LEGO Lord of the Rings: The Video Game is a video game that was released on October 30, 2012 for handheld consoles and November 13, 2012 for platforms. The Mac OS X version was published by Feral Interactive and was released on February 21st, 2013.[1] It was released November 7th, 2013 for iOS. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad. The game takes players through the events of all three movies and is the second LEGO video game to feature fully voiced cutscenes. Though it follows the events of Peter Jackson's film trilogy it throws in some comical twists. It has the largest game environment so far of