The December 2002 Edition of Popular Science Magazine has an article explaining the state-of-the-art software behind The Lord…
Continue ReadingThe December 2002 Edition of Popular Science Magazine has an article explaining the state-of-the-art software behind The Lord of the Rings, MASSIVE. Thanks to Ringer Chching for the scans:
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Greetings — Quickbeam here.
Today was terrifically exciting. I was afraid there would be blood on the streets of Norfolk before it was all over.
Saturday, 2 November 2002, was the final day of struggle in the Lord of the Rings TCG World Championship, overseen by the DGMA (Decipher Gaming Management Authority). The youthful crowd filling the Chesapeake Convention Center had mutated into a throng of zealous fanatics, all rooting for their favorite player. What energy!
The world’s finest went head-to-head — like the great chess tournaments of yesteryear. Remember the Americans versus the Russians? When individual players became symbols of the Cold War struggle? Remember those days where newspapers spouted headlines of national pride played out on the chessboard?
Today it was England versus Canada. After seven hours, where the center tables in the main hall were blocked to resist the crowd of onlookers, only four remained. Three lads from Montreal and one lone Brit. Patrick Malboeuf (older brother of finalist David, whose card list we posted previously), Matthieu Brochu, and Dominic Gaudreault brought the red maple leaf to bear against Alex Tennet’s Union Jack.
As the evening grew very late, the finalists struggled through three games apiece, in final elimination pairings. No time limit. Whoever got the best 2 out of 3 would advance. People stood atop neighboring tables trying to watch from a distance as the temperature continued to rise. This was the utmost in championship playing.
The final two: Matthieu Brochu and Alex Tennet.
These two moved over to a separate locked room, containing only one table and several video cameras. And the Judge, of course. The players were isolated — no distractions, no crowds, staring across at each other in a final dead heat.
Everyone else moved over to an auditorium with a giant projection screen. It was a very entertaining yakkity-yak crowd; the lads around me would just not sit still. We were all glued to the screen, making blow-by-blow comments as the game unfolded. The most interesting thing was that both combatants played strong Isengard cultures for their Shadow side. That was the case for all participants throughout the Championships. Everyone LOVES using those fierce Uruk-hai with Saruman to boost them.
Best of three games would decide this. In the first, Alex bid very high burdens to start the game; forcing Matthieu to go first. That was a shock. That hardly ever happens. They moved through a fast early game. Later when Matthieu, as the Free People’s player, moved to Site 9 for the win he was stormed by a spectacular assault of minions that Alex drew at the last minute. Alex threw down Saruman and several heavy Uruks (including a Tower Assassin) which would have destroyed poor Matt. But at the last second, the crowd around me stood up and screamed. Matt used Aragorn’s game text to make him Defender +3, thus Aragorn was sacrificed to save Frodo. When the additional fierce skirmishes were assigned, Matt saved Frodo again with pump cards like Hobbit Stealth.
It was a stunning upset.
Game two was a longer exercise in holding your breath. Alex was about to move from Site 7, using all his Old Toby pipeweed and Aragorn’s Pipe to heal up his battered Fellowship. It was not much help. He had no idea Matthieu was holding an arsenal of evil Uruks. Lurtz appeared but was quickly shot down by Aragorn and Legolas. This was almost as good as watching the Fellowship movie! Poor Alex had to stop at Site 8 — he could not risk moving again for the victory at Site 9.
The crowd gasped again — almost loud enough that the players could hear across the hall, through sealed doors! Matthieu made his move, giving Alex a mammoth amount of twilight pool to use. Problem was, Alex had used up all his minions from his deck. There was nothing left to stop Matt’s determined Fellowship. At Site 8, Matthieu made easy work of a few Uruk-hai and skated forward to Site 9. It was a cakewalk simply because Alex had ripped through his deck and had nothing left to play.
The crowd I sat with shouted with a great cacophony of noise. It was that moment of victory that reminded me of the Angels winning the World Series just a week ago.
Both players were perfectly quiet, even calm, through this grueling contest. Everyone was impressed at the good gamesmanship that was on display here, after seeing such frayed nerves yesterday. Matthieu would take the $7,000 and the Chrysler…. while Alex as second place would take home a not-too-shabby $3,000. Beautiful One Ring replicas for everyone.
