Monday, September 28, 1998

Well, I’m happy to report that my order from http://www.netgrocer.com/ came in on Friday. Everything was well-packed, and in very good condition. I’ll be buying more from them from now on.

I see somebody’s writing a massively-multiplayer game based on Tolkien’s “if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m flattered to death by now” Lord of the Rings series. It’s a good idea, really: the world will support up to 10,000 players (and can be cloned should more than 10,000 sign up), it is only playable on the internet, it’s based loosely on Interplay’s LOTR games, and it’s set in the Fourth Age, 150 years or so after the adventures of LOTR. Players cannot become godlike, characters die permanently, and there are no generic “levels” (thus, none of this “Don’t talk to ME that way, I’m twenty-eight levels ahead of you!” nonsense). So far they’ve got an impressively pretty website (now defunct), with some background and so forth. It’s worth a look-see, though the game won’t come out until Fall of 1999.

Interesting, isn’t it, how this will conveniently coincide roughly with the upcoming LOTR movies? I’m still worried that they’ll suck, but then again it’s hard to make a judgment call on a story so well-defined as LOTR. There can’t be an authoritative movie of the book, as much as there’s ever an authoritative movie of Shakespeare. Every director would make it differently. So we’ll just have to see if the characters and plot remain true to the book.

We can but hope.