Matthew, I’ve got one question for you. Oh, hit me up. What about second breakfast? I’m Samuel Roberts. I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. First of all, how was the film Spider-Man No Way Home, a film I can’t see because I want to go see my parents at Christmas, I don’t want to give them a disease that might kill them. It’s tough for me. Much like Peter Parker, I’m facing my own crisis of conscience. So yes, how was the film? I enjoyed it. And don’t worry, listeners, I won’t spoil any of the spoilers for you. Yeah, I liked it a lot. It riffed on some stuff I really liked. It’s, I’ll tell you what though, the first 20 minutes are quite bad. Right. And then, cause I think you’re just waiting for stuff, certain things to happen that you’ve seen in the trailers. And once that stuff’s happening, you’re like, oh great, well, here we go. We’re off to the races. But before that, you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on with it. Yeah, so obviously like every single thing about this has basically been spoiled in the run-up seemingly, but I’ll see when I get to it in the new year. I have two things to ask you about. First of all, you messaged me the other day and said, I went to this cinema and I forgot that people can bring big plates of meat into the screening room. I’m like, that’s where you saw Spider-Man. I had forgotten that the bath has a cinema restaurant, and that was a thing that people were having fucking fine dining and roast dinners while you’re watching Spider-Man fucking face off against CG-eyed Alfred Molina or whatever. So what’s the deal with that? What is this venue you’ve been to? So this is the Tivoli, which is the posh cinema, but I’m beginning to question how posh it is. It’s certainly posh in its pricing. It’s 17 pounds for an adult ticket. That’s a lot. That’s a lot. And so you’re like, well, what balance is that out? What are you paying for? You’re paying for kind of a private sofa or armchair. It’s quite a small, exclusive feeling screen. So like it’s a very comfortable environment. But outside of that, you’re kind of paying for a smaller screen than you’d get at the Odeon. A slightly weedy sound system. And the fact that people can order food and drinks before the film starts. And then they bring it in. And I don’t know if it’s because we saw Spider-Man at lunchtime, but there was an almost comedic parade of like burgers and massive pizzas before the film started. Just these people endlessly bringing these trays in. And after one, you know, one burger walks past you. You’re like, man, this room now smells of burgers and meat. But by the time the film started, it was just like a slaughterhouse. It just smelled so meaty and hot and hot like food in that room. And so I actually think it was a terrible decision. I thought I’d pay to go to the fancy cinema because then I might avoid, you know, the legions of coughing masses at the audience. It’s much bigger screens, but I don’t know. I don’t know if I hate. I think I hated the meat stink more than the threat of disease. So, all in all, Spider-Man No Way Home gets four sausages out of five. Is that right? Yeah, that’s right. So, the other thing that happened is you were talking to me before we started recording this today. Do you have had your first, like, tweet blow up into the stratosphere? And like a kind of Louie Theroux style documentary, you were telling me about the ways in which it’s changed your life. So, do you want to recap what happened there? Yeah. So, we watched the film, Spider-Man, and we watched the post-credit scenes, which are awesome. And I turned to Catherine in the cinema and said, these scenes are always so dumb. It’s like some random guy comes out and says, hey, it’s me, Blorko. And I shrug and go home. I then repurposed that into a tweet. A few of my friends humoured me and liked it, and I thought that was very kind of them. But somehow between them and now, it’s on, like, 60,000 likes, which is quite a lot. And it’s getting retweeted. And it’s the first time I’ve had a tweet do that. And so it’s been really interesting to see it from the inside of, like, you start off like, yeah, there’s rules, like, people love my shit. And then waves of people begin turning up saying, like, you’re sneering at Marvel fans. Why do you hate Marvel fans? And then people going, you should watch the credits anyway. Do you disrespect the art of cinema? The hand ringers come out, they start telling you off, and you’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, which is just a dumb comment. I said to my wife, like, but you can’t keep up with it, because there’s so much of it. Then everyone starts throwing your own patter back at you with all this blorko bullshit. Like I’m endlessly getting tweets about people doing fictional lore for this blorko character. Then I had people saying I’d rip the idea off from a Star Wars meme, which I promise you I hadn’t. Apparently someone did a similar tweet about a Star Wars character called Shit Glurp, and like months ago, and that is an internet meme. But the people who see it, they live full time on the internet, and they think everyone has seen everything they’ve seen online, so they’re like, oh check out this fucking Shit Glurp robber over here. You’re like, what the fuck are you talking about? It’s been really traumatic, and all my excitement has curdled. But then I started seeing, somehow it’s broken into celebrity circles. My version of celebrities, I’ll add, no one’s big, it’s not like Chris Evans has liked it, but like I was saying beforehand, the creator of Mare of Easttown, a show I really liked, he liked my dumb joke. That’s practically an invitation to come and write Season 2 of Mare of Easttown with him, I think. Yeah, I think so. Mare versus Blorko for Season 2, I look forward to it. Yeah, this could be a life-changing tweet for me, but I will never again envy friends who have this more regularly because they’re either very good at Twitter or they’re internet famous, and everything they do gets this level of response because it’s quite tiring. I suddenly understand all the filters on Twitter. They exist for you to basically cut this swarm of people out of your life. I welcome the swarm, but I’m drowning in it. Well, it’s a very emotional tale there. There’s a couple of observations from all that that I find kind of funny and I just want to put out. So you saying a joke I made to my wife, I’ve never heard you refer to Catherine as your wife ever. It’s like you’re framing yourself as this everyman figure who’s like, like those people who were like, accused of flying drones to Heathrow Airport. Like it’s like my life has been turned upside down by this. Me and my wife are going through hell right now. That was, that’s one part. The second thing is, is Bloor Coat of the MCU what Ginrod Dongmax is to the Star Wars Universe Matthew. I mean Ginrod Dongmax is a funnier made up name than Bloor Coat and never exploded in the way Bloor Coat. Bloor Coat, if I knew people were going to be reading that tweet, I would have come up with a better fake name than Bloor Coat. Well, I thought it was good. I think it was funny than, I don’t know, Shituesto or whatever the fuck he said. But yes, very good. I’m glad I got to recap that story on the air. And I have resisted doing like a tagging, a follow up tweet going like, listen to the back page pod, because I hate it when people do that, when they try and hijack their own viral tweet. I’ve decided not to do that. I thought if I ever have, if ever, if God ever smiles on me and gives me Twitter success, I will not do that. And I have not done that. Yeah, fair enough. You’re just there in the in the mentions going, look, if you want to like make fun of Bluoco, go ahead, but leave my wife out of this. I really regret saying that now. Maybe I said wife, because I’m trying to like anonymize my life in a way to kind of get away from this mass of people. This tweet, I’ll tell you, this tweet’s done a number on me, Samuel. Yeah, you don’t sound like the same man, you sound a little bit shaky, but things will be okay. It will die down. And people will be angry about something else and enough. Do you know what I actually got? I had a low key story, a story about low key saying how much I didn’t like the second half of it. I can’t remember if I told this story on the podcast before. It was on tech radar. I had someone email me saying, stick to flipping burgers, you fc and all this stuff. Was it Tommy Hiddleston? I did have like, but I had all kinds of weirdos in my mentions being like, look, we get it. You liked Owen Wilson, but that’s not what the show is now. And it’s like, oh God, this is the worst thing in the world. And it’s just, yeah, I just thought like, I don’t know of all the things to go to bat for like, the MCU is such a, if I’d like slammed the licorice pizza and you’re going to bat for Paul Thomas Anderson, I’d be like, fair enough, you know, but this guy doesn’t like Phantom Thread or whatever, like. Or the Phantom Thread stands coming for you. Yeah. But that such is the way with the MCU. It’s just people defending three star content. Enough of that. I’ve got another quick little podcast lore update. Sure. I got a secret Santa at work and it was an Intermezzo gift voucher. What? Two questions. Those gift vouchers exist? And like. Apparently so. Unless he invented it for me. Does it just say IOU one baguette signed? Yeah, pretty much. That’s amazing. And quite a nice gift, actually. Pretty thoughtful. I don’t actually know who gave it to me, but that is an amazing Secret Santa. That is 100% something I will use and enjoy. Someone harboring a bit of guilt about the Christmas sandwich leaderboard, no doubt. A bit of a kind of like Ralph Wiggum Valentine’s Day Simpsons episode situation. Oh, I can’t believe I’ve entered the Wiggum zone. Oh dear. Yeah, that’s a good update. And like I said this on Twitter as well, Matthew, but people should also know in the last episode you mentioned that I could go on your Nintendo Switch Online family membership. That has happened now. So just want to make that clear for the listeners out there. So there’s your lore. The episode can now begin. So in this episode, we’re marking the 20th anniversary of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. It released in cinemas on December 19th, 2001. And we’re recording this on December 19th. And so we thought it would be a good kind of excuse to talk about Lord of the Rings footprint in games, as well as its place in wider culture. More than that, I was looking for an episode that was a little bit Christmassy, but wasn’t specifically an episode about Christmas games. The Lord of the Rings is sort of Christmassy. And so, as is my way, I’ve bullied Matthew Castle into following me down this path of madness and we’ll see where it leads. Matthew, how are you feeling about discussing the Lord of the Rings motion picture franchise? Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I love these films. I haven’t rewatched them for a while, but I do cherish them. What we’re going to do in this episode, we’ve got like a first part, we’re going to talk about Lord of the Rings more generally, a bit about the films and their kind of place in pop culture. And then the ways in which it kind of like affected other pop culture, including games and how, what kind of, you know, imprint it left basically on the landscape. And then in the second part, we’re going to go through, I think every single game that was inspired by the films specifically. So we’re not going to do every single Lord of the Rings games because that actually includes stuff like the Hobbit text adventure or shadow facts, games that are far too old for me and Matthew to understand or talk about with any authority. So we’re instead going to talk about some seven out of ten action games from the early 90s, which is much more a wheelhouse. And so yeah, it’s not like a super dense episode, I would say. You know, it’s not as probably not going to be as in depth as like the Halo episode was, for example, for discussing those different games. But it will be fun, just because I think Lord of the Rings is a good juicy subject matter. And maybe it’s got something in common with our perennially unpopular James Bond games episode, which is still languishing in the in the bottom of the back page pod views leaderboard. So RIP Bond. That’s what happens when you make a podcast under an hour long. And now, you know, all these episodes later, an hour is how long it takes for us to get to the subject of the episode after we talk about fucking your Twitter trauma and like Christmas sandwich updates and stuff. But yeah, so Matthew, let’s go straight into it. So was Fellowship a big deal to you when it released back in 2001? What are your memories of the film? I remember it becoming a huge deal when I saw it, you know, like I knew it was going to be big. And, you know, I was probably, you know, I don’t know what I’d been. Yeah, I would have been 16, so like, you know, super getting into films at that particular time. And then, but I wasn’t like, you know, queuing up. I wasn’t like dressed as, you know, a freaking dwarf on launch day or anything to get in. But then I saw it and it was, you know, one of the definitive cinema experiences I’ve had and I was just instantly, you know, blown away by just the scale and detail and just how rich it was. Even without any attachments, I hadn’t read the books at that point. So even without any attachment to that world or those characters, you know, it’s the stuff of top 20 films of all time for me instantly. And