Hannibal Smith posted:

Heroes of Might and Magic 2

I discovered the game purely by chance thanks to a PC Gamer demo disc when I was about 12 or 13. I spent a couple of weeks playing the one map included in the demo over and over again until I got a chance to buy the full version. I then introduced it to my circle of friends, and for the next year or so we were constantly getting together to play hot seat games all day and into the night, usually filled with alliances, cease-fires, back-stabs, and betrayals. It was also my single-player game of choice during that time, and I'm pretty sure I've played nearly every campaign & individual map between the original game and its expansion.

Heroes 3 may have been a superior game mechanically, and I still put a lot of time into it, but by the time it came out my friends and I weren't quite as willing to forfeit weeks of our lives to play the big, epic maps like we used to. And I'll always contend that the cartoony graphics and animations of 2 were far more aesthetically pleasing than the bland rendered style that 3 used.