Gaming In The Russian Cosmos, Part One
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There was also a surprise in the form of hybrid-RPG King's Bounty. It's a game comparable to the most recent Heroes Of Might & Magic title, and yet surpassing it on all fronts. The turn-based battles are dominated by vast monsters, while the world-wandering is so vast and intricate that you can even add a wife and child to your inventory. Be careful she doesn't divorce you she'll take half your gold! I marvelled at it, and wondered why we see so few of these kinds of games today: surely they're our answer to the ultra-stylised Japanese RPGs? Quietly, I noted the game down. I suspected someone back home would probably like this game when it gets an English translation.
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Just 142 million people have 17 million square kilometres to live in. (Compare that to 60 million of us in the UK sharing just 245,000 square kilometres). It's an eight-day train journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, where the the King's Bounty team reside. They couldn't make it to KRI for that very reason. What's more it's a place where publishers need to battle with the problems of distribution and rampant retail piracy. We might get upset about torrent sites and online theft, but up until a few years ago most games sold in Russia were pirate copies sold as packaged products on the street. The cost of broadband meant, for the larger part, it was cheaper to buy pirate product from a vendor. The problem was so bad that pirate companies were reportedly approaching publishers to offer to distribute their games. This has been quite fiercely stamped out by the Russian authorities.