then I just after that, you know, became incredibly invested in, you know, the wider film project in the next two films. How about you? Were you big on this beforehand? No, it was sort of like I remember this and Harry Potter came out in the same year. I was probably more hype for Harry Potter at the time just because I’d read those books since I was 10. I’m roughly the same age as the characters in Harry Potter. Those games are you’re saying that series of which has become cursed for very different reasons that I will go into obviously, but like, I think that I was more excited about that. Lord of the Rings seemed more grown up. And on a first watch, I thought it was spectacular, but I felt a bit overwhelmed by it. And it was when we rented it from Blockbuster a few months later that it really got its hooks into me and I became obsessed with it. And because my dad has a bit of the old kind of like car boot sale seller energy, he actually recorded the VHS that from Blockbuster onto another tape. I can’t believe you’d throw your dad under the bus with this criminal act. Well, I mean, what, who’s going to do anything about it now? Do you know what I mean? Like, it’s safe now. The statute of limitations is gone. Then again, I did mention that he bought me GTA when I was 13. So I’m building up a library of evidence against him on this podcast. Shout out to you, dad, there. I like that this podcast ends with games caught, but it’s actual caught, and it’s with dad on trial. I’m sure you and I will end up in jail at some point as a result of this podcast, Matthew. But yeah, it was a massive deal for me too. I think that it hit at just the right age. I think about Lord of the Rings is probably most comparable to something like Star Wars for me, in terms of how people who were around when those films hit the theatres were interpreted it. It’s funny though, because I was massively into it while it was happening, and so when the next two films came out, I was hugely into those. But after that, in around 2004-ish time, I felt very done with it because it had been so pervasive in the pop culture landscape. It was fucking everywhere for so long. It swept the Oscars in 2004, obviously, and it just became so kind of like, I don’t know, whatever the early noughties version of a meme was, there was a lot of that going around. I had just was a little bit done with it, but The Fellowship of the Ring was my favourite of the three by quite a long way. I think they’re all good, obviously. But I think just the sense of a journey in that one, all the characters being together, and the set pieces and the ending, it’s just like a five-star film for me. The rest are probably like four-star films for me. Yeah, but it’s a huge deal. I watched this film, and then I went to France in 2002 on a holiday, like a four-week holiday, and I ran out of Game Boy batteries in the first week. And so I basically just read all three books back-to-back, and that was intense, but also the best way to read it, just absolutely absorbing this information. When you’re that age, you have the capacity to absorb all that lore stuff, just because you don’t have anything better going on in your head. So you just fill your head with nonsense. So I was there reading the appendices, being like, oh, Galad means light in elvish and all this stuff. Were you big into the Tom Bombadil songs? I must admit, because Tom Bombadil wasn’t in the film, I couldn’t even conceptualize what he was from reading the book. I just thought, well, this is a fucking long diversion, isn’t it? And it takes ages and ages to be Aragorn in that first book. You think it’s like three chapters, it’s not. It feels like you’ve read about 800 pages by that point. I like the idea of you visualizing the Tom Bombadil scenes, and it’s got all the actors from the film in, and then just a blue rectangle where Tom Bombadil should be, because you just can’t even conceive of such a thing. I pictured the tofu from Resident Evil 2. And then it just sang, and that was it. That was all I could come up with. So that was my Lord of the Rings experience. In a wider sense, by 2004, I felt like I was purging Lord of the Rings from my system a little bit. There was too much of it around. A similar thing happened with a lot of my pop culture from this time. Weirdly, The Matrix, which is obviously back in the headlines at the moment, because there’s a new film coming out. The Matrix is another thing that I got deep into in my teenage years, and then I just needed a massive break from it after that, and so I kind of like parked them after that for quite a long time. But then, yeah, over time, I became sort of more into them again and have been watching them regularly. And now I just, you know, they’re part of the landscape of pop culture in a way that I just, I know I watch them probably five to ten more times before I die, whatever that is. Don’t talk about your death. It’s a bit grim, isn’t it? It’s meant to be a festive Christmas episode. How did you feel about the other two films, Matthew? Do you think, how do you think Fellowship compared to them? Yeah, I think I’m with you on thinking Fellowship’s like the most sort of consistently like enjoyable of all of them. It’s probably the best in terms of like, you know, the action set pieces are kind of smaller. You get all the characters you love. Obviously, it sheds characters and splits them up as it goes along. I mean, it’s hard because I think Two Towers like The Battle of Helm’s Deep is like one of the greatest bits of cinema of all time. And when they charge down the hill, when Gandalf comes down the hill with everyone, that’s like a probably top five cinema moment of all time for me. Like I, you know, I can almost put up with that film just for that. Because it’s just so like, yes, same with in the third one, I’m a real sucker for the when they light the torches on the mountains. And they place that epic music, like honestly, I was like bawling in the cinema when I think because I was just like, so epic. It’s just the load of torches on top of mountains. But you know, it’s that the men of Rohan and Gondor are coming together, Matthew. Yeah. Only together can they take out fucking Saurons. What’s the fruit the Mad King eats very messily? I thought it was a tomato, isn’t it? Doesn’t it get tomatoes everywhere? Yeah, that was unpleasant. Yeah, so I think you’re right, like two and three, I am like less into it. I would probably give them all five stars, because they’ve all got epic stuff in them and the scale of them is just so awesome. And like the fact that it never loses its attention to detail and it never loses just the craft of like the individual shots, you know, the level of love and detail it’s inside like Bilbo’s or Frodo’s house or whatever is as, you know, you never lose that no matter how big the film gets. I mean, that was like the huge takeaway from all of them. I just couldn’t believe that just the scale and the detail of all the army and when you see all the, but maybe this is informed a bit by having seen all those, you know, hours and hours of documentaries they shot about them, showing them like making every prop and having like armies of armourers basically making all the armour for the orcs and stuff. But that realism and just the sort of authenticity and the fact that the physicality of it really comes through and it kind of felt like it was going to usher in this like new age of like epic, real cinema, but it sort of didn’t, you know, it’s followed up by just the huge dumping ground of CG. And I know there’s CG in Lord of the Rings, but there’s so much CG in like the blockbuster scene that follows where I don’t have any of that admiration, I guess, for like the Marvel films. So, you know, I just don’t think they exist in the same way that the Lord of the Rings films like really existed like in camera and that for me, it just it feels like the sort of the, you know, the biggest sort of one of the biggest cinematic achievements in that way, but also totally like the end of an era. It’s interesting, I was reading an article in The Guardian today, which they had a Lord of the Rings anniversary article and they were saying, you know, did this, you know, is Lord of the Rings to kind of blame for what modern cinema is in terms of like everything, you know, you’re just part of an ongoing series of films now, nothing is standalone, you know, in the way that they committed to the three Lord of the Rings films and shot them all the time. Does that sort of usher in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, you know, the strengths and weaknesses of that? And I don’t know that it does, just the fact that it’s, you know, I don’t really see another way of doing Lord of the Rings than doing all three. Like, you know, it’s sort of inevitable that way. Well, it’s funny you say that because, you know, this year we saw Dune release and they kept very quiet in the marketing about the fact that it was basically called Dune Part One and that there will be a Dune Part Two. I think they did say it was like half the book, but when you it takes watching it for you to realize just how much it ends in the middle of the story. And they didn’t have the confidence to like film them all back to back and make them all back to back. And what makes Lord of the Rings such an amazing undertaking and retrospect is that they did have that faith that they did put their money down and they were like, we trust you to deliver this vision. And we’re going to even if it for first one fails, we’ve paid for the whole lot. We have committed to this for three years. And like with a filmmaker who on paper didn’t do like loads that was comparable to those films. Yeah, it is mad. He must have been so good at pitching that film, you know? Like, he must have just sold it to them, just on the power of his enthusiasm and charisma. Because his previous track record, while I love the films of Peter Jackson, there’s nothing there pointing to the fact that he could do Lord of the Rings. Yeah. What’s that film where there’s like some women naked and Hugh Grant’s in it? And it’s like Sam Neill’s there as a kind of like pervy artist. Like is that I don’t know if that is Peter Jackson, that’s Sirens. Oh, right. Is that not a Peter Jackson film? No, he did. Very confused with Heavenly Creatures with Kate Winslet. Oh dear. That’s on me. That is my getting myself like slightly bawdy. Films of the 90s where you used to be able to get really famous people to take their clothes off. Yeah, basically. You can’t do it anymore. An easy mistake to make. Well, it’s funny because I don’t know what the conclusion The Guardian writer came to, but like The Hobbit is what happens when that franchise machinery just like runs amok and doesn’t have a kind of proper vision and is just ends up being massively disappointing and feeling like a big franchise exercise, which is The Hobbit. The first one’s pretty good. Then the last two are just terrible. They’re awful. The last one’s like a one star film, I think. It’s just completely irredeemable. I don’t know if you have any taken that. Oh, it’s so bad though. I’ve only seen it the one time, but I didn’t hate, hate, hate it. I thought, I didn’t think it was good, but I had some good special effects. Yeah, I mean, for sure. But like, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s like, oh, I found it so… It didn’t run out of story. It’s just a big battle, isn’t it? And then it ends. Yeah, it just, it just because it sets up Richard Armitage’s character, I can’t remember his name. Is it Thorin? Thorin, that’s it, yeah. Thorin Oakenshield. It sets him up as like this very troubled king and like possibly like a doomed tragic figure, but they lose the thread of it after the first film and he just basically becomes a jerk then he dies and that’s kind of it and that’s his arc and it’s not very interesting. I mean, that’s, that’s going to be our arcs too. There’s loads and loads of scenes of him just glowering next to some gold in that second one. You’re like, oh God, can this just fucking end? I only saw him for the first time last year. Actually, I watched them. I’ve seen the first one before, but I only watched all three back to back last year. So yeah, that’s a big disappointment. But I don’t know, what did the Guardian writer say? Because I don’t think that you can really make a connection between Lord of the Rings and the MCU. He sort of said it was like the double whammy of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. But they’re finite projects and they’re standalone stories. I think they’re quite different to what happens in the MCU where they are standalone stories, but they’re also part of this ongoing project. And there are some Marvel films which feel like, at the end of it, when you add it all up, you think, was this just set up for the next film? Really? Like, did this film need to happen? Could you have just told us that this happened and it would have been fine? And I think the answer is often yes. I think it’s unfair to kind of equate the two though. Like the level of craftsmanship and the focus and the finality of Lord of the Rings is just a totally different thing. I think they just wanted someone to have a spicy headline on the Guardian. They look, I’ve worked in media, I get it, that’s fair. But like, yeah, I mean, I think there’s a big difference between, like you say, the kind of, you know, the sort of set decoration of Hobbiton versus David Harbour doing a Russian accent like he’s in GoldenEye. Like there’s a big difference there. That may be a bit reductive, but like, you know