Lord of the Rings

The books the lord of the rings were awesome, and this game does them some credit, depending on what versoin you have, the cd rom version has scenes from the cartoon movie, while the floppy disk version just has little scenes of its own. The game strays from the books, but it is still very fun

Being a huge fan of Tolkien's works, I can safely say that most fans will be quite content with this game. Although a little buggy, it's about as good as any 1990 game can be. The game does tend to drift away from the original story in many parts, but I guess that's necessary if it's to be interactive at all, I mean, what fun would it be if it were exactly the same as the book?

This game is an RPG/Adventure game based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more specifically, The Fellowship of the Ring), and was originally published by Interplay in 1990.

After having played this game for about one hour, I wiped it off my hard disk. I was disappointed with the game to say the least, for several reasons:

A. - The gameplay is so utterly monotonous and boring, and does not properly capture the excitement, depth or action of Tolkien's universe. You're constantly scratching your head wondering what to do next and are often lost in the game (and exploration isn't terribly fun, because the world isn't very interesting). The interface just plain sucks. There is little of the character development from Tolkien's books. Most of the NPCs are faceless entities. Many locations in the game have a lack of distinction and look very cookie cutter. The pacing is off. The battle is tedious. Yes, I know the game came out in 1990, but it wasn't brilliant at the time, and it most certainly isn't now. Ultima suffered from the same problems. However this game sucks in other areas...

B. - Bugs galore. This game is very buggy. All sorts of stupid little bugs abound. This game isn't very well programmed, and this is especially apparent on a modern PC.

C. - The graphics are baaad. Even for a game that came out in 1990, the graphics could've been better. I think this is due to the fact the game was originally programmed for the Commodore 64 computer. It supports 256 colours, so there's no excuse for the graphics looking as blah and unspectacular as they do. Even Ultima VI looks better than this. The graphics are top down - I personally would have liked an isometric perspective, but this isn't really a fault.

So there you have it - this game isn't very good, especially since its supposed to be based off the Tolkien universe. If you want to see an example of a good RPG/Adventure game this era, see Sega's Phantasy Star instead.