My next favourite is MM6. Again, excellent plot and puzzles. A couple of bugs in it were never completely solved until Mok provided his unofficial MM6 patch, which also allowed the game to run successfully under WinXP in 99% of cases - but if you know where these bugs are, you can play the game in ways that avoid them.

My biggest disappointment was MM7. In many ways, it's a superb game, technically better than MM6. Wonderful scenario, excellent puzzles, and the battle for a Light Path party to clear The Pit is one of the finest in the whole Might & Magic canon. The thing that killed my pig was that it was impossible for any one party to have access to both Light and Dark magics.

I was very happy with MM8 and even MM9, despite its bugs. I'll admit that I seem to be in a minority with MM9, which I rate as a badly flawed masterpiece. In case you don't know, it was approaching completion when 3DO was going down the tubes, and it was rushed out at the last minute before it was finished. That was a great pity, because it could have been one of the truly great M&M games if they'd had time to do a proper job on it. The traces are there, like the subterranean humour (read some of notes pinned up on walls or left on tables, and I thought it a pity that you had Salieri playing the organ in the loft of Lindisfarne Abbey without any sign of a grave for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and the Chasm of the Dead is a cracking good battle for any group between levels from about 11 to about 30, but the bugs make it a difficult game to play until you're used to it.

MM4/5/WoX is another flawed masterpiece. When present on the same logical drive, MM4 (Clouds of Xeen) & MM5 (Darkside of Xeen) interact to create another small but difficult game, called Worlds of Xeen. There's not a lot wrong with the game, but parts of it are unutterably boring. You have to do the Red Dwarf Mines early on to get gold and experience, but there isn't enough variety in them, and consequently, they seem to go on for ever. But when you've completed MM4 and take your party into MM5 and on to the Darkside, it's a lot of fun. There are some damned good puzzles - and try exploring the Islands in the Sky!