what I mean? I had a thing I just remembered when Two and Three came out, they started doing film premieres for them in Winchester, where I lived. And obviously Winchester is not where they had the world premiere of Two Towers. They called it a premiere. And what it actually was was we just saw the film, but beforehand, we got to have a sausage roll in the car showroom next door to the cinema. Were they served by anyone notable from the film? No, no, maybe like the mayor of Winchester was there with his big old chain or his bell or whatever it is a mayor has. Not even Billy Boy did he come down? No, no. Funnily enough, they didn’t have, and they’ve got enough cars to send them across the country. But it’d be a bit rough if like the main shows in London and then they’re like, Jonathan Reese Davies, you’ve got to go to Winchester and have a sausage roll in an Audi showroom next door to the screen cinema. It may be apocryphal, but like the same thing happened in my hometown where people were saying like the premiere of James Bond, This is Dying of the Day at the time, is happening in Gun Wharf Keys in Portsmouth and the Queen herself will be there. It never happened as far as I could tell. The Queen’s coming to watch Bond. That’s a good headline. She would have walked out after he was fucking, you know, his car turned invisible. She’s like, fuck that. Very good, Matthew. So I’d like one more point to make on Denethor, by the way. And I do think that like it’s a very powerful metaphor to see a man angrily eat tomatoes to indicate that he’s not very nice. Very powerful visual metaphor, you know, very subtle. And the audience can kind of read into what that means. This man is angrily eating tomatoes. What does it say about his inability to lead? I just think that’s a very powerful bit of film making by Peter Jackson. Why didn’t I learn? Because I ate a tomato very angry on my first day as editor of O&M. Maybe that’s just what lost the team back then. Okay, so Matthew, Lord of the Rings impact then. So do you think it led to a surge of interest in fantasy? I’ve been like, I guess, sort of theorizing a little bit with this, but you can make a very natural connection between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, for example, because it shows how you can do basically like an adaptation of high fantasy with a big budget and do it well with credible actors and also put Sean Bean in both just to show people that it’s a fantasy thing. And that’s very good. But in a wider sense, I wonder, does Lord of the Rings lead to this bigger surge of interest in things like the Elder Scrolls with Oblivion or Skyrim? Or even like things like how Dungeons and Dragons become so enormous and like we have the Wheel of Time and fantasy is such big business. Do you think that starts with Lord of the Rings? Or is it just kind of like one sort of like stop along the way of something that was going to happen anyway? Yeah, I mean, I think what you said earlier about how this being like your and my Star Wars is probably key to it in the same way that Star Wars comes along, becomes the definitive sort of pop culture artefact of its age, and then everyone has to shift into Star Wars mode. That’s when you get like James Bond in space in Moonraker and you start getting a lot more sci-fi TV shows and there’s a lot, you know, a lot of people are having a go at it. So, you know, in a way, I feel like there was a little bit of a gap between, you know, it wasn’t like, you know, after Lord of the Rings, I can’t remember there being anything sort of immediately heavy fantasy, then Game of Thrones comes along and Game of Thrones is so massive that that becomes the sort of touchstone for everything. So now we’re living in the everyone’s trying to make a Game of Thrones. They don’t say like, oh, everyone’s still trying to tap into that Lord of the Rings magic. They say, you know, even Lord of the Rings, the TV show, they say, oh, it’s Amazon’s Game of Thrones instead of, oh, it’s Amazon’s Lord of the Rings films. So, you know, I feel like it’s maybe been a little, a little lost or just overshadowed by the, you know, just the TV sort of gargantuan phenomenon that is Game of Thrones. And the fact that it was like around for so many years has this kind of like pushed the other thing out of the limelight. If you know, it struck me this last week that loads of people, there have been loads of articles about Lord of the Rings going up because of the anniversary and people are like, oh shit, yeah, that’s one of my favorite things of all times. How did I forget about that? Like I was a little bit like that this week, just thinking about it and prepping for the podcast. I was like, oh, yeah, I haven’t watched this for ages. That’s mad. Like it’s one of my favorite films. Why didn’t I do that? So yeah, in my head, that’s how it sort of played out. Basically, the MCU does come along, and it has changed the way things are franchised generally and like, Lord of the Rings was before that. So it didn’t it wasn’t quite subject to the same thing. And then obviously, the Hobbit happened, but that was always going to happen anyway. And the TV show feels more like like how would The Matrix is a fourth one coming out or, you know, allegedly, there are Spider Men in this No Way Home film, at least that’s the kind of rumour mill, and like, there’s this kind of sort of like shockwave of old culture coming back. And what else can we do with this thing that was actually just meant to be three films and we left it alone? And now it has to kind of exist forever, which is how things are just sort of happening in the kind of franchise space at the moment, which is, you know, arguably depressing, I guess. But I don’t know, I don’t feel like it’s, it’s totally eroded pop culture as I know it. But yeah, Lord of the Rings was slightly before that. In terms of how it affects fantasy, though, I was thinking about Oblivion specifically, because when you look at its predecessor Morrowind, it was a much stranger looking game in terms of like, this kind of quite fungi-ish, strange looking sort of fantasy world. And by contrast, Oblivion looks like something that someone who has seen Lord of the Rings might enjoy. And I don’t know if it shakes some of the thinking, but I think it certainly extends its appeal beyond what it was before. Morrowind I always considered a bit of a niche game, but Oblivion was a massive success. I feel like there’s a changing attitude there where maybe people who always saw this kind of pop culture as being very geeky, just sort of suddenly were on board with it because Lord of the Rings just sold how exciting it was when it was done well. So that’s kind of my theory, Matthew. Yeah, I like that theory that that actually never occurred to me that sort of shift. But you’re right. Like, Oblivion is quite Lord of… you know, it opens with that shot of that big white tower. The music is quite Lord of the Rings-y in hindsight. That kind of big, like, wow, this lush orchestral is so exciting. It’s definitely not weird. It feels super mainstream from the off. Yeah, I think that’s a good theory. Have Bethesda ever talked about this? I don’t know, actually. I didn’t do enough research for that. I was too busy looking up seven out of ten action games from the first year. Ah, yes. Eat your hearts out, Retro Nauts. Yeah, so, yeah, it was very much a case of just that was just kind of like my thinking in terms of how that series has developed, just because Oblivion still has your, you know, sort of like Khajiit, which I know you love, Matthew. But like, it’s a bit less strange than Morrowind. And I think that, you know, obviously, as well, they’ve got like Sean Bean and stuff, the touchstones are there, the music, like you say, very much ties into that. I even think that when you look at the shift from Baldur’s Gate to Dragon Age of Bioware, like Dragon Age Origins feels a bit more like, it kind of starts with something that starts the battle that feels very Lord of the Rings-y. And like, that’s not to say Baldur’s Gate wasn’t a big success on PC, it was. But Dragon Age was like a multi-format success and a massive franchise that was born, basically. And again, I think that was 2009. And so this stuff emerges in the wake of Lord of the Rings, and I think it just leads to bigger and bigger things. And then obviously The Witcher is part of that, too. I don’t know if it’s just, you know, because some of the fantasy tropes are just so established now. I mean, it’s hard to say, like, did Lord of the Rings sort of… it didn’t invent, like, the look of elves, but, like, you know, we’re watching some of The Witcher Season 2 and just, like, the elf costumes and the kind of… even, like, the elf performances are… feel kind of sort of slightly ethereal and reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. And I don’t know if that’s just the fact that they’re all tapping into the concept of an elf, and that is just fundamentally what an elf is, you know, across the entire genre. And, you know, similarly with dwarves, you know, like, in my head, you know, dwarves will always have kind of heavy Scottish accents or, you know, that kind of vibe because that’s what they’re like in Lord of the Rings. That’s the first go-to. But maybe there are loads of examples of this before the Lord of the Rings that I just either haven’t seen or forgotten. Well, Lord of the Rings art direction is very inspired by, like, I think it’s the illustrations of Alan Lee, I think it is. I hope I got his name right there, but again, should have done more research, really. But like, yeah, I think that that’s, you know, fantasy art kind of inspired it, but they showed you how to put it on the screen. And I definitely think that when you look at the colour palette of The Witcher and Game of Thrones, like, The Lord of the Rings is basically a handbook on how to do that without it looking kind of campy or rubbish. So yeah, I think there’s something in that. I wonder how many of the people who made these shows watched all the behind the scenes features and that acted as like a school, you know, a school for filmmakers because they were so comprehensive. Those DVDs of Lord of the Rings and like the amount of stuff they showed, you know, it sort of showed you how to make, how to stretch sets, you know, like, you know, the mix of set and green screen, how to make that stuff like really sing and, you know, what really matters, what you want in camera and what you don’t like. That must have been an inspiration because, you know, I haven’t gone on to be a filmmaker or anything, but like I watched that stuff and absorbed it and felt like, oh, that’s how you do it. You know, it almost felt like a how to. Yeah, I think so. Complete side note, by the way, those DVD extras. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad happier than when he was watching the extras on the extended edition DVDs of The Lord of the Rings. Like just sort of like he’s not a very expressive man generally, but I think he was just so serene going into like such granular detail about the fucking shoes that Mario is wearing or whatever. Like I just said, it was just fulfilled in a way that was kind of like sort of beautiful. And yeah, I just wanted to kind of note that. But yeah, they were very comprehensive. Did he watch the multiple commentaries? I think he did actually. Yeah, he would have them on while he was ironing. Like it was like the most dad thing you can possibly imagine. But yeah, they got some real use those extended edition DVDs. But they were good. They were good like early noughties artifacts. So yeah, on that note, Matthew, theatrical versus extended editions. Where are you at with that? I’m kind of a theatrical guy. It might be awful. I don’t know if I’ve seen all the extended editions. I’ve got the extended Fellowship and I’ve definitely seen that. I don’t know if I’ve seen the others. Is that awful? Is that a been this podcast off moment? I don’t know. No, I don’t think so. I mean, they are really fucking long. It’s not practical to rewatch them every time. I personally think the extended edition of Fellowship is the best extended edition, just because otherwise you’ve got a lot of like Frodo and Sam taking L’s on the way to Mordor, just like a lot of basically L’s being dropped on them by the forces of Sauron, Spiders, Gollum, all that stuff. So it’s a hard journey for them. And on a rewatch, it’s not quite as fun as Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas doing their whole kind of lads on tour to Rohan thing. It’s just a bit harder work. So yeah, that’s my takeaway. I think if you can do anything to curtail that a bit, the theatrical cuts, that’s the other way to go. But yeah, that’s a far too granular answer, really, but good. So how did you kind of like, I guess you mentioned that you realized this week that this was one of your favorite things. Do you remember how you sort of fell away from it or how it became like less of a thing in your life? Because it really was like at the center of pop culture. And like I say, like The Matrix, I just burned out on it and I needed to just get away from it and I sort of put it, put it behind me a bit and then I’ve just come back to appreciate it in the last like maybe five years. What was your sort of like? Yeah, well, it coincided that the trilogy ended just as I went to university. And I did have a big Lord of the Rings poster in my room at university, but at the same time, I don’t know, those couple of years, that’s a period where you’re being inundated with so much new stuff and new people and new tastes. And