News from the LOTR convention Best of Both Worlds in Canberra, Australia: “Brad Dourif cannot join us in…
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News from the LOTR convention Best of Both Worlds in Canberra, Australia: “Brad Dourif cannot join us in Sept. as he will be filming. We are working very hard to secure another guest for you and will advise asap.” Also Bruce Hopkins [Gamling the Old] wrote to say that he is looking forward to being a guest at BOBW, and “Gamling is also in The return Of The King. I have just done some filming for the pick ups and have a couple more days to go over the next month.”
Ringer Spy AlfaMale spotted this great new set of six screencaps on AICN (which was removed not 2 minutes after being posted). One of these shots really give an idea of just how enormous the battle of the Pelennor will be. You can also check the interior of the White Tower and see the skull-filled spookiness of the Paths of the Dead! [More] [EE Pre-Order] !!Major Spoilers!!
Note: it seems that some of the thumbnails on this page have been triggering a truly ridiculous bug in versions of MS Internet Explorer older than v6 sp1 (build 6.0.2800) in which the browser refuses to render any images after viewing the page. We recommend getting a Decent Browser, or upgrading your IE, or try using this link to access the images and navigate with the Prev & Next buttons – or clearing your browser cache, completely restarting IE, and force-refreshing the scrapbook page with Ctrl-F5. The thumbnails currently online are known to work fine – if you have a stale copy of the page you might still be encountering problems. Whilst you’re at it, you might want to consider a better operating system all round… 😉 – Arathorn
With millions without power for a soon-to-be second night in a row, some of them may take to heart that one man is among them…this man is the ever-prepared…Sean Astin.
Anyone who has seen the Extended Edition cast commentaries or listened to the many stories that the other castmates tell about Sean Astin will get a chuckle out of this one. Sean was in NYC yesterday during the blackout and, as reported by MSNBC and ET, he has been helping people out of elevators and directing traffic in the streets. Way to go Sean!
Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director at Strange Company recently sent us an email about the ‘movies’ in the Two Towers Playstation game:
‘We’ve got something kinda unique for you: “games from films” site
Machinima.com reviews not the gameplay but the “movies” in the Two
Towers Playstation game.
Machinima.com is a site focused on movie-making in computer game
engines. In this review, we’re looking at the way that the game blends between real footage from the Lord of the Rings movies and the “Machinima” footage from the game – Lord of the Rings moments created inside the PS2’s graphics engine.
Here’s an excerpt:
“As far as how it stands as an extension to the films, “Two Towers”
does digress from the plot of the films at times, in order to fit in more battles, but is otherwise fairly faithful. The “flashback” plot
mechanism is very nice, and gives the game a subtly different story arc, but the game
creators do occasionally seem to be struggling to find enough action
from the films to fill out their game. However, there’s nothing that really stands out as blatantly changing the story or feel of things, Gandalf’s use of very “computer game” magic in one of the levels and the “Suicide Bomber Orc” characters notwithstanding.”‘
Find the review [here]
Hail and well met all!
[Ardan Nights]
is a project which is dedicated to bringing a Middle-earth, that strictly adheres to Tolkien’s works, to Neverwinter Nights.
The project has been running for over four years. And
progress has steadily been made. We hope to go live with
our first module, Bree-land before the end of the Summer.
Bree-land encompasses the areas of Bree and the surrounding
lands, including the Barrow Downs, South Downs, Old Forest,
Midgewater and the Weather Hills. This comprises of roughly
151 16×16 areas and also 164 interiors.
But this is not all, that we have accomplished in the last
year since NWN was released, major customisations have been
made to the engine, with our own set of classes and races and
replacing the NWN magic system with our system of Songs.
There has been other custom content made ranging from a
complete selection of new PC heads, relevant monsters
and creatures from Middle-earth to a new tileset.
We are dedicated to an all encompassing Role-playing
environment, so our work is not only geared to the
adventurers, much work has gone into more “normal”
professions in Middle-earth, including craftsmen and
farmers.
We recently relaunched our website with a completely new
design, which is hopefully easier to navigate and easier
for a visitor to find the relevant information that they
may be looking for.
Namarie,
Vildar
Head of Council for Ardan Nights
Good morning! I don’t know if you’ve seen this trivia game that Fantasy Flight Games has produced, but it is excellent! My husband got a copy for his birthday yesterday and we played it last night until far too late. 🙂 I’m a huge LOTR fan and a huge trivia fan, and this game satisfied both aspects completely!
The questions are very specific, for one thing, which I really enjoy. They’re often taken word for word from Tolkien’s text. And there’s a good range from mildly difficult to bang-your-head-against-the-wall stumpers. Best of all, you can customize the game depending on how skilled the players are! Each question has 4 multiple choice answers, one of which is right and one of which is in brackets. If you want an easy game, you skip the answer in brackets so the person only has 3 answers to choose from. If you want it a little harder, you offer all 4 answers for the person to choose from. And for the real expert, you can just read the question, without giving the possible answers at all… 🙂
There’s also a game board and tokens, if you want to play the actual game instead of just firing questions at each other. 🙂 I’m not usually impressed with game boards for trivia games, because they often seem contrived and pointless, but in this game, they really do quite a good job of recreating the challenges involved in the quest of the book. And it’s illustrated by Ted Nasmith, so it’s visually stunning as well.
You take the role of Frodo, and the game board shows all the major locations you go through on your quest. You have to pay “resource” tokens to move to the next area (fighting tokens, walking tokens, One Ring tokens), and when you get there, you have to answer trivia questions or pay more resources or both. There are also gift tokens, which you can use to counteract the effect of getting a question wrong or having to pay extra resources. Slightly convoluted to explain, but once you’re into the game, it flows very smoothly and is quite intuitive in its rule structure.
If your only exposure to LOTR is the movies, you’re probably in for a frustrating time, because so many of the questions are nit-picky about something that was only mentioned once in the book (i.e. the name of Nimrodel’s lover.) But if you’ve read the books at least once or twice, you’ll enjoy this game a lot. And if you’ve read them more than 4 times, you’ll really enjoy this game a lot. 🙂 HIGHLY recommended, and apparently it’s now available in game stores. It’s certainly made it to the Greater Toronto Area!
Here’s a link to the game-maker’s site. http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/lotrtrivia.html
Cheers!
TorontoStrider
