Just after the New Year EA and Pandemic will be launching The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. An interactive overview of the major battles/conflicts shown in the three movies, the real hook of the game will be that players will be able to fight for either "good or evil." Hopefully it won't be quite as black and white as that, but we shall see.

Personally I'm a total Tolkien freak, so I'm down regardless. But what I am hoping for is a little evolution though, if not through this game and others like LOTR Online, then through the others that will follow. What I mean is that as fantastic as the movies and all the games based on them are, they are far from the end all of what I hope to see emerge out of Middle-Earth. The movies are fine for the mainstream, but as Tolkien--as opposed to LOTR--fans will tell you, the time period during which the events of LOTR happen are really the lesser, or at least much later, days of Middle-Earth. A LOT of really cool stuff happens in the first, second and earlier parts of the Third Age of Middle-Earth. If you don't believe me simply open up a copy of "The Return of the King." You'll notice that a full third of the book is dedicated to appendices. Even better, read through the Silmarillion, basically a mythology/history of the peoples and civilizations that are referenced in Tolkien's books and stories. Anyway, enough with the dork-fest. Conquest will be available on Xbox 360, PS34, PC and DS in January '09. I just hope that we Orc-a-philes are allowed to pick the specifics of our kind. We Uruks hate being stuck playing as that Morgul slime that's been on offer for years.

--Hobson's Choice

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