I feel like you can change a lot in that time as well, like the stuff you’re into. And, you know, I was super into film. I think because I was such a big sort of film nerd, I just had a hunger. You know, I couldn’t just exist being a fan of one thing. I was a fan of film and wanted to see all film. So I was just like move on, move on, always moving on. So I don’t think it was like I went to university and I didn’t want to be a big Lord of the Rings guy, as if there was some sort of stigma attached to that, you know, it’s not like I didn’t want to turn up and be like, you know, the first thing I do is like a golem impression to someone because that’s just, I just, well, you shouldn’t do that. I don’t think. That’s weird, because that’s what you did when we met and it was like… Yeah, well, yeah, I’m different now. I found myself after uni. But at the time, it was just kind of like, it was the kind of thing you’d see someone else do and you’d be like, oh, yikes. It was like that version, that day’s version, like Borat impressions, you know what I mean? Yeah, because it was, yeah, it was a little bit pre, pre, it was definitely pre the film Borat because that came out when I was at uni. I did go and see Sean Astin talk at the union about the films and they got him to sign his autobiography afterwards. So I met, I met a hobbit at university. That was exciting. Except when I was queuing up, I turned around quite fast and smashed his kid in the head with my rucksack, which was embarrassing. So that’s my Sean Astin story. I had no idea that was going to, I had no idea that happened. That’s amazing. How have you waited this long to tell me that? Because I’m sure you told me about Sean Astin before doing some kind of like signing thing. But oh, that’s so good, Matthew. So you brained his kid. Good. Yeah. And I asked him because I was running a film society. I was at a college called Mansfield and I was like, oh, it’d be really funny if I got him to sign something to Mansfield Film Society so I could tell people that he was like the patron of the film society. So I was like, could you write like a little message of support rather than to? And he obviously misheard me and he wrote, this has been bugging me ever since, instead of writing Mansfield, he wrote Mansfrel. Is that a Lord of the Rings character? Well, that’s the thing. It sounds sort of fantasy-ish. So, yeah, I knocked over his kid and he wrote something wrong in my book. So yeah, that was, that is one of my two Shaun Heston anecdotes. That’s a great story. So you also went to, obviously you went to Oxford University and that’s like a big, didn’t we even go to the Tolkien pub on your stag day? Like this big, is that right? Is there a big Tolkien sort of thing there? Is that? Yeah, it’s the, it’s the Eagle and Child. Yeah, I don’t think we did go there. I never, I never went there at university just because it’s a bit of a touristy thing or it’s a little bit like, oh, it’s the Tolkien pub. I think that’s the one he went to with old CS. Lewis or whoever back in the day. Yeah, I mean, the town is very Tolkien-y for sure, but the films had all been out by then. So maybe like the buzz of it had subsided a bit. Yeah, I noticed the town was much bigger on Philip Pullman when I was there. And I thought, oh, is that because he’s alive and therefore it’s a bit easier to sort of talk about his stuff? Yeah, I don’t really know where I’m going with that one. The games were kind of interesting to see grow alongside it because I feel like they were sort of a mega budget priority 3A and then they sort of die off in the late noughties quite horribly and then there’s kind of a few years in the wilderness and then we get the kind of Shadow of Mordor, Shadow of War games from Warner Brothers when the license goes to them. Do you have any memories of the Lord of the Rings games generally, Matthew, and their part in the whole thing? Yeah, I can remember playing demos of them and thinking that particularly the direct movie tie-ins were incredibly swish and we’ll obviously talk about them in more detail in a second. But yeah, back then, if you were a big film you probably did have a licensed game, that’s obviously changed now, so it didn’t stand out as, oh this seems unusual. I thought they were unusually good at the time and I can remember thinking they were pretty much like what you’d want from a licensed game and I remember some of the chatter around them about how authentic they were and how they worked with the film production teams and the talent as well. So they were quite invested in them, but they probably got drowned out a bit. Movie licensed games weren’t necessarily where it was at for like, critical hits back then. So yeah, they were just kind of there, they weren’t right in front of me, but I was aware of them. Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to my relationship with them too. I was always a bit surprised to learn that Peter Jackson was apparently quite down on EA’s approach to the license, because obviously when he does the King Kong, another film that never fucking ends a few years later, he would do it with Ubisoft and wanted to work with Michel Ancel. And so that King Kong game is quite notable, quite interesting, it’s a favourite among people who want to get a thousand game of score instantly on Xbox. I thought the Lord of the Rings games were very glossy, and relative to a lot of the licensed games at the time, were actually pretty high-end, were actually not as bad as they could have been, and there were some genuinely interesting ones too, as we’ll get into. But yeah, I was always quite surprised that he was kind of down on them. So Matthew, shall we take a quick break there and come back and we’ll go through the games one by one? Welcome back to the podcast. So in this section, we’re going to go through all of the games that were based on The Lord of the Rings films. I think this is the case. I’m not actually sure exactly how the Warner Brothers ones were delineated, but I assume because they made the films that the games they published were based on the movies as well. So they’ve got the movie Gollum in them. That’s true, yeah. But otherwise, they’re quite loosely tied. I think actually War in the North actually has Aragorn in it as well. So the Viggo Mortensen version. So yes, we’ll get to that. So yeah, it’s a bit of an odd history, but there’s some interesting stuff here. So we’ll go through them one by one. So first up, Matthew, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers. Came out in 2002. There was no Fellowship of the Ring game. I always got the impression that maybe the success of the first film took people by surprise. And so there was suddenly this, I think EA announced that they were making basically like two tie-ins to the next two films and an RPG. And then it feels like they were kind of like sort of marshaled into action. And then that happened because normally you’d see a tie-in to the first film as well. But this game would amalgamate levels from both both Fellowship and The Two Towers. And this game is kind of why I wanted to do this podcast because I probably played it for like 100 hours or something. Oh, wow. Oh, I didn’t know that. It was a very dependable piece of fan service for me. So before I get to that, do you have any memories of this one? Yeah. So I’ve definitely played it. I don’t know if we like rented it or something. We played a demo of it for sure. Some of my memories of it blur in a little bit with Return of the King. But yeah, I remember it being quite heavy into look how authentic it is to the point that it sort of blends live action into the game, which I think at the time would have probably been a bit of a wow moment. Looking at it now, you’re like, you know, it obviously goes from like a film clip and then all of a sudden, Aragorn might not actually have fingers or something. And it’s like, yeah, it’s like one sec, one second ago, that was Gimli. Now it’s a foot with a helmet on. So there’s some, yeah, some slightly weird stuff with that. But like, yeah, I remember them definitely leaning into it. It feeling like quite a fun bit of fan service, feeling quite authentic. Looking back on it, like watching some of it today, I haven’t replayed this for this. So I should I should add incredibly dark game, like very visually, very, very hard to see a lot of it, which which may be kind of like help sell how like amazing it it looked, just because you can’t see any kind of rough edges. It’s so dark. I saw an interesting thing, actually, someone positing that they thought this may have been just an Aragon game at one point, because it’s kind of told from his perspective, the tutorial character has basically the same controls as Aragon and the cut scenes often Aragon folk like you you play the Aragon role in the film. And if you don’t play as Aragon, it costs Aragon as the other characters in quite a weird way. So yeah, that’s an interesting one. Yeah. Yeah. So like, basically, the Battle of Helm’s Deep, if you if you play as Legolas, Aragon basically does all the Legolas scenes in that in that fight, sort of shooting all the arrows down the steps and all that. So that’s a bit odd. Yeah, I think I think it’s because so that that is a good theory that it might have just been an Aragon game. I can sort of see that because, yeah, he is present for all the different set pieces. But like, I think that it’s partly because if you play as Legolas in those Helm’s Deep bits, you kind of need someone else who’s ranged to fire arrows and like give me throws axes and he’s not as good. So I always think that’s why they defaulted to Aragon. That’s really granular. But one of the things I actually like about this game is how they actually delineate between the three characters. So you have Gimli, who’s this quite heavy, kind of short range guy, and his long range attack isn’t like as fast as either Legolas or Aragon, but he’s like very like deadly up close. And then you have Legolas who is very light and like can fire arrows really quickly and has quite a lot of them to shoot. And then you have Aragon, who’s like smack bang in the middle in terms of like expertise. You see in the first film that he’s got like a bow and arrow and so he can use it, but he’s never as good as Legolas with using it. And so I thought that was actually like really elegantly done. And like this is best described as like a side scrolling hack and slash game. Like it’s got it’s a little bit Devil May Cry. It’s definitely not as nuanced as Devil May Cry. But it would kind of rate you on like a good, great, perfect kind of like sort of bad kind of like kills of enemies and it would encourage you to be sort of creative with your combos. The progression system in this was unlocking more combos, has some nice really kind of like thumpy attacks where you’d like sort of do AOE damage and knock over like three eric high. And that that was really cool. Had a really kind of quite nice, the Enterprise Square and R2. This is a man who’s definitely played this game for 100 hours. I don’t have as much of this to say about every game I should say. Particular soft spot for this one. And then like, if you if you press the button combination right, the entire fight around you stops and you perform this like perfect kill on the on the on the enemy, which is really cool. And what what it lacks is it lacks scale. It feels quite like it happened quite quickly. And you never quite feel like you’re fully at Helms Deep. It breaks Helms Deep up into basically there’s a bit where you’re knocking down ladders that are climbing, then there’s a bit where you’re shooting these like basically like gunpowder wielding Uruk-hai. They’re just blowing up constantly at this like exposed wall. And then there’s finally a big fight in a courtyard, which still isn’t really like massive scale. So even though the cutscenes you see the big Peter Jackson kind of like set pieces, you never quite get the same sense of it in the game. So yes, I was quite fond of it. It also had a kind of like Devil May Cry Bloody Palace style, kind of like post game mode where you basically went up the Tower of Orthanc clearing out floors after floor of different enemies until you got to the top and then… That is such a video game concept, climb, climb old Saruman’s Tower, killing enemies on every floor. Yeah. And then at the end you get to hear very off brand Christopher Lee, it’s definitely not him basically taunt you and then fly off as a crow or something, I don’t know. But I was big into this and then Isildur, who you play in the tutorial, he was the unlockable bonus character. I thought that was cool, the fact that it had the opening to the film is like a playable level. