Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

First-person action brawlers aren't really my thing, but I can be persuaded to play them if the theme is interesting. And themes don't get a whole lot better than the Lord of the Rings universe.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor came out last year, which makes it a fairly new game for me to be playing. There's a sequel on the way soon, which of course means good deals on the original, so I picked it up for just a few bucks in a recent sale. I played it on my PC, though it's available on just about every gaming platform.

The story takes place in the time between the Hobbit (when Bilbo finds the One Ring) and the start of the main story in Fellowship of the Ring (when the Fellowship starts their quest and the War of the Ring begins). The main character is a ranger named Talion, who used to patrol parts of Mordor before Sauron and his minions began to reclaim it. He's haunted/possessed by a mysterious elven spirit, giving him all kinds of interesting abilities. Learning about that spirit makes up a good chunk of the storyline.

Shadow of Mordor does several interesting things as far as combat mechanics. There's the usual assortment of physical attacks - sword for melee, dagger for stealth, bow for ranged - but everything can be augmented by special spirit abilities. You can drain enemies of their energy to replenish ammo, for instance, or have your spirit augment melee attacks to stun enemies. Lots of blood and gore while beating up orcs, too, of course. I'm not particularly good at these kinds of first-person action combat mechanics, so it took me a while to get the hang of it, but eventually I got fairly decent at taking on hordes of orcs.

There's quite a bit of Middle-earth flavor in the game, which I really liked. You can find various artifacts with bits of lore embedded, each of which has a bit of story attached. There's small silvery runes called Ithildin to collect, which unlock portions of a image similar to the hidden Moria door. And throughout the main story there are references to the larger world, from references to coming war to an appearance by Gollum. They do take some liberties with the world that may upset some of the Middle Earth purists out there, but I don't mind that sort of thing, figuring I can just ignore the bits that don't seem to fit.

As Talion goes around Mordor, he'll run into stronger enemy leaders that are tougher to kill. These captains and war-chiefs are unique, and they'll remember if you run from them or if they kill you. They get more powerful over time, too. You can even find special missions to defeat captains who defeated your friends (assuming you're playing online and linked to a friends list). Those encounters add some extra depth to the kill-'em-all gameplay mechanics. And eventually you can use spirit domination to bring some of them around to your side, which adds a whole new facet to your fighting style.

There are some extras beyond the main story, mainly combat challenge modes. I didn't really mess around with most of that, since the combat wasn't the draw for me anyway. I was there for the story and Middle-earth world. I'm sure players that are more into the combat would enjoy them, though.

I had a great time roaming around Mordor in Shadow of Mordor. Well worth playing for any Tolkien fan, or if you like the gameplay style. If you like both, all the better!

The Middle Earth Collectible Card Game

More than 20 years have gone by since Iron Crown Enterprises released their first Middle Earth: Collectible Card Game (MECCG) set. It only lasted a few years, but that doesn't stop some of us from pulling it out as often as we can.

Back in 1995, the game was still called Middle Earth: The Wizards, and it was fairly simple. Oh, there was some complicated stuff with how you moved around Middle Earth to various locations, and I don't think anyone liked trying to figure out how influence worked. But overall, it had a straightforward theme: take a few characters around the map of Middle Earth, gathering up allies and items for the coming battle against the darkness while preventing your opponent's efforts to do the same. Or possibly try to destroy the evil of the One Ring, of course, although that was fairly difficult to pull off.

The MECCG designers had a hard time knowing when to stop, though. ("Delved to greedily and too deep" into the complexity of design, one might say.) The addition of dragons, agents (ugh), and then entire new playable factions (Ringwraiths, Fallen Wizards, Balrog) made the game a complex mess that required a huge amount of effort to learn. A basic two-player game could take hours to finish. There are some really cool themes in every MECCG set, but actually playing the game became more and more difficult. Eventually, the game collapsed under the weight of some unsound business decisions from the publisher, but I'm not sure how much longer it could have continued to grow regardless.

People still play the game, even after all this time. As recently as 2006, there were world events, held mostly in Europe. There are still World Council web sites. Haven't heard anything for a few years, so that may finally have ended, but I still get the occasional email from someone looking to sell cards or find out info about the game. And you might find MECCG players at several of the larger gaming conventions, often playing small tournaments with the pre-constructed challenge decks.