The hour struck 1:00AM and everyone was exhausted. The winners came over into the auditorium and were officially congratulated by the Decipher team. Alex spoke to the crowd and declared he would split his $3,000 prize with his partner who designed and playtested his deck, Mike Dalton. Top winner Matthieu also took questions from the audience. He said that at all times he was confident with the strength of his Fellowship cards. Using permanents like swords, possessions, and artifacts were not key to his strategy, even though conventional wisdom advocates such cards. Matt said he preferred simple strength boosters instead. Well, maybe a copy of Sting (of course).
Go to the official DGMA website [http://www.dgma.com/content/default.asp?id=183] and there you will find the complete card lists for all finalists and winners. Top of that page is Matthieu Brochu’s winning deck for the first Lord of the Rings TCG World Championship. This deck is now officially the best in the whole wide world.
Now you can try it for yourself.
Much too hasty,
Quickbeam
DecipherCon Day One[click here]
DecipherCon Day Two[click here]
DecipherCon Day Four[click here]
Back in August we reported that the current cut stood at 3 hours and 14 minuntes. Now Kevin writes that a private theater here in Austin, Texas has posted a running time for the Two Towers of 2 hours and 43 minutes.
Update: Aaron writes that Fandango also has 2 hours 43 minutes listed as the running time. [More]
Update2:FB however writes that according to the Norwegian Oslo Cinema, 2 hours 43 mins was the old running time and that 3 hours 10 minutes is what we should expect. Unfortunately, I’m not much chop at reading Norwegian, but you can see the numbers here.
Staale sent in this translation:
‘You mentioned that you are no great hand at reading Norwegian. Well, here is my translation of the text.
“The supposed length for The Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers has until now been 2 hours 43 minutes. However, director Peter Jackson has found reason to add close to half an hour extra.
Early this summer Jackson and his staff went back to New Zealand to shoot some additional scenes for TTT. The postproduction on the new takes and the substantial special effects work have since been going on at full steam. The distributor SF Norway claims that the finished movie will probably be about 3 hours 10 minutes long. That is, 10 minutes longer than the Fellowship of the Ring.”
Just for your information :)’
Thanks to Ur_Friendly_Hobbit_Baker who also sent in a rough translation for us.
More grist to the mill … consider Jackson’s recent words in Fangoria Magazine:
One thing The Two Towers will share with Fellowship is a running time of about three hours. “I have never had any edicts from the studio to cut anything,” Jackson says.
“There was a pragmatism with the cutting of Fellowship, and even in a sense with The Two Towers. These are rare expensive movies, and you do want to get the biggest audience you can, and we thought we were taking enough of a risk with a three-hour film. We knew the studio was riding on it, and we knew they wanted something between two and two and a half hours, which would be much more commercially smart. They didn’t force us to cut a two-and-a-half-hour film, though, and we felt ourselves that anything over three hours would be much more difficult to attract an audience to.
“We just couldn’t afford for the box office of Fellowship to suffer because of the length,” he continues. “No matter how good or enjoyable a film is, at three and a half hours you’d simply put people off. It’s as simple as that. So our focus was on releasing a film that was under three hours. We worked very hard to get that cut, and The Two Towers has actually been the same. At one point, Two Towers was almost four hours long, and we’ve been working hard to get it under three. These are sensible cuts, though — it’s not a case of the studio forcing the filmmaker. In this case, the filmmaker doesn’t want to release a film over three hours, because it’s not a smart thing to do with all this money at stake.”
That’s it. For what it’s worth, my money is on two and three-quarter hours. Anyone running a tote?
Greetings — Quickbeam here.
Playing cards sounds like a fun, relaxing pastime. Yeah, right.
When you have this much money and such huge prizes at stake… you can bet things will get hairy. Today in Norfolk there were 95 finalists in the Lord of the Rings TCG World Championship who concluded their second day of competition. At the end, only sixteen were left. Getting that far was arduous for some of them.
When two particular players started to loudly disagree with each other, throwing their arms up in the air, the judges came over to restore order. One of these fellows, Mike Long, has a reputation in the world of tournament play. He used to be a leader on the Magic: The Gathering circuit but encountered controversy with allegations of shady playing. This kind of behavior might follow you around for years. Today he was in a critical match against Josh Cornwell-Mott, as both players were in the running for qualification for Day 3 (the Finals).
There were several heated outbursts, with Mike showing his nerves as things got down to the wire. There are all kinds of itchy little things players might do to cause his opponent to lose focus, to throw them off their game, if you will. Josh would have none of it. The whole match was covered with tension so thick you could slice it with a butter-knife. One judge stood rooted to the table to monitor the players through to game’s end.