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Just because it also allows them to tell the entire story of the film because they start back then and do all the Galadriel stuff. And like you say, this was like a big show of what a DVD kind of console can do game, where it’s like, you know, here are some here are literally clips from the film before the film is actually out in the case of the two towers. And then it transitions into gameplay. What I will say, Viggo Mortensen, in the voice acting for this game is the most tired sounding man I’ve ever heard. Like it’s like, what if Aragorn just took like four Summon X and drank a bottle of whiskey? Like, it’s just like, not, he didn’t sound like he was doing his best work, I’ll be honest. It’s no… It’s definitely him, right? Yeah, it is him. Yeah, because you see him in the behind the scenes clips and he seems a bit like, why am I here? How about the whole thing? It’s not as good as his performance in A History of Violence, I’ll be honest. So yes. It’s top five though. For sure. So that’s the two towers game, Matthew. I was really obsessed with it. And then the next year came Return of the King, which was actually developed in house EA. This was so good looking for the time. And this did have more of the scale that that last game lacked. I personally thought the combat system wasn’t as good. I don’t think it quite had the same, I don’t know, just the same feel. And I don’t think they did the extra characters he added as well. So you could place Frodo in this one and Sam and Gandalf doing spells and stuff. I also personally was much more into the Helm’s Deep set piece than the Minus Tirith being invaded set piece and then running across Palinor fields, all that stuff. And also like the whole army of the dead thing was pretty daft. I didn’t think that was a very good sort of plot device. Sorry Tolkien. But yeah, did you play this one? Because this was actually acclaimed. This was like properly rated by media at the time. It’s like over 80 on Metacritic. Yeah, again, how I’m not entirely sure, but I’ve watching bits today. I was like, oh yeah, I remember this. It had, yeah, I think it didn’t have it didn’t use the same like film game interplay things. The first game, I don’t think. I don’t think it’s quite as pronounced, but it’s still I’m pretty sure it still has film cut scenes in it. Yeah, I just I remember the first one being maybe a bit more like complete fan service. Looking at some of the clips of this today, I thought, oh, wow, they really ripped off God of War. It was before God of War, which is absurd in terms of like, you’re fighting in the foreground and something amazing is happening in the background, which is a trick I’ve always sort of loved, but I thought was sort of, I don’t know, I pioneered elsewhere. But yeah, it looks pretty amazing. I’d forgotten how good these games looked, actually. Yeah, I think this one looks like a notably a step above The Two Towers as well. Like the characters have a lot more definition. And it feels very big budget, because, you know, these were the big budget games of the day, really. But I think it’s easy to conflate some of the NAFA James Bond games that are happening around this time with how EA was handling this license, which was a lot better. So this is like the studio that goes on to be Visceral Games, right? This is like, I’m pretty sure Glenn Schofield is involved in this one. I think so. Yeah I think I saw his name in some like developer diaries and things. So I was looking at it going like, is there any take on this where you can say like, oh, here are elements of like the proto-visceral thing, but it’s quite hard to touch to tie this to like Dead Space. It’s going to do quite an arduous link of, there’s a bit where you fight zombies and ghosts in the path of the dead. But I don’t know, I don’t think you can say like, hmm, does this feel like an early take at Dante’s Inferno? I think like there’s maybe something in that. I mean, it is like the set piece presentation is very good. There is like Nazgul flying around in the background and shit, and like, they simply didn’t do that stuff in the Two Towers game, probably because they didn’t have time, probably because it made in a year, you know. So yeah, I think it was actually like legit for the time and people, I definitely think people have forgotten how acclaimed this was. Note to the listener at home, that is not me saying go buy this on eBay. I would say just go watch it on YouTube just to kind of remind yourself of how pretty it was and then look at some of the review scores because yeah, this was acclaimed. My own sort of former sub-editor, Tony Ellis, reviewed this piece of game and gave it 83% and I think even compared it to the illustrations of Alan Lee if I recall, but yeah, so very shiny. Yeah, I slightly prefer the Two Towers. I think it was just, I don’t know, I think I preferred having three characters down one path rather than like all these different characters off doing their own thing. I was never interested in playing as the Hobbits for example. Yeah, they’re quite a hard sell, you know, just very weak, scared, two weak scared boys. Like again, that’s just real life. Yeah, I think it’s even got a bit in Mount Doom this one where Frodo is kind of running around and presumably about to have his finger bitten off by Gollum. But yeah, tough break for Frodo Baggins. But yes, so that’s Return of the King. That was 2003. After that, I’m going to bundle two games together here. So Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth, that was in 2004, and then there’s a sequel in 2006. And these were real-time strategy games on PC. The second one was actually released on Xbox 360 as well during a time where EA was doing kind of like Command and Conquer games that run 360 on PC. And these come right in the kind of middle, I suppose, like towards the tail end of the sort of golden age of the RTS. Just they were still big business at the time. And this was like the game I wanted more than anything else at the time, but something that properly gave you that sort of like large scale, top down view of the of the action. And the first one has more of a kind of like living map quite lengthy campaign. The second ones are much more straightforward. Pick good or bad and then play a bunch of campaign missions for each one. And yeah, I think that they hold up pretty well. They’re quite good looking games. So I actually played the second one on 360 today. I’ll confess these are you cannot get hold of these on PC now unless you got a disk drive and a way to get them working. Like they are just out there. All these games for me are just like you cannot buy them now. And because these are PC only games, they kind of like doomed a little bit. But the fact that the second one was on 360 means that you can actually get it and play it on on Xbox 360. And it does look pretty good. Like the controls are quite good. They use a kind of painting mechanic for you to select units. And it’s got a fair amount of scale to it. Definitely better on PC, of course, and has like HD mods to make it look extra shiny. Is it like a proper like, so I must admit, I don’t know anything about these games. Like I’ve never played them. I don’t I don’t think I’ve even watched any footage of them. Is it like a base building, like resource grabbing type game or is it something a bit different? Yeah, it does have that element to it. Yeah, like it’s sort of like, you know, the the different factions will have their own ways of accumulating resources, and then you kind of build units, then you push basically. And like the campaign missions are a bit more sort of bespoke, a bit more like, oh, these dudes are attacking from the south, so you have to build an army and like fend them off and stuff. But it has a skirmish mode and you can go in there with them, set the number of resources you go in there with. Yeah, so it is actually like a proper strategy game. It has a bit more scale than some of the Halo Wars, I would say, which you mentioned on the episode was a little bit like limited in its scope. But this isn’t like some of the battles get pretty busy on 360, where you got like eagles flying around, you’ve got like, you know, riders kind of running into like goblins and there’s just like a lot going on. Has it got those big elephant lads? Yes, yep, they make the cut. In the first game, they had Rohan and Gondor as different races and then in the second one they kind of merged them into like one man race basically. And what they do as well is in the second one, they actually, well the first one follows the plot of the films and has a lot of the film characters. The second one is like a kind of war going on in the north between like elves, dwarves and other stuff. So you actually get some quite colourful looking elven and dwarven units and stuff and it’s got, this is where they start to take a bit more license with it, I think. But I think it does result in a pretty strong game. I was quite impressed by it. And yeah, they got, they roped in old Hugo Weaving to do some narration for the second one. And he says things like, purge the goblin filth and like the goblins will pay for this. And it’s like, pretty sure that wasn’t in the film scripts. And then like a little version of Arwen, not played by Liv Tyler, will come on and be like, father, I have returned. And it’s just a very strange mix. Like you sense them maybe losing grip of the license just because the films were over at that point. So, you know, they just basically had to rope in who they could to do it. Does it use characters as like hero units? Is there like an Arwen and Sonya type deal? Yeah, basically, they’ve got like different sort of powers they can apply in battle and you have to keep them alive and stuff like that. It’s got loads of hero units, actually. And because there are six factions in the second one, that’s a lot of different characters that can take part. That sort of thing has done very well, I think. These are legit and it’s a shame you can’t get them on PC. These would be perfect for GOG, but I imagine the license is a nightmare to untangle. This isn’t in the Lord of the Rings Total War. No, I think there are mods for various Total War games where you can do that, though. I think that would be so obvious. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It does seem like a good fit, but like I guess at the time EA just had the license, so they sat on it. So, Matthew, I assume you didn’t play these, right? No, no, not at all. I just, yeah, just strategy games. Not my bag. Not even the Allure of Lord of the Rings could pull me in. Yeah, I missed out on them at the time just because my dad didn’t have a PC powerful enough to play these, which was heartbreaking because I wanted to play these more than anything else. Yeah, but they were definitely good attempts at it and they were acclaimed by critics very well. So right up to this point, you still got EA basically making acclaimed games based on this license. So they took it pretty seriously and put out some good stuff. So next up, probably the weirdest one we’re going to discuss, The Lord of the Rings The Third Age, 2005, so I discussed this a bit on a previous Gamescore episode and I was absolved of course. I’m still alive in that reality, whatever it is. Yeah, I don’t know what that was based on because I do not know this game. So it is a Final Fantasy X ripoff and I was playing it this week and it’s so firmly a ripoff, down to the battle system, the fonts, the layout of the world, how random battles happen, the different powers. It’s like the same game in so many ways, but it’s really strange to see EA make a Japanese RPG basically, but that is what they do. Right down to, I don’t know if you remember in Final Fantasy X, their battle system shows you a running order of who’s about to attack and this game has that. They just took the whole thing and put it in this game. This though commits what I think is a bit of a sin with these games, which is, and I’m never into this, they don’t have the characters from the film, they have knockoffs who are like the characters in the films and I always think that washes a bit wrong. As in like voice actor knockoffs or like the whole character is like a Gandalf alike. Gandalf is in the story, this is where it’s really weird, right? So one of your characters is called like a Barathor, they’ve got very generic names and it’s like he’s the generic like Boromir Aragorn mashup. It’s pretty much just the off-brand versions of these different characters and they’re sort of tailing the fellowship throughout the story and they get involved in like all these different set pieces. You’ll be surprised to learn Matthew that your party in this game were there when Gandalf fought the Balrog and watched him fall into the abyss. Well they were just on the other side of the bridge. Yeah basically but you fight in a battle with Gandalf against the Balrog and like they basically and then film clips play and like it’s really really weird like really out there and wild. I like the idea that the suggestion that there were these other Fellowship of the Rings who were just like a bit late for starting off and so they’re constantly like in the background kind of squinting to try and see the action and then when Gandalf falls down in pit with the Balrog they’re just like oh did he did he go down I can’t see oh god oh I hope he didn’t fall that would have been terrible they look sad they look sad about something I would that game would be that would fucking rule a game with that tone. Yeah, they would it would be like yeah that would kind of work if it was like you and me or in the kind of like dumb fellowship, do you know what I mean? Except we’d would have deliberately have set off late yeah we’ll we’ll see you guys at the Prancing Pony yeah and like we end up staying in like Brie for two days and like we’re like we’re like listen let’s just go and put up with Tom Bombadil he’s awful but it does mean we’ll have an easier ride. Yeah get us out of any responsibility yeah yeah well instead of taking like the the sort of ferry at that lake with a Nazgul where we walk around and it takes fucking days like that’d be our vibe for sure. So a genuine curio this but I don’t I wouldn’t say to people to go out rush out and play this I would say watch it on YouTube again like check it out I was like pleased to have played it and when I tweeted about it actually a lot of our