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This isn't a proper review or anything special; just a summation of thoughts about 35 hours of gameplay. I 100%'d LEGO Lord of the Rings today. I plan on doing similar for all of the Traveler's Tales games in a kind of morbid, painful adventure. As much as I hate the repetitive nature, there's things about the formula that appeal to me, such as the stories/licenses, the colours and the kind of mix-and-match gameplay that sporadically appears. I like Lord of the Rings, which is why I decided to play it first. Prior to this, my previous TT Game's experiences were LEGO Movie, Indiana Jones 2 and then the three Star Wars games. If it's not clear; this was really my first full experience of an open-world(-ish) TT Game. I can't be sure when they started, but I know that there were still things that weren't exactly right; the lack of a minimap, certain gates and doors remaining locked half the time you spawn in, a wide variety of clipping issues...but honestly, it was actually kind of fun to walk around Middle-Earth. Looking at the map, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a pain to get around (especially since you can't spawn in vehicles), but it's actually a lot smaller than it looks, which is good for easing in movement. The "parkour" challenges were made awful thanks to a unique bug that has spawned thanks to a prominent feature in this game; there's a "character wheel" which means that you can have a party of 9 or more characters at one time, and you can select which you want to play as (or in Free-Play mode you can also get the full character selector). That was actually really handy; what wasn't so handy was the fact that the game has a lot of trouble discerning between when I want to swap between 1P and 2P, and when I want to open the character wheel, since they're both tied to the same button. Many times, I would be at the top of a parkour challenge and needed to make a final swap to another character with a specific ability, when suddenly the game would pull the rug out from under my feet and switch me to 2P. 1P would then jump down to the ground, and I'd lose all progress. There were also weird instances where, upon selecting a free-play character, instead of just setting 1P to that character, the game would switch me to 2P and then switch my character. I can't even fathom how that works logically. There was a lot of bollocking in this game. The game is WAY too happy to steal the camera and point out the bloody obvious (I'm pretty sure even the kids the game is aimed at know what the f**** was happening and don't need it shoved into their faces for 20 seconds). Thankfully, it seems like the dynamic hints option wasn't as annoying as The LEGO Movie Videogame, but that might just be because I either tuned out. There's also a plethora of bugs; characters moving half-way across the map during QTEs, Gollum/Climbing characters moving into awkward positions if they touch a speck of dust while wall-climbing, items that can be collected multiple times (no benefit in doing so though), many AI pathfinding woes... Is it all just negative? Surprisingly, no. I nitpick because I really wanted to love this, and in the end I did kind of like it. The voice acting was just straight-ripped from the movies (aside from the Quest characters who were probably just people inside the studio), but at least it wasn't poor imitations. The animation work is almost flawlessly entertaining like always, and there's a lot of really satisfying polish (bits of vibration, camera shake, colour, sounds etc). While they did cut out some of the plotlines, they managed to keep the important stuff (and even add characters not from the movie; that's pretty damn good). The Bonus Level (and Sauron's attack) were very satisfying. Some sections of the game were actually really fun to play. Of course, it does get very tedious and repetitive at times. Certain sections edge along unfairly (such as any time you're requires to jump on the thin planks, thanks to poor invisible wall placement), and somebody was clearly taking the piss when they decided to keep doing that thing from LSW where you have minikits during the run-towards-the-camera sections (multiple times!). TT Games really haven't figured out the money problem, since the point at which you have more money than you actually need comes quite early in the game (especially if you get the red brick multipliers, which can total up to around x3800). There was also a substantial lack of fanfare for making the 100%, but I guess that's always been a bit of an issue. If I had more time or patience, I'd probably do a full review and breakdown of every bit of the game, but I wanted to give a kind of quick summary. I don't hate this one. Unlike LEGO Movie Videogame, it feels like this had a bit more time and a bit more love was put it into it. The problem is that Level Design clearly dropped the ball on many parts of the game, and while they get certain sections absolutely perfect, others they get terribly, terribly wrong. I figure that if they had just a few more months, a lot of the bugs and issues would have disappeared, and I'd be a bit more satisfied.

All those years back my family would make the drive up to a bigger town every Sunday, to go to Barnes and Noble, get some drinks from the cafe, and read. And so every Sunday I'd head back to the children's section and search for the next BIONICLE novel. Usually I'd have to settle for something else, but those special days that the BIONICLE world expanded just a little were always my favorite. Today I don't really have the luxury of the serendipity of discovery like I did then. I knew Island of Lost Masks was coming long before it did, and I knew that I would be reading it the same day. I did make the attempt to stop by Barnes and Noble to pick up a physical copy, but they haven't got their shipment in yet. That's just how it goes, I guess. After 5 solid years of Farshtey its exciting to have a new author. If I'm being honest than Windham's writing history hasn't exactly inspired much confidence in me, but I've tried to go into this with as much of an open mind as I can. The first and probably most important thing that I want to bring up: I really, cannot thank Windham enough for maintaining consistency with the online episodes. I realize that for a lot of people that's probably a disappointment; a repeat of the same story content instead of something new. But I can't tell you enough how much I prefer that to the alternative that Greg (and Hapka)'s books opted with: making their own narrative at the expense of a coherent continuity. For example, Greg's depiction of this short differs fundamentally from the source material on enough points that he may as well have not referenced it at all. I get that he wants to do his own thing, but him doing his own thing at the expense of story coherence was really frustrating for me. Windham does not do this. He keeps true to what we've seen. And I deeply appreciate that. What is more, Windham does put forth the effort to make sure the characters are depicted consistent to their characterization in the episodes. We have a fumbling Kopaka too proud to admit his mistakes, a joke-cracking Lewa, an objective-driven Gali, and so forth. I didn't always feel his writing was quite up to the mark (Onua fumbling about Korgot being a girl got to be a little too verbose for him in my opinion), the effort is clearly there and, really, that's all that I expect of him as someone newly inducted into the BIONICLE mythos. The writing style is simple and straightforward, which is more or less to be expected from someone coming off of writing tens of Star Wars readers. It does the job well enough. I liked that some of the Protector's speech came across as more formal without being detached, echoing the style that MNOG often followed. Windham's got a nice sense of humor too, Greg's jokes never really hit me the right way but a few of Windham's original passages have genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. In general, I think it is a good start that has potential. The book doesn't strike nearly as hard as the online episodes, but then, it is an adaption - Windham is taking something that wasn't made for the novel medium and trying to get it to fit. I think the true test will come this winter with Revenge of the Skull Spiders, which, if the alignment of the stars hold true, will be an original story and Windham's first real chance to dig into the world and do things his own way. Before that though, he's got another BIONICLE writing debut coming up in the form of the first graphic novel - which is looking to be another retelling of the episodes. It will be interesting to see how Windham goes about attempting to breathe a unique life into them for a second time. He's certainly got his work set out for him.