A Flaming Eye On The Past

The release this month of Lord of the Rings: Conquest stirred something deep within me. No, it wasn't a long-dormant Balrog, arising like some gassy bout of acid reflux. Nor was it an irritation at Tolkien's novels being milked dry while other fantasy series' like George RR Martin's lie untouched (although actually it was that, a bit). Instead it was the memory of me, as a small child, seeing an advert in some gaming magazine or other for Melbourne House's 1988 release: War In Middle Earth.

As a young hobbit-fixed boy with a growing collection of Games Workshop miniatures, this game looked like possibly the most exciting thing in the world. The version featured in the ad was either the Amiga or Atari ST release, meaning the graphics shown put the Spectrum I owned at the time to shame. There were literally tens of Orcs and Nazgul on-screen at once. One shot appeared to be a detailed rendition of Tolkien's classic Middle Earth map. Everything was in colour! For a while I was somewhat obsessed by how tremendous this title must be.

Yet even though I ended up with an Amiga several years later, I never got hold of a copy of War In Middle Earth. Whether my interest had faded, the game had drifted out of print (and out of piracy circulation) or I was simply too distracted by games like Syndicate to care much about Gandalf any more, I don't know. What I do know is that seeing Lord of the Rings: Conquest made me think about War In Middle Earth again for the first time in ages. Strangely, it seemed I was still pretty eager to play it - and so, after the pre-requisite ten hours to get anything working properly in useful-but-also-terrible Amiga emulator WinUAE, I was emersed in the glorious technicolour lands of 1988.

... Unfortunately, War In Middle Earth isn't too spectacular in 2009.

Now look, before any fans of the game get upset (and I know you're out there because fansites Aaronwillisillustration are still being semi-updated), if I'd actually managed to play this back in my childhood then this article would probably have quite a different outlook. For a 1988 title, the scope is pretty incredible. The whole of Middle Earth is depicted and can be viewed on three levels: the overall map, which shows every region of the land (just like in the front of the books), the slightly zoomed top-down map which shows rivers, hills and icons representing armies and the fully zoomed map which features troops and characters plodding along roads against a backdrop of picture-postcard scenes from the realm. Making use of this multi-level approach is a sort of proto-RTS, in which armies must be mobilised against Sauron's forces to clear a path for the ringbearer to make his way across the map to Mount Doom.

Mike Singleton (he of the other fantasy gaming epic The Lords of Midnight) took five years to develop and perfect this title, which is rather admirable. Today, if a game has been in development for five years it usually means it's changed studios about four times, been relocated abroad a couple more, had the entire engine rebuilt from scratch by 15,000 people and then forced out of the door two months too soon anyway. Four years before Dune 2, War In Middle Earth was shaping the Real Time Strategy genre. It was just doing it in a rather ponderous fashion, with a pace more akin to a board game than anything else - though the addition of the excellently named speed-up options 'hasty' and 'very hasty' can turn on the afterburners when necessary.

The game's most impressive feature is probably the freedom it gives players to re-write the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a way of their choosing. Don't fancy leading the party of hobbits to Rivendell? Not a problem, you can take another route. Nor do you have to take on the might of the Nazgul at Weathertop with just Aragorn's blade as protection - simply call up reinforcements from elsewhere on the map and ride to the rescue. In-keeping with this 'anything goes' approach, it's quite possible for main characters to die in the course of player's strategic movements. More than possible, actually. In fact it's very likely, because the characters are remarkably brittle and seem to drop like flies when anywhere near a conflict. Don't expect Frodo and chums to be able to take on anything more menacing than an old, confused goblin without getting wounded.

It lends a wonderful sense of YOU ARE REALLY MESSING THIS UP to the proceedings when the named characters are getting slaughtered left and right, but a fairly serious problem is that there tend not to be any major repercussions. If Frodo dies and there are no other characters around, then yes, evil forces get hold of the ring. This is pretty much the only consequence suffered through death, however. If Aragorn dies, nobody really seems to care much. Elrond? Nah, he's expendable too. Other than the implicit feeling that you probably should have tried harder to keep them breathing, there's no subsequent outcome. It doesn't affect the game beyond having one less guy walking around. This is suitably brutal, but it's a bit puzzling when Sam dies and Frodo happily marches on, whistling a cheerful tune.

Compounding this issue are the somewhat bland battle sequences. When armies meet, they line up against one another as stacks of numbers, with the option to 'charge', 'engage', 'withdraw' or 'retreat'. This is not particularly thrilling and relies upon your faith in the computer AI to calculate whether 150 Rangers would fare well against 300 Orcs. As battles make up a sizeable bulk of the game, to have them be this pathetic is a shame (though also understandable, given the technological limitations.)

While it's a bit unfair to pick on graphics from 1988, the art direction is also ... questionable, at times. The semi-randomly generated backdrops which the characters walk past were brilliant for the time, and the main map screens are clear and functional, so no concerns there. The confusion is over the character sprites, which mostly look pretty realistic (insofar as Orcs can look realistic) in terms of proportion and design: Knights look bold and noble, Dwarves are squat and bearded and so on. What's less easy to explain is why a decision was taken to make the Trolls all look like Mr Spock after a diet of steroids and why the Balrog - supposedly a terrfying, demonic presence remember - looks like a fuzzy Michelin Man with a rather cheeky expression. Frodo's insistence on wearing a bright pink cape is also something of a fashion mystery. Especially when he's supposed to be spending most of his time hiding.

Graphical quibbles are minor, however. The reason War In Middle Earth seems a little disappointing today doesn't so much lie with the game itself, as with what it was aiming to achieve. The title was hugely ambitious for the time, but this placed it at the cutting edge of things which are now taken for granted. Older releases which best stand up to revisits are those which crafted a tight, well-designed game that (graphics and sound aside, perhaps) would need little modern improvement. Something like Julian Gollop's Chaos seems (to me, at least) tricky to improve upon in terms of gameplay. In contrast, there are too many points to be found during War In Middle Earth where modern technology would clearly improve matters: a superior way of resolving battles and a larger range of consequences when main characters die being the two most obvious. This is why the game appears lacklustre - not because it was bad at the time, but simply because the genre it helped to launch has developed beyond recognition in the twenty one years since it's original release.