There was some talk throughout the Con about this — namely that LOTR players as a community don’t want competitive tournament play to deteriorate with the kind of stunts we saw today. That’s not what this is all about; and it’s certainly atypical of the environment that Decipher and the DGMA has created. These gaming event are totally comfortable and everyone enjoys themselves. But in this instance, I understand how intense these players feel about their game.
There was one fellow in particular who was unstoppable today. He won every single game (that means no losses, no ties, and no games called on time). I sat down to talk with the beast that is Efridge Engelhardt. Young yet very casual and self-composed, Efridge hails from Huntsville, Alabama. He is the player that your mother warned you about.
Quickbeam: So, Efridge, what brought you to the LOTR card game?
Efridge: I have played the Star Wars game for about a year or more until Decipher lost the license. I still play it but not as seriously. Then they started publishing the new LOTR game and I picked up on it pretty fast. I was okay at it, I just played it for fun first. Not competitively.
Q: How long have you been in the professional circuit?
E: This summer, I decided I wanted to play at the upcoming DecipherCon. So I started preparing and playing more competitively with my friends. My buddy Ben Lacey and I built a deck that was broken. It was unbeatable, for the most part… the chances of it losing where significantly less than anything I had seen. We took that deck, driving around to territory and state level championships in order to qualify for today — Day Two of the World Championships. I won in Georgia — we were pretty much all over Southeastern states.
Q: What kind of strategy is most appealing to you when you build a deck?
E: Good consistency. Uruk-hai are undoubtedly the most solid Shadow cards but Moria are more fun to play.
Q: Did your friend build the deck you used today?
E: Yes. His name is Andy McClure. It’s really good. I had seen it in action and decided it was a “machine.” I was going to play the Star Trek TCG tournament today but I know this game better and decided differently.
Q: Wow, what a fateful choice, especially with you being this much closer to the top prize. What would you tell a casual player to focus on, if he seeks to improve his game?
E: Balance. Work with the numbers. Just because you built a deck and it doesn’t work 100% doesn’t mean you should throw it out. You should work with it and improve it until you’re comfortable with it. The player should stop daydreaming about what the “perfect scenario” would be for his cards. He should go for efficiency, because those ideal conditions for certain card combos will rarely happen the way you want them to.
Q: Is there any hope for the Sauron culture becoming really viable with the cards that are currently available (not including new TTT cards).
E: I think Sauron is competitive now. I have a friend who has a deck that works really well. There’s only a few really good Sauron cards that I would bother with. Orc Bowmen, Under the Watching Eye, Hate. And of course Orc Ambushers.
Q: Where are you going to drive first if you win the Chrysler PT Cruiser and the $7,000?
E: Hooters!
What can I say to that? Their hot wings really are good, I admit, but I think I’d rather go to Disneyland.
So much more TTT coolness was revealed today! I had the chance to interview those great guys from Decipher RPG Studio in Los Angeles, Christian Moore and Owen Seyler. If you enjoyed the fantastic new LOTR Core Book that was released in August you can blame them. Role players have been able to recreate their own adventures in the Middle-earth setting with the introductory Fellowship of the Ring RPG (with the players going through the Mines of Moria) and now with the Core Book, nearly any possible scenario can be drafted. Now they’ve got something brand new to crow about. The Two Towers RPG is another introductory product that allows beginning players to experience Helm’s Deep with a select group of four characters (Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas). We were all sitting at a large round table where Christian and Owen opened up the never-before-seen boxes, with new maps, dice, character sheets, and Guidebook. I had to ask about this cool new game:
Quickbeam: How long have you guys been working on this new game?
Owen: We’ve been working on this particular product for about 5 months, 6 if you include time for printing.
Q: What is the first thing that would turn on a new player with this game? Assuming there are some Tolkien fans out there who are not experienced gamers, what would be the first thing they would enjoy?
Christian: The chance to step into the world and actually be the characters. To experience it from the inside.
O: Right. If you were Gandalf what would you have done in the Mines? Made a different decision? In this product, at the dramatic conclusion of the scenario, the players face the invading forces of Saruman’s Uruk-hai as they besiege the Hornburg. You would get to play each of the four characters leading a different faction of Rohan’s forces to protect the keep. Rohirrim Infantry, Archers, and even Elven Archer reinforcements.
Q: Sounds like it’s following the movie storyline which many fans consider apocryphal. We know that there aren’t really any Lorien Elves at Helm’s Deep, but the idea makes perfect tactical sense to me, personally.