listeners said oh I have good memories of playing this it is actually like it’s pretty good for what it is a facsimile of Final Fantasy X again as someone who loves that game very strange to just see a retrofit version of it with knockoff Lord of the Rings characters one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen does it have a blitzball equivalent no it doesn’t but like when the random battle starts the eye of Sauron can flash when they in the transition screen and stuff but it’s really weird how similar to Final Fantasy X it is like so strange does it have good production values is it like quite is it still OEA still throwing money at Lord of the Rings yeah it’s got Ian McKellen recording new bad dialogue for it so they were they went all out yeah so Ian McKellen was right there to the end I think I think there’s like maybe some new Hugo Weaving dialogue in there too yeah so um it’s a weird game but I kind of like enjoyed ticking it off but um I don’t think I can get through all 20 hours of it I got the baroque bit and I was like right I’ve seen this now it’s very silly oh well Thank you for your dedication of getting that far. Well, you know, it’s just I’ve got to do my due diligence on the podcast. It’s not that far into the game. They always throw the barrel, I’ll get you pretty early in these games. Get a bit spicy and then sort of trail off. Incidentally, The Two Towers and Return of the King both had Game Boy Advance games. They’re like Diablo rip-offs. And don’t get too excited. It’s very, very basic and kind of an isometric sort of game. But like, yeah, you kind of go through these dungeons, kind of hacking and slashing enemies, picking up loot and stuff. So yeah, this is back in the days where obviously a handheld version of a game would be completely different to the main thing. So yeah, interesting times. But have the same, the same sexy box art though, as the console games, you’d be like, oh cool, that looks so good. And then you buy it and be like, wah wah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, like that was definitely a thing. So yeah, EA still kind of flying high here, mid-noughties. I guess Lord of the Rings interest was kind of latent. It sold a million copies apparently, so very popular. People wanted to play it. And an RPG was a good fit for Lord of the Rings. And if there’s one criticism you could level at those PS2 games, they’re very short. You could fire through them very quickly. So this was a lot longer, more than 20 hours this game. So I actually I had a quick Return of the King thing. I forgot to mention. Oh, yeah. Go on. I was watching a video about it today and someone was saying that the guy was saying that the it had a bonus documentary about hobbits who like games. And it was a documentary about Elijah Wood and Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan talking about which of them was the best gamer. And they were all like, oh, Elijah Wood’s the best gamer. He’s really good. And this guy in his video had I don’t know how he done it. I don’t know if it was like cameo or something, but he managed to get Sean Astin recording like a little clip about like now saying like, actually, I, you know, I was really good at games. So Elijah Wood’s talking about which I thought was quite sweet in the background. You clubbing his kid over the head with a bag. His kid walks by with just a huge rucksack shaped indent in their head. I’m like, oh, no, oh, that’s so funny. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s that is interesting. Yeah. It does feature on the pit, there were like loads of DVD style extras for the games, actually, like the first game, the Two Towers game, that does have Elijah Wood kind of playing it in there and being like excited about it. Whereas when they interview Viggo Mortensen and Ian McKellen about it, they’re just like, I don’t know what the fuck this is, but I’m here, I guess, kind of thing. Huge 2002 energy of Elijah Wood being like, oh my God, it looks just like me. And then you look at the character on screen and it’s like, you know, it’s basically just a rectangle with Elijah Wood texture on it. Yeah, for sure. Definitely like deep 2002 energy there. Yeah, so I think they were sort of like, they were throwing money at it and it was manifesting in different ways. They’d always get the music, they’d always get the look right, in theory, but they would fluctuate wildly. So one of the cheapo games I’m getting to here is The Lord of the Rings Tactics, 2005, a forgotten PSP-only tactical RPG. I meant to play this for this episode, but I didn’t, so I just watched it a bit on YouTube. Very cheap looking, kind of like, you know, move characters across different squares, just kind of a bit like knock it out sort of thing. Made use of the UMD though, it did play video clips from the films in it, because that was what the PSP could do, of course. And so yeah, but that’s just sort of, I think speaks to how big the PSP was at the time. I was hoping you were going to tell us like, oh, there’s a tactics game and it was made by like Julian Gollop. So even though it looks terrible, it’s got this amazing pedigree, because you often get that where people are like, oh, actually, this is like the Final Fantasy tactics guy. He actually did this. And you’re like, holy shit, I didn’t know that. But sadly, no, it sounds like. Or like you’d hear about Grasshopper doing like a game based on Burger King or something. You’re like, holy fuck, I want to play this kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, so speaking of the money running out, we come to The Lord of the Rings Conquest in 2009. So really far down the line. I was not a fan of this game. Don’t massively blame Pandemic for this. They kind of were shut down like pretty soon after this and The Saboteur, their other game they were working on. And I was a big fan of the Battlefront games and the Mercenaries games. I thought they were a good studio. So it’s kind of a bummer that they they’re just one of the studios that EA shut down. But this was really bad. It was really badly balanced. It was not fun to do any of the action in it. And it felt so off-brand for The Lord of the Rings. It felt really like they were just stretching beyond the license into just being really kind of silly. So you’re picking like mage, warrior, archer classes, going to battle. The kind of thing of note here is that when you play the evil campaign, it ends with the Balrog invading the Shire, which is quite funny. But it’s so cheaply done. This is a weird one. Regular listener Matt Pearce gave away a load of PS3 games that he had a few years ago. One of them that I took was Lord of the Rings Conquest and I played it again a bit this week and it’s just… I find that the battlefront games from that era are really playable still, but this is just not good. Do you ever play this one, Matthew? No, I did not. I remember it getting a rough ride at the time. Just thinking like mad that this thing is so perfect for it. The idea that it’s not a good fit and I was watching some of it today and the combat just looked really flat and just the third person perspective or the way they framed the action like lost all the scale. You never saw the scale of the battle or the size of the battlefield, it seemed in any of the footage. It just seemed… You’re constantly on battlements where there were big turrets blocking off what should have been the vast Lord of the Rings epic nature of it. Yeah, this just looked hugely misguided. Yeah, it seemed like such a win on paper but you’re so late with it at this point as well. 2009, Lord of the Rings is a little bit passe at this point I think. Or at least as passe as it would ever get in its lifespan. The idea of this game that comes along and just a very crude take on a formula that was otherwise proved to be very, very good for Star Wars. Disappointing on two fronts. Disappointing Lord of the Rings game and disappointing that that battlefront formula didn’t extend beyond Star Wars because it is a good fit for a variety of different licenses and in theory this should have been good but just didn’t have the money or the time behind it. So at that point Matthew, EA loses the license. I think at midnight of the end of 2009, December 31st, all the games go off sale because they no longer have the rights to them so at that point Warner Brothers which is obviously spinning up as a publisher at this point gets the license back and starts making their own games and so they inject a little bit of money into it. The first game they make is the Lord of the Rings Aragorn’s Quest and this is like a kiddie game. I don’t really have much to say about this here. It’s like a Lego style kiddie game. Do you have any thoughts on this one? I don’t think we actually reviewed this in Endgamer. We’re certainly not on Metacritic for it, which is odd. I do remember someone playing this in the office for Gamesmaster. It had this quite nice framing device in that it was told after. It’s like the trilogy from the perspective. You play as Aragorn but it’s like Sam Wise telling his kids about what Aragorn got up to. It is a slightly kid-friendly take on it, which is okay because I think there is… Lord of the Rings was like… weren’t they PG’s? Kids could see it and kids would be into it. It was just super flat and repetitive. A little bit like a fable, but like fable-like or like my first fable in terms of how it played. Nothing particularly spectacular. I think… didn’t Ash on… Ash Day on Twitter say that he thought this might have been a Battalion Wars game at some point? Yeah, which I don’t think quite makes sense, right? Because that was Cuju and this was TT Fusion, so I don’t quite see how that was the case, but I guess maybe that’s a good moment. I will say, the Battalion Wars games did have large worlds, which this sort of has. I could almost draw a line based on that simple fact of there’s some similarities and the action isn’t particularly satisfying, it hasn’t got a lot of physical weight to it, but annoyingly that’s a fact I’ve introduced into the podcast but forgot to research more, so make of that what you will. That’s fine. We can just call that a dubious rumour and then we don’t have to delete it from the podcast. That’s our new section of the podcast which is Ashley Day’s dubious rumours. Good stuff. Yeah, so I remember this coming around and again I was really burned out on Lord of the Rings at this point. I was just not interested and I don’t know, a kind of kiddy game. I think in terms of setting a stall out, a sort of kid-focused game just wasn’t really what I was interested in, but that was very much me then and me now wouldn’t feel as passionately about such things, but yeah, that was the Warner Brothers’ first stab at it and it does sound interesting in terms of scale and stuff. Warner Brothers would go on to bigger and better things. That didn’t happen next because the next game was The Lord of the Rings War in the North. This was by Snowblind Studios, who Warner Brothers acquired, and they were the creators of the Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance games on PS2. I don’t know if our listeners know those games, but they were basically Diablo but set in Baldur’s Gate sort of universe because they couldn’t do Baldur’s Gate on console at the time, but obviously, you know, very popular series on PC. So pretty solid, extremely hard games on PS2. This was a riff again on Diablo, but like this time, you again had like knockoff characters. So you have like an Aragorn-like character, a Legolas-like character, and a Gimli-like character. And it’s just they all meet Aragorn in The Prancing Pony before Frodo arrives. And that’s the start of the story. And it’s just from that point in, I was just like, this is not good. And it didn’t really win people around. It was kind of like just quite a rough and boring take on that universe. Did you ever play this one, Matthew? I didn’t. But I do like the idea that as well as the party from The Third Age, or whatever it was called, who are like several days behind, you have this third party, which is like even further behind, or maybe between the idea of all these increasingly shitter Fellowshipers of the Ring. I quite like that pitch. Well, in theory, they were slightly further ahead. So like, if they were, they did a terrible job of it, because by the time everyone got there in the films, it was still a fucking nightmare. They hadn’t done any work. It’s a bit more like, the kind of story sets up as, again, like I mentioned that the battle for Middle-earth 2 basically like was set in the kind of war in the north where there were like dwarves and elves battling some goblins or something. And this kind of like was set in that context. The thing I did like in this game was, like one of your sort of like, sort of ultimate moves was to basically call in the eagle, which would like dive bomb and then do a bunch of AOE damage and fly off and I thought pretty sure that’s not what they did in the books there. Bit off canon. But yes. So, how do you feel about, side note, how do you feel about the people who complain why didn’t they just use the eagles to fly all the way to Mount Doom? Oh, I don’t know. Like again, I think by the time that discourse spun up, I was like a bit done with Lord of the Rings. That was like the most tiresome discourse. You could even look on someone’s face. If someone mentioned Lord of the Rings, you could tell instantly the person in the room who’s going to be that guy. Yeah. I mean, like, I don’t know, maybe the Eye of Sauron would have fucking shot it down