Locally, there are a few of us who still play whenever the opportunity arises. For years, we'd use sealed product that we'd picked up for practically nothing once the official game support had stopped. It ran out eventually, though. Now we mostly take a whole bunch of cards and randomly divide them out among 3-5 people, then play the results like a sealed deck. These games are generally bloodbaths. Kings of Gondor, Elven Lords, Wizards, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits...the corpses pile up. Even if you play it safe and stay away from dragon country or the heart of Mordor, there's still plenty of danger. Especially since combat involves dice rolls, and those things are treacherous. More than one mighty warrior has been defeated by the dreaded snake eyes.

One goal of these games is to win, of course, but the larger goal is to pull off something thematically cool and/or crazy. For instance, I once took Gandalf to Moria, and the Balrog got dropped on him. Which I promptly defeated with Sacrifice of Form - exactly the theme battle that card was designed for. (OK, actually it got cancelled and I had to go back and do it again later once I got the Sacrifice of Form back in my hand. But it still fit the theme!) Or the time someone had Boromir in a company being attacked by Orcs, and used Many Foes He Fought so that Boromir protected everyone else (and died). Just like the battle at Amon Hen. Near misses are nearly as good...such as when the random shuffle gave the same player Gandalf, Frodo, Gollum, the One Ring, Gollum's Fate, and various other supporting cards. Everything you need to take the One Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it...until Gandalf got killed, and he had no other way to actually put the One Ring into play.

There aren't a lot of games that I still get excited about playing, nearly 20 years after they went out of print. MECCG may be a complex mess of overly-ambitious design, but it's still one of my favorites.

The Hobbit Movies

I've been a Tolkien nerd for years. Read all the books, seen the movies, played the games. So when a friend offered to let me borrow the extended edition of The Hobbit movies, I took the opportunity, even though I'd already seen the theatrical releases and knew the series was flawed.

The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was a masterpiece by Peter Jackson. There were a few warts, but overall it's one of the best adaptations of a Tolkien story that has ever been created. When he took the helm on The Hobbit films, expectations were for a similar result. Perhaps that was too much to expect, because The Hobbit isn't in the same class at all. (Jackson himself knows the whole production was flawed.)

The Hobbit films are just under 9 hours long in the extended editions, and just under 8 hours long in the theatrical releases. Unfortunately, there's only about 4-5 good hours. The rest is extraneous extended action scenes, a ludicrously awkward love plot, and blowing minor characters all out of proportion.

The films are pretty good when they're telling the core story from the books. The initial unexpected party at Bag End, the trip across the mountains, the riddle game, dangers in the forest, Bilbo's verbal fencing with Smaug, Thorin's struggles with corruption...all that is good stuff. I also thought the added component of the White Council fighting to drive out the Necromancer from Dol Guldur fit well, even though it's barely mentioned in The Hobbit book and not described in any detail elsewhere. It worked in the films to establish the big picture and tie into the Lord of the Rings series.

If that's all there was to these movies, they'd be great. But there's several more hours that just do not fit well at all. Many of the action scenes should be about a third of the length (i.e. the escape from Goblin-town) and several are completely unnecessary (i.e. pretty much everything with Legolas). The Elf-Dwarf romance was awful, both in story and cinematic terms. I personally don't think any romantic component was needed at all, but if it had to be there, I can think of any number of better ways to do it. The entire Lake-town portion should have only taken about five minutes: Alfrid didn't need to exist, and too much time was spent to emphasize the Master's greed and incompetence. Smaug didn't need to spend forever chasing dwarves around the mountain before heading off to Lake-town. The battle of the Five Armies could have taken about one-third of the time and still been epic. (Though don't cut out Dain on his battle-boar and the dwarf ram cavalry - they were amazing.) And so on.

If The Hobbit series had been told as two films, without most of the non-book components, I'd have loved it. As it is, I'm glad I watched it once (well, twice, if you count both theatrical and extended versions) for the good parts. But unlike the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I doubt I'll ever spend the time to watch it again.