C: The distinction to be made is that the beginner’s level Adventure Game products are film-based only. While the actual full RPG you have with the Core Book (and subsequent products to come) are based more fully on the original books.
Q: I know there are Tolkien fans who don’t fully speak the “gamer language.” Does this new TTT Helm’s Deep game really fall into the category of “difficult” for the non-experienced gamer?
O: I would say not at all.
C: The game is geared for ages 12 and up. And the rules in this new boxed set include a lot of hand-holding.
O: It makes learning the game rules a gradual process; the player learns quickly as the storyline progresses. The “Fast Player” Rules are only 4 pages long, and represents a quick distillation of everything that is in the scenario gamebook. A participant who plays the full scenario will learn different segments of the rules as they are introduced during play. The Character Sheets assist this process by explaining each character’s abilities. Gandalf’s Sheet explains his spells, his abilities, and some of background history (and dialogue) to encourage more creative role playing.
Q: The maps look really fantastic. What do you have to decide ahead of time, to produce a certain staging area for the action?
O: At points in the story where there are many physical episodes of action, like a battlefield, or a clearing, or an underground dwarf kingdom — anything where the physical environment becomes more critical for the story, we look at that.
C: Yes, the story dictates that. In TTT we picked three encounters.
O: There’s a field where the Three Hunters meet the Riders of Rohan for the first time. If the heroes were to happen to catch up with the Uruk-hai sooner than they did in the story, it could lead to a battle.
Q: So someone playing could actually alter the course of the War of the Ring, just by catching up to Merry and Pippin sooner and rescuing them?
O: Presumably, yes. That’s what they are out to do at the beginning. These adventures don’t always have to follow the book perfectly. It is a tricky thing for the designers to provide for complete open liberty with the story as the players progress, for there is also the need to think ahead and see how this gaming scenario will affect future events in The Return of the King. Our job is to try to give a “guiding hand” while ensuring the player feels his autonomy has not been restricted.
Q: Do you recommend this as a fun introduction to roleplaying in general? Meaning is it something that a gaggle of Tolkien fans can just open up and dive into at a party (or a hobbit picnic)?
C: That’s precisely what it was designed for.
O: There are sections of the game where the Narrator and the players have scripted dialogue, yet the players can easily go off in various, unexpected directions depending on the tone of voice and the general flavor that each player brings to the table. Improvisation is key to making this game a lot more fun.
There you have it, folks. This new boxed game is very cool and I recommend you get a closer look at it.
That’s today’s report from DecipherCon 2002. A day that will be talked about for months to come among the world’s gaming community. Tomorrow is the final showdown between the top sixteen players in the world.
I will be here for the final lap and also more interviews with the LOTR designers!
Much too hasty,
Quickbeam
DecipherCon Day One[click here]
DecipherCon Day Three[click here]
DecipherCon Day Four[click here]
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be holding a preview screening event of the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on Saturday December 14th.
Martha, who dropped us the tip with the news, says that there will also be a “conversation” with Howard Shore prior to the film.
The price for the movie is $7.25 for members and $10.75 for non-members. Martha is unsure if tickets are still available — “these things have a tendency to sell out fast. You can either call 1-877-522-6225 or visit lacma.
I couldn’t find anything on lacma, but there are more pricing details on museumtix.com. You can can check it out here.
Mythrandir writes:
I just picked up a Starlog related magazine called Fantasy Worlds.
There is also a five page interview with producer Barrie Osborne, a four page interview with John Rhys-Davies and a two page interview with Liv Tyler.
Here’s a little spoiler regarding a possible Boromir flashback from Barrie Osborne:
“We toyed with doing a scene where you actually get to see Faramir, Boromir, and Denethor in a flashback, in which Faramir is thinking back to how he got into the situation he’s now in. So there’s a scene with Faramir, his brother and his father, and it’s still in and out of the film. We’re not sure if it’s going to be in there or not.” (Interview with Barrie Osborne, “Making the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” page 41)
The people at Starlog said to keep an eye out for the next few Starlog magazines as they have interviewed some of the cast members.
This issue features articles on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. There are one page interviews with Karl Urban, Miranda Otto, Brad Dourif, and Bernard Hill. Enjoy!
Update:
I was reading through these interviews and I spotted this comment by Brad Dourif:
“There’s a scene between Wormtongue and Eowyn that we did ,[in which Wormtongue makes his romantic designs clear to her], and that’s not in the book.”
Now, it could just be that this picture of Grima and Eowyn that we revealed just yesterday is the scene Dourif refers to …
