I see a lot of people doing recreations of games (or simply new ones) but I've noticed that there's just some ick-factor (hard to explain), in addition to performance issues, and just plain old bugs.

It's amazing what can be built using vibe-coding, but it still feels far away from actually being able to create proper games with soul.

Or am I wrong?

May be niche but I actually bought HoMM2 last week on GOG to replace my aged CD, what a coincidence.

Heroes 2 in particular and Might and Magic 2 (Gates to Another World, the RPG blobber) are some of my favorite games of all time. I also discovered there was a Mega Drive (Genesis for you Americans) port of King's Bounty, the predecessor to HOMM.

I may want to try what you did too, I managed to have a local Qwen 3.8 instance play M&M2 fairly successfully using dosbox-x and MCP, so I may be able to have it play HOMM2 too. Thanks for the idea!

I have tons of friends who know HoMM III, it’s the game of our youth

I think it’s also popular in eastern Europe

I think HOMM2/3 is pretty well known to mid thirties.

There’s not one but two major HOMM games in late development right now.

VCMI is also available for Android. Mod support. New factions. Not that the depth or homm3 leaves anything to be desired, but it's really fun nonetheless to try new stuff :)

For HOMAM3 there’s also the amazing HotA: https://h3hota.com/en/documentation

I also loved 3, "Songs of Conquest" has been an enjoyable spiritual successor for me recently even if the base game is quite limited on factions and a number of mechanics differ. I'm also keeping an eye on "Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era" when it eventually releases.

I don’t think you develop this kind of things to be useful and solve problems. It’s more of a fun hobby project/homage kind of things. Maybe not everything has to have a purpose yk

There is this HoMM3: The Succession War total conversion mod for HoMM3 in the style of Heroes 2 which happens to have new factions for what looks like Heroes of M&M II.