[Last time][cpc] I wrote about try­ing to find ca­su­al games for medi­um/large-group so­cial events. We can split mul­ti­play­er video gam­ing in­to a cou­ple of vague­ly-de­fined cat­e­gories; I’m go­ing to use the term “ca­su­al” or “so­cial gam­ing” to refer to medi­um-scale so­cial gath­er­ings that in­volve video gam­ing; hard­core gam­ing, of course, is all about the game; and we might per­haps call the last group “LAN par­ty gam­ing” to indi­cate a mid­dle ground be­tween ca­su­al gam­ing and su­per-in­tense gam­ing.

[cpc]: http://non­graph­i­cal.com/2008/09/ca­su­al-games-for-the-pc/
[hom­m3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Might_and_Mag­ic_III

It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: [Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III][hom­m3]. It’s kind of an old game - it was re­leased in 1999, but the graph­ics cer­tain­ly don’t show it. If you look close­ly (and use the map ed­i­tor a lot), you’ll no­tice that an in­cred­i­ble amount of time was put in­to mak­ing the art­work for the game. Even at the measly 800x600 or what­ev­er res­o­lu­tion the game us­es, the forests and moun­tains and ev­ery­thing are in­cred­i­bly de­tailed.

What is most in­ter­est­ing about the game, how­ev­er, is its po­ten­tial for so­cial gam­ing to­day. It has two in­her­ent ad­van­tages. Old games tend to use disk space much more ef­fi­cient­ly (as a ne­ces­si­ty), and this one is no ex­cep­tion. The en­tire in­stalled foot­print of HoMM 3 Com­plete (the orig­i­nal and two ex­pan­sion packs) is on­ly about 300 MB. I can com­press this in­to an archive and put it on other com­put­ers, and get this - HoMM 3 al­lows you to join mul­ti­play­er games with­out hav­ing a CD in­sert­ed! You can copy this game to all your friends’ com­put­ers and have them join your game with ex­cep­tion­al ease. It’s sec­ond ad­van­tage is its turn-based na­ture: since you can­not do any­thing when it’s not your turn (be­sides look­ing around and in­spect­ing your al­lies’ heroes), there is a lot of room in-be­tween turns for con­ver­sa­tion and so­cial­iz­ing. It’s not nec­es­sary to be in a fren­zied, in­tense state the en­tire time one is play­ing this game.

HoMM 3 games do take a long time to com­plete (on the order of many, many re­al-life hours), but mul­ti­play­er games can be saved and restart­ed at any time. Sav­ing is al­most in­stan­ta­neous and ba­si­cal­ly ef­fort­less. I have been try­ing it out with my friends, and HoMM 3 does in­deed make an ex­cel­lent so­cial game!

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, HoMM 3 is no longer pub­lished, but you can still buy HoMM 3 Com­plete (which works, very well, on Vis­ta!) very cheap­ly at [some sites][buy­hom­m3]. It might be worth­while to pick one up soon, espe­cial­ly if you’re in­ter­est­ing in so­cial gam­ing, as I’m not sure you will even still be able to buy this game in a cou­ple of years.

[buy­hom­m3]: http://www.mas­tertron­ic.com/pro­duct­PcGamer.asp?pid=331&pro­duct­La­belID=1