Lord of the Rings : Game One

Copyright : Melbourne House | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

The Ring of Power that has been found. The dark eye of Mordor has turned its full attention on The Shire and the Hobbit folk have been noticed for the first time. Dark days are coming to Middle Earth and the only safe course of action is to take the Ring on the long and dangerous journey to the Cracks of Doom and destroy it once and for all.

Join Frodo Baggins on his journey to destroy Sauron?s ring in this text adventure interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien?s Fellowship of the Ring, the sequel to The Hobbit.

One of the most eagerly anticipated games of all time, The Lord of the Rings was brought forward in the release schedule to meet demand and as a result probably skipped a playtest session or two?

Graphics

Using a primitive window display, The Lord of the Rings is one of the more unconventional looking text adventures I?ve ever seen. With caricatures of the four hobbit characters appearing at the left hand side of the screen to show you who is present in the location and who is else where (and with whom), it?s certainly a clever way of doing things but in practice it proves to be more bother than it?s worth as it takes an absolute age when entering a new location to draw the new graphic and then draw the heads moving in from the outer border to the inner, one at a time.

The graphics are actually a step back from the quality of those found in The Hobbit and are a real let down to be honest. Once again, Melbourne House would?ve been better advised to scrap the graphics altogether and concentrate on creating rich and vivid descriptions based on Tolkien?s book instead of dodgy pictorial representations that appear rather abstract for the most part. While The Hobbit?s graphics were at least colourful if uninspired, LOTR?s are more a collection of ellipses, squares and circles with different colour shading and are like some kind of prototype GAC graphics stuck inside a window.

Sound

None.

Gameplay

As you would expect from the creators of The Hobbit, and with yet more of the same source material to manipulate, in terms of storyline and plot - The Lord of the Rings is without peer as the complex and deeply involved tale begins to play out with enough differences from the book to allow you a sense of freedom without leaving you completely dumbfounded as to what you?re supposed to do. Some locations in the game are never even explored or mentioned other than in passing in the novel!

The story is what drives the game on and the first part of the game were you are being relentlessly hunted and pursued by the ominous black riders is a claustrophobic and exhilarating experience that perfectly captures the dark overtones of the original novel.

More than this though. the program is once of the most ambitious ever to be produced and the fact it was released on tape is nothing short of miraculous. The concept of playing as more than one character, or at least having the ability to become different characters at various points, is something that is taken for granted now but the freedom of having this choice was something to behold back in 1986. Although you can only choose to be either Frodo, Sam, Pippin or Merry it did open up different strategic avenues for the novice player to try out like playing as Merry and reaching the rest of the party before it?s too late and giving the ring to one of the hobbits and having them leg it on their own - both doomed to failure?

The parser, again, is a bigger and better version of that found in The Hobbit and it continues to build upon the Inglish system created by Melbourne House for that game. The variety of commands and sentence structures that the game appears to understand is very impressive and although you do get the odd bizarre reply or unhelpful prompt, the game is better than a lot of others in understanding what you are trying to get across.

At times though its own worst enemy, the complex routines and character interaction means that the game plays very slowly and although this can be improved thanks to emulation, the original required you to have an awful lot of patience as the computer would often take up to ten seconds to perform a command - particularly frustrating if you mis-type and the Black Riders are closing in on you!

This is not the biggest problem however, like The Hobbit before it, The Lord of The Rings is more bug-ridden than the insect house at your local zoo. Objects will mysteriously vanish, you?ll find yourself suddenly dying, characters will disappear inexplicably and many, many more frustrating problems will crop up before you come anywhere near reaching the end of this epic adventure.

Oh and did I mention that every time the game ends you have to load the game from scratch again? Yes, half an hour?s loading time for ten minutes? gameplay, if that?

These are big, big drawbacks but it still has to be said that at least Melbourne House didn?t take the easy way out and re-hash The Hobbit with new locations and pictures - they tried something completely different and sure it didn?t pay off completely but they did manage to translate the feel of the novel to the computer and it deserves a lot of credit for that alone.

Persevere with the drawbacks and savour one of the best adventure games in terms of plot, just don?t expect not to be even a little frustrated!