or something. I have no idea. But yeah, that’s just sort of like a sort of what counted as a conversation starter in the early noughties. Do you know what I mean? We didn’t have Twitter yet, so what could we do? Yeah. So yeah, War in the North, not very good either. Next up though, LEGO Lord of the Rings in 2012. Oh, so good. I thought this was a great game. A really nice translation of the films. The first in the LEGO series to actually use voice clips from the films integrated very well but obviously given that trademark silly touch to retell the story. But notably introduced an open world sort of like Middle-earth to walk around basically. You can walk from Hobbiton to basically Mount Doom and do the entire journey and kind of free roam and then kind of revisit it with the different characters later on. I thought this was hugely impressive and they put some like real effort into capturing like the lighting and the style of the setting and it was a real step up for LEGO games at a time where I thought they were getting really good actually Matthew. Did you remember play this one? Yeah, yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, I think they’ve always been just amazing at sort of harnessing licenses when they have them, well, they always have them, but like their art team just do like wondrous things in terms of really putting you in those places and recreating them like they’re sort of, it seems condescending to say they’re secretly some of the best looking games of around but they kind of are, you know, you don’t really think of them as that but you know, because maybe some of the backgrounds aren’t interactive or anything but like the scale of them, the variety of them, what you see, the fact that you get like you say the whole shebang and you know, you get the levels that kind of dig deeper into set pieces but you get that open world to kind of tell the overall story, I mean, that’s the structure that’s missing from those early EA games. I think these are probably the best Lord of the Rings games in terms of like, if you’re into the films, this gives you the most of the films to play. I think the fact that Lego games are a mixture of light combat, exploration and puzzle solving means that all the different characters make sense in this game, like having the hobbits do their weird little hobbity things kind of makes perfect sense. You can do smaller levels which are, you know, more narratively focused, like the stuff you do with Gollum in this, but you can also do the its version of, you know, Hell’s Deep or the big battles and they’re pretty cool, like the big battlefield scenes in this. So I mean, this, correct me if I’m wrong, I think this also opens with the same playable prologue that Two Towers did in terms of you get to play that fight at the start and chop off old Sauron’s fingers and all that. So yeah, like this just feels like totally, totally comprehensive to me. Yeah, for sure. I think this is like the ultimate Lord of the Rings game. Like it’s the one that I was the most excited to replay this week. I was just kind of like, I just, because it feels just so detailed down to like the very specific flavor of some of the kind of hub-like settings. Like when you go to Hobbiton, it feels, it feels like you’re actually there, but in a slightly more kid-friendly sort of like Lego flavor. And just like has obviously such love for the material, but just finds the right tonal balance to kind of not offset what’s good about them. And like, yeah, just really complete feeling. And it’s right around the time as well that TT Games was doing like that Lego Batman 2, which is a game I loved. And then they would do the Marvel Super Heroes in 2013 as well, which is one of my favorites too. So they were getting really good at integrating the open world stuff. You know, just because it was kind of like the next frontier ready for those games, because you know, there is, there was like an established puzzle adventure platformer formula, but like, if you can add this stuff to it as well, it suddenly becomes something else. And that it’s like that sort of like fun little puzzle design writ large and then the exploration bit they’re actually quite good at as well, because they’re really good at packing their levels of secrets. So yeah, real good this one, Matthew, and bit of a weird one in terms of like picking up and playing it now. It’s not unlike any of the current gen consoles. You can’t buy it on Xbox, the Xbox Store is on Steam, though. So, okay. Yeah, that is a way that people can play it. A Lego Hobbit game would follow. I never played that one. I confess. Did you play that one? No, I didn’t. I’m sure it’s fine. I mean, it’s got weaker source material, but I’m sure they did just as careful a job. Yeah, I think they only did the first two films for that one. Oh, that’s right. I hope they… Side note for TT. I hope they bring out that Star Wars game soon. That feels like they’ve been working on that for like 5,000 years. That’s a great mystery, how they’ve gone from being one of the most productive teams, like a couple of LEGO games a year, to like there hasn’t been one for a year and a half, two years it feels like. I remember people were really buzzing about it when it was out of your free. Yeah, I think you like fly between planets. It’s like, it’s not just open world, it’s like space. That’s insane. That’s cool. It has all nine films in it as well, right? So, yeah, it might be a big undertaking. Yeah, maybe it’s just, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But it’s just funny, like there was a time where you were like so many LEGO games, like you just couldn’t move from them, like the LEGO movies had their own games. Yeah. I seen that we were reviewing one like every other week on O&M, but yeah, I hope they come back and still nail it because they’re like some of the best kids games around or family games. I like them too. It’s, you know, they’re good for everyone. Yeah, for sure. And like around the same time too was also LEGO City Undercover, a very good game too. Oh, that is so good. Yeah. If you ever do a Wii U draft, Matthew, I’m sure that will come up. Yeah, go ahead and put it out there, that’s great. So yeah, that was that was the next Warner Brothers sort of like gambit. Then finally, they do something big, expensive and shiny, which is it comes in 2014, Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor. So Matthew, maybe you should talk about this one because we’re equally experienced with these games. In fact, I haven’t played Shadow of War as much. So I look forward to leaning on your expertise. Yeah, these are weird ones. I think they’re good. Sometimes great games, but the overall take is I don’t think they’re very good Lord of the Rings games. They are set between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and is about basically what’s going down in Mordor in that time. You play Talion, who is a ranger of Gondor who gets killed at the start of the game and then gets sort of spliced with the soul of this dead elf blacksmith called Celebrimbor, who is a character from the extended Lord of the Rings lore as told in the Silnerillion, which is like the fuck off Tolkien’s world bible or whatever you want to call it. It basically fills in all the gaps. Peter Jackson took a lot of stuff from it to like fatten the hobbit out into three films. They’ve taken this thing, so it’s this weird splice where it’s like a bit of Tolkien in Celebrimbor and his whole deal, which is kind of all about how the ring comes to be, which is kind of interesting, mixed in with stuff they’ve made up, which is the Italian stuff, mixed in with a hint of the film. Like we said, it is the Gollum visual design. I don’t know if it is actually Andy Serkis in the game, but it kind of riffs on that. What’s also strange is that these two games then have stuff which is in the film and kind of more so in Shadow of War, which is the sequel, like Shallab or Shellab? The Spider. Shellab, I think, right? Yeah, and turns it into this sexy lady. Which is so, it’s this real hodgepodge of influences and art styles. Kind of hard to place it in, specifically in the film universe. And especially by the end of the second one, it feels like it’s gone off, it’s entirely its own thing in terms of lore and how it fits into Lord of the Rings. So, I think as an actual Lord of the Rings thing, it’s a bit disastrous. I think as stories, I hate these games, they’re very flat. It’s very easy to lose, like there isn’t much story and you lose track of it. That’s mainly because what’s interesting about it is it has this big emergent villain system, the Nemesis system, where as you’re killing orcs, if they kill you, they become stronger, they gain reputations. There’s this big hierarchy of the world that’s kind of like… There’s basically persistent goons is the pitch. And that storytelling, and keeping on top of what’s going on with that, is almost divorced entirely from what the games are about. So by the end, I think you’re more invested in this story that you’ve crafted with the orcs than the actual Lord of the Rings stuff, which I don’t think is a spicy take. I think most people will say, like, if anything, I think the more you’re into Lords of the Rings, the more egregious you’ll find what this does with that lore. I mean, in reality, you just fucking ignore it because it’s just boring. And you focus on chopping up orcs with a really good Batman Arkham combat system. It’s basically the rough pitch here. Yeah, I think so. That’s basically it. I think I like the idea that in this game, you’re sort of cheering on your orc fail son and just being like, come on, lad, and then get them to the top of the chain. And that’s very satisfying. Yeah, it’s a weird one. It’s so derivative of Batman and it’s basically Batman meets the stealth from Assassin’s Creed. So similar, distractingly so. And it’s annoying because it’s got this absolute, truly original idea at the heart of it, which is these persistent orcs, which is just brilliant. And it can trigger some amazing things, particularly when you start brainwashing them and setting them, sending them as almost like double agents back into the orc army to like trigger later as like sleeper cells so they can start assassinating people. You can engineer some really cool stuff, but it’s almost like you have to fight what the game actually wants you to do to really like engage properly with that stuff, which has always been the problem. And then the sequel, it adds like a huge amount to that orc hierarchy and what you can do to and orc behavior and those characters feel like a lot more. There’s a much bigger pool of traits from them to pull from and like much weirder characters emerge, but it also blows the scale of the game out massively. And it actually gets to a point where it feels like instead of playing one huge game with this amazing hierarchy, you’re kind of playing across like multiple world regions with smaller hierarchies. I actually think the second game doesn’t work as well as the first in terms of like that story emerging. It feels a lot bittier that you have you have lots of run ins with lower level orcs rather than developing like one uber nemesis. It’s my memory of the sequel. Funny thing about our first game is it’s quite paired down. There’s like a sort of brown area and then a sort of green area and like you go around doing these sort of like very basic missions, but the nemesis system is so clearly the heart of the game, like it’s the beating heart of it and it’s the thing you pay attention to more than the objectives or anything else. Just because it is so interesting and yeah, I think like anything you can do to give that stuff breathing room is good, but if it’s a big unwieldy open world game, it’s harder to do that right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. There’s too much stuff distracting you. I think it just loses sight of its main strength in the sequel and it’s annoying because they are, on paper, a lot more charismatic, like this one that sings, for example, he sings little songs, so if he becomes your nemesis, you’re going to keep running into him and they’ve written a lot of like bespoke stuff for a lot of different characters or potential characters. The interesting thing about these games is that the narrative mastermind behind them is the guy who is like the narrative mastermind behind Fallout New Vegas. So he left Bethesda, he left Obsidian and went over to do this and like the nemesis system is like the thing he makes, is the clever bit. But it did always strike me that, like around that, just how poor the story is. That’s the thing I don’t really understand is like how you can have this cool like narrative design but the actual nuts and bolts narrative is very, very bad. Like Gollum is just confused, you know, using famous faces from that world as quest givers, Gollum’s basically there asking you to do, you know, little shitty Gollum things and the spider lady there. It’s just, you know, it’s just very clumsy. They crack out the bullrog again as like a sort of boss character. The second one has like more obvious LOTR stuff in it, but none of it lands, I don’t think, in terms of, you know, it doesn’t trade on your love or nostalgia for those films. It doesn’t do much with it. Do you know, did you ever finish Shadow of War? No, just the first one. Can I tell you how it ends? Yeah, please do. No, no, go for it. So yeah, spoiler alert. The big thing, I hope I’m remembering this right, is that you basically, like, he ends, you forge this second ring of power, which you sort of