The Price of Loyalty, revisited

Motto: in the end, useless hp box
found new life as heroes 2 playstation.

I still remember the day, 25 years ago just about, when I first saw this wonder. "It's exactly like a fairy tale", was my first and strongest impression, the mind racing to cope with the first, and to date strongest miracle it ever witnessed : mythos, embodied.

I played the hell out of this game, solo as well as hotseat multiplayer. It was a point of pride, and a point of joy, structure of my early life of the mind. I was fascinated, utterly. In fairness, I still am, yet... things have changed. Perhaps the opposite of how the world has changed meanwhile ; yet changed they have nevertheless.

What a far cry, those days of the eagerly occupied, feverishly relinquished seat of power, magnificent throne of allpossibilities standing before the desktop running the "hotseat". As we sat on comfortable couches passing a laptop around now, me and my bevy of nude girlies, there was a quite palpable feeling of difference, hovering, iridiscent if barely perceptible, above the cruft-ladden coffee table. Things have changed, haven't they!

How many times did the DOS boot into a C:, and maybe identified a D: ? Yet how many of those times your actual residence was in a mystical, alien, outright science-fiction Z: ? This, this alone, that I'd get into the image of the computed world from an imaginary, hidden Z: of power, of magick incomprehensibleⁱ... The apotropaion of ulterior me smiles back over the years at myself, such as I was. This place isn't a hruscheba, nor does it look upon the Romanian "picior de plai". They around aren't sticksuri Aurora. There's no longer any rule against going into town multiple times per day because the machine no longer takes a good second to flip memory bits and render the townscape. In fact, everything in the virtual machine's practically instantaneous anyway. Eight cores, who even heard of such a thing!

And so we played ; and I won ; and made merry. I wouldn't trade it for the world, this life of mine, such as it was, such as it is. The best possible time of the best possible times, there for the grace of god goes no-one else than I.

Goodbye! Adieu! Si pe curind!

1. Altogether very comprehensible. If you have the original game CD, like I do, rather than a more recent repackaging (stolen from GoG, like everyone else on the internet's, apparently) you may find the ubiquitous "helpful guides" abundantly useless. No matter : plop your CD into the drive, start dosbox, run

   mount c /home/user/blabla/

   to put the game into c and then

   mount d "/media/Heroes II" -t cdrom

   to put the drive within reach. Yes, believe it or not, /media is a thing now.

   Then heroes2 and enjoy yourself. [↩]