Some people actually took great delight in finding new bugs. The evaporating river in 'The Hobbit' is a prime example which I witnessed on a couple of occasions. Unfortunately the kind of bugs present in 'Sherlock' got me right up to the end but the final shoot out failed to occur, even though everyone who needed to be there was in place ready and raring to go! (Melbourne House didn't publish a book to help players stuck in 'Sherlock' like they had done with 'The Hobbit'. All they did was send out a rather unhelpful hint sheet that was very thin on content).

With 'Sherlock' out of the way, Philip Mitchell turned his attention back to the land of Hobbits, Elves and Middle Earth. It took another year and a bit to complete, but 'Lord of the Rings' Part One finally appeared in late 1985. It came in a box the size of a brick. This was so that the game could house the first paperback instalment 'Fellowship of the Ring'. It was a nice idea, but the price of the game was now £15.95, which I think made it the most expensive Spectrum game ever at the time. The box also had to accommodate two cassettes this time around, as the game was so large that it had to be split into two parts.

On completing the first part, you could save your game and load it into the start of the second part to continue. The second part could be played on its own, but as a result it was harder to complete without the advantage of having done the first. Also included was a beginners version of the first part for inexperienced adventurers who needed to get to grips with the system.

There were a couple of innovative features included in 'Lord of the Rings - Part One'. For a start you could control up to four characters (Frodo, Sam, Pippin or Merry) and you could quite happily switch between them. The screen layout was different from anything I'd seen before. Each Hobbit had his own face illustration and the character you were currently in control of would appear at the top of the screen. The main part of the game was displayed on what looked like the top sheet of four pages of paper. In the left hand border the hobbit faces were shown. If certain faces were displayed in the border of the pages behind the front then they weren't in the same location as the hobbit you currently controlled.

This innovative (and never repeated since) style had its problems. The update time was slow. Each time you moved to a new location, you had to wait for each one of the other characters to follow you there. (This not only applied in the text but the faces had to be removed from the other page borders then placed in the front page border to signify that there were now in the same location). After a while this became rather annoying and there was no way of turning it off.

'Lord of the Rings - Part One' did have a few location graphics but they were obviously thrown in as an after thought as they were limited in number and were very poor. The game starts in the same "comfortable" location as 'The Hobbit' did, but you wouldn't have been able to tell from the new location graphic. Very little was actually drawn, with the plonking down of large slabs of meaningless colour preferred to trying to produce a proper location graphic. [more] [back]