And People Say Peter Jackson Maligned Faramir's Character...

I was just checking out Amazon.com, gleefully rubbing my hands over the thought that it's only a few more days until season 3 of Buffy comes out on DVD (although how I'm going to find time to watch all the discs I've got already, I have no idea), and I notice that they're trying rather hard to sell me a Lord of the Rings computer game. Which isn't something I've got a whole lot of interest in, but it does bring back some memories for me... When I was a teenager, we had a Lord of the Rings computer game, extremely primitive by today's standards, no doubt, but we thought it was cool. You got to wander around the whole map of Middle Earth, controlling all nine members of the Fellowship, with the goal being to get the Ring to Mount Doom before the Black Riders killed you all and took it. This was not an easy goal to achieve. I remember, I ultimately found only one solution that would actually work: I had Aragorn take the thing, abandon his compatriots, and run like Shadowfax for Mordor while the Nazgul were distracted by the business of brutally slaughtering the rest of the party.

I feel as if I should apologize to the spirit of Tolkien for this appalling combination of character assassination and story distortion. I also feel that this is probably a good example of why it may have been a good idea not to make The Lord of the Rings into a computer game.