more hero and castle slots in the side menu than in regular HoMM2 and the castle/battle/hero screens are in windows instead of fullscreen. Only FHeroes does that yet it is not mentioned anywhere in the article that I can find.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for using high res screenshots from fan remakes to better promote old games as my website Blake's Sanctum is full of me doing that, however I ALWAYS put an explanation that the pictures are from the fan project, give the credit where it's due and link to the fan project so people can get it and support them.

So it's a real shame as I was really thrilled to see this article but quickly noticed the screens weren't quite right and spent the rest of the read thinking "it's okay, they'll mention using FHeroes on page 2".. " wait nope, okay page 3".. "wait nope page 4".. etc until there was none left.

@SirDranik and the FHeroes team have been working their butts off over the last few years to give this great gift to the world of a fan remake of HoMM2 that allows modern resolutions, so for a big international mag to use screenshots of their remake without crediting them, and then on top of that tell their readers that the original game was higher resolution when it wasn't (as only the fan game allows that) is pretty misleading and disrespectful and spoils for me what should have been a nice moment.

Retro Gamer usually use original vanilla game screenshots and they often do mention fan remakes in their tributes too so it's strange that neither happened here. Although the article was done by someone who's not on the regular team so that might explain things a bit. Either way they can't play dumb and say they didn't know about FHeroes as they friggin used it for the screens lol.

Spoke with SirDranik elsewhere. He spoke with the author and found out what happened. Turns out the original article was 8 pages but it got cut down in editing and FHeroes was part of the chopped out stuff. Not the authors fault. The FHeroes part included an interview with the team too so thats a bit of a shame but Dranik's cool with with it all and happy to see HoMM2 getting coverage, so then I'm happy too lol. As it certainly is good to see HoMM2 getting some love in a big mag again.

Any chance the full article can be accessed somewhere?

Sir Albe wrote:

Any chance the full article can be accessed somewhere?

Sadly unlike other big magazines they don't seem to do web versions of all their articles.. which means you gotta buy a physical or digital copy of the mag... or find a naughty scan or pdf copy out there in google land heh.

Retro Gamer 239 is the issue the article is in:
https://www.rowansglobal.com/blogs/news/retro-gamer-magazine-issue-239