use to, Italian basically stands guard for all eternity, to sort of stop Sauron from leaving Mordor, like, he’s going to be like, sort of like the watcher on the wall forevermore, which is why, like, you know, in the years between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, it suggests he hasn’t just come and like fucked up the world, it’s because there’s this one bloke with an amazing combat system standing on a wall somewhere. But like, the ring corrupts him and he basically ends up becoming one of the Nazgul in the films. Oh, right. Yeah, that’s it’s sort of thing, he’s one of them, and then right at the end, Frodo chucks the ring into Mount Doom and when all the baddies disperse, he finally gets to step into the afterlife as himself again, it’s like the end of that game. On paper it feels like quite a big swing, but it feels like this… it’s kind of a shame that it’s this big cutscene attempt to tie everything back into the films again, because it sort of diverges, it’s… yeah, I don’t know, I don’t really know how I feel about it. I have a kind of unifying theory on this, which is I don’t think that Middle-earth as a setting is fit to tell other kinds of stories, fantasy stories. I think it’s a world that is built for the story they tell. I mean yes, the appendices suggest all this lore and the Silmarillion are like the fucking Dead Sea Scrolls of like Tolkien basically, like it’s just kind of like really out there. If you want to read about the Valar, the gods of Middle-earth basically and all that stuff and it’s really wild. I think personally that the reason something like a setting like Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls works so well is you can kind of make them fit what you what story you want to tell. If like there needs to be a kind of like a blight outbreak or like you know some Grey Wardens having a war or something, you can just make up the rules of that universe. I mean Thedas in Dragon Age is you know literally stands for the Dragon Age setting like it’s a purpose-built world to tell the stories they want to tell and like I find that a common thread with some of the weaker games here is they are just trying to tell a story around the edges of the one big story and it just you can’t do it. It’s not built it was wasn’t it wasn’t built to be like Rift on endlessly to have these tie-ins and stuff. I always think that twist would have worked if they’d have stopped it at he’s stuck on the wall and then like but then basically like you know it ensures that Sauron can never leave that tower unless he gets hold of the ring so he can’t he has no other means of coming back I guess but yeah there is there is some other again a little murky on it’s been a while but there it’s sort of suggested that throughout the whole thing like Cella Brimbor is like the big is equally bad you know you are powering up Cella Brimbor to take down he can take down Sauron once and for all but he intends just to be another Sauron-esque character and I’m pretty sure it suggests that like that flaming eye at the top of the tower is Sauron and Cella Brimbor like trapped in an eternal fight okay that is wild yeah like they are they’re constantly dueling and it’s sort of that eternal fight Which stops him from fucking everyone else up. But again, I’m probably missing a few key details from that, but that’s the rough shape of it. Yeah, I do appreciate that with these games, they did take a big swing, premise-wise. It’s almost like they resigned to the fact that the story is so silly, that you’ll never take it that seriously. Yeah, but if you’re going to do that, I’d almost rather they just went all out and brought in some of the… set it later, set it closer to the Lord of the Rings, and brought in a lot of the big players, rather than like, we’re going to set it here because we can’t tread on anyone’s toes. Oh, but by the way, we’re going to end with such a ludicrous swing that, maybe we should have just done a big silly Lord of the Rings game the whole time. But it’s got a very tangled relationship with the films, the books, and itself as a standalone franchise. That game, it’s very odd. Yeah, I feel like franchise extensions of Lord of the Rings are just doomed to this. The TV show is set in an earlier era of Middle-earth, and it’s like, I don’t know, maybe it’ll prove me wrong. They’ve got a good director for the pilot, the guy who directed The Impossible, and like, but I just, I don’t know, this doesn’t feel like there’s a story to tell there. And then when you look at the way you extrapolate upon the different bits of lore for the Hobbit films, that kind of falls flat, and the way that brings characters in feels very fan-service-y. It’s a real hard one to do when you’re not just directly adapting the one story or the two stories that are in this universe, but yeah. I think you can have fun by going after and playing with legacy, if you’re allowed. You can definitely riff on, well, you know, the events you know and love are now history, let’s investigate that in some way, or, you know, we can throw back to that in some fun ways. I know that’s like a huge cliché now and even and that has become tiresome in itself, but I would rather that than the prequel thing. I feel the same way about the Game of Thrones, you know, it’s like, do you really want to see what happened 400 years before? Not particularly. Yeah. Yeah. Again, like maybe not a universe built to tell all these different types of stories. Yeah. So the next up, Matthew, there is a Gollum game coming out. I don’t know if you have many thoughts on that one. Yeah, I’ve had to write loads about this for like different scripts over the years because it’s been in production for quite a while. It’s ended up on a lot of like, oh, games for 2020 or whatever lists. So I feel like I research it every year around this time of year for those list videos, which I inevitably end up writing. And I really don’t know because it isn’t film license, it’s its own thing, which is obviously a bit odd because their Gollum looks an awful lot like film Gollum. I don’t know if that’s just because that’s what Gollum looks like, and you just kind of have to deal with that. But I wonder if people will see that and go like, oh, Gollum like in the films and then the rest of it definitely isn’t based on the films. It’s like, it’s very, it’s got a very different look to it. I think it’s set between, again, between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I think there is crossover, like you’ll definitely go to, you’ll definitely go to more of the locations from the films and that you like, you meet Gandalf and things like that. I don’t think it’s voiced by a McKellar thing. It’s set in its own self-contained thing. It sounds like a bit of a weird sort of cinematic stealth platform game. I don’t really know why, why they’re making it. I don’t really understand it as a thing. I don’t really see the appeal. Like you say, it doesn’t feel like there’s a big Lord of the Rings resurgence coming, unless they plan to release it alongside the TV show and hope that’ll do it. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s a puzzler, that one. Those PS2 games did tick the box, then like the Battle for Middle-earth games ticked another box and then LEGO Lord of the Rings sort of wrapped it all up in a package I quite liked. So if I ever wanted that Lord of the Rings nostalgia hit in game form, the LEGO game is the one I would play. What happens if someone, for whatever reason, this would never happen, but someone basically did the EA action games again, but like mega modern production values, like mega graphics, like a really awesome combat system, like a proper kind of devil may cry kind of like combos, like God of War style production values for like boss fights. Would you go for it? I think I would, yeah. Like, you can always see if you were just following one character in The Fellowship in a kind of like God of War style, one take cinematic game, if it was just like basically the Aragorn’s Quest idea, but like as a whole game, like for adults to play, that could be really good. But they’re trapped in the cycle now of like, do you get the off-brand voice actors? Do you try and get it? Because there’s no way the Viggo monster would do it. They would struggle. They might get themselves into like the Marvel’s Avengers position of like, you’re up against the film actors with these knockoff versions. So it’s kind of tough. I don’t know, Matthew, it’s tough. And also like, that’s not the type of game that publishers tend to make these days. No, yeah, I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s kind of looking at these games. It’s just, it’s kind of amazing how far they’ve strayed from like, what was just the obvious thing to do back then is so different to what it is now. Yeah, it’s also wild that like, you know, just aside from the, these are just the ones based on the films, like based on the books, you’ve got the Lord of the Rings MMO from Turbine that’s still going. You’ve got, you had that Hobbit game that was like a kiddie platformer on them, on like PS2, Xbox, GameCube. You had a very like, they had one attempt at adapting the books wholesale in a game called Fellowship of the Ring and they abandoned the other two because apparently the games went up to scratch. And like, they’re so, they were so massive for so long, I felt like they just, that was part of my fatigue with the series, I think, is that like, I was just seeing the license get stretched more and more and into like less and less satisfying results. So such as it is, Matthew, but the films, of course, they remain very dear to my heart. When do you think you’re due for your next re-watch of these? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll re-watch them over the Christmas holiday. We’ve got a good week away at the in-laws, so lots of TV time, lots of sofa time planned. Might do it. Yeah, that sounds good. We won’t be doing that in my parents’ house because my mum fucking hates those films. Your dad loves it. You said it’s like brought your dad like probably the most joy he’s had since you were born. If not, you know, double the joy. Yeah, like he says, but that’s just, you know, the kind of like contradiction at the heart of that relationship is like, you know, one loves Lord of the Rings, one despises it. And yet they still make it work, you know, which I think says a lot about love and persistence. Your mum loves the Hobbit trilogy. Yeah, big. She’s a big Thorin stan. That’s like her whole thing. James Nisbett in a barrel all over the fuck it is. That is the other problem with those films, right? It’s like you start at the top of the cast list, you’re like, oh, you know, Martin Friedman, Ian McKellen, very good. By the time you get to the bottom, it’s like a fucking episode of Cracker on ITV in the 90s. It’s like, yeah. And like me as Smaug. Yeah, it’s a bit like that. And then I think like, is it Luke Evans who turns up in The Last Hobbit? Isn’t he your Beedle the Bard? Something like that. I don’t think he ever did any actual bard stuff. I just remember running around while a dragon was setting fire to shit. It was just very, very underwhelming, Matthew. It had quite a good Lee Pace as a sort of a smug elf, I remember. Yes, riding a big like stag. That was rad. He correctly identified Peter Jackson and Lee Pace doing stuff in quite a preposterous way as a good addition to your project. So that was a big win for everyone involved. He’s in that Foundation show, right? He’s probably the reason to watch it, actually. He’s incredibly smug and it’s like a mad cosmic Lee Pace. I actually quite enjoyed it, Foundation. Okay, well there you go. Nice TV recommendation to round us out. Any further thoughts on Lord of the Rings, Matthew, or should we get out of here? Oh, let’s get out of here. Otherwise, this podcast is going to have more endings than Return to the King. Which would be appropriate. Yeah. Look forward to the extended edition of this podcast in about six months. That’ll be available on 4K Blu-ray. You can look forward to that. So our next podcast is our final podcast 2021, Games of the Year. Matthew, how’s that process going for you? I found it very stressful, I’ll be honest. I found it very stressful. I’ve been cramming in some oddball stuff and I’ve added two games to my list in the last couple of days. Nice. Yep. I shout out to a certain time traveling sort of mystery game, which I tried to play, but was hung over. It had too much text in it and so I’m going to have to bump it to next year. And so we’re in my top 10. I’ll say what the game is when we get to the actual episode, but I’m sure people will know what game we’re talking about. So yes, I look forward to that one, Matthew. That will be a monster, I’m sure. Yeah. Particularly on your side because you have played every single computer game for 20 minutes Only 20 minutes. Yep. So that’s good. But thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, it’s Back Page Pod. We always like hearing from you. It’s backpagegames.gmail.com if you want to email us. I know I’ve been saying for a while now we’re going to do a mailbag in the new year. I think that’ll probably be the first or second episode we do in 2022. So I guess this is like a last call for any emails for that. But thank you for everyone who’s emailed so far. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I’m at MrBazzill underscore pesto or just search for the word Blorko. Yeah, he’s the Blorko guy now. That’s me. It’s Blorko guy, Matthew Blorko Castle. Yes, that’s the end of the podcast. Goodbye.