Change Your Image
gregorytobin
Reviews
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (2004)
A wonderful LOTR game
This game has a lot of flaws, the largest and most glaring being that the final boss is the Eye of Sauron for some reason, rather than the black gate battle. As well, the combat can become frustratingly difficult, especially during the battle at Helm's Deep. That being said, it is one of my favourite all time games and I wish they would make an updated version for the newest game systems. I spent hours and hours playing this when it came out and I had such a blast exploring Middle Earth. The are so many great parts to this game. From finding new members to join your party, To traversing the mines of moria and the plains of Rohan. The maps are all pristine and mimic the in-movie layouts exactly. The game made me feel like I really was an adventuring party in the midst of the War of the Ring. On top of the that the game incorporates the real voice actors, real clips from the films, and have the incredible soundtrack based on Howard Shores score for the films. If you are a fan of LOTR and especially Peter Jackson's films, this game is for you. And it will always stay with me as a fun adventure game set it my favourite universe.
Game of Thrones: The Long Night (2019)
Anti-Climatic and Disappointing
Despite the show being called "Game of Thrones" which is the title of the first book, the book series off of which the show is based, is called "A Song of Ice and Fire." Built into the very spine of the series, is the notion of magic, prophecy, mystery, and the idea that there are forces at work which go beyond our understanding, with villains who do things not "just because". But after watching this episode, the only thing that goes beyond my understanding, is why the show-runners decided to throw that all away for a tumblr fan-fiction level twist that makes M.Night.Shyamalan's, Avatar: The Last Air-bender look like a Scorsese film. The books and show are built off of the understanding that the throne, the kings, titles, all of these are meaningless in the face of the threat from the frozen north. In the books the White Walkers, or Others, are vastly more mysterious than in the show. We have seen them a grand total of twice, and are only mentioned a handful of times more than that. In the show we were gifted many more scenes of the creatures in their habitat. So many questions, so many prophecies, so many mysteries were presented to us, all in an effort to keep us guessing about who the Walkers are, and what they wanted. In George Martin's own words he informs us that despite being a fan of Tolkien, he said he was done with the one-dimensional villains who wear all black and live in a giant tower and have dark minions. He said his villains aren't like that, they have motives, reasons, even reasons we can sympathize or agree with. In the books, the Others are not mindless monsters who kill for the sake of it, they have a motive, they have purpose, we just don't know what that is yet. In Martin's world we see very clearly how the passage of time can blur or even completely obscure truths that people once held dear. The books taught us to question our assumptions, to look deeper, and to never assume someone is totally evil, or totally good, question the nature of prophecy, question the nature of history itself. And in the show we were given the same story. Prophecies of a hero who would come forth to help defeat these enemies, a last hero who, instead of destroying, might forge a pact with these beings we always assumed were monsters. We all were sucked in because of the intrigue of a show which had come to make most of the blockbuster films released now a days look like a good episode of Peppa Pig. But then the Long Night aired, and we found out by the end, that no, the White Walkers were not multi-faceted beings who had reasons for what they did, or why they did them, all the prophecies, all the warnings about putting aside worrying about the Iron Throne. All of it was flushed down the toilet with a dagger to the chest from Arya Stark. It turned out the Night King (a creature who does not exist in the books yet) were after all, one-dimensional comic book villains. Disappointment barely covers how I feel. I wanted to like this episode, I really did. But I just can't help but hate how it betrayed everything about what George had written. I will finish out the series as I have invested 9 years of my life to this, but I can't imagine that I will be impressed. If only the source material had kept up, we may have gotten a satisfying ending, instead of an episode which should have been titled "The not-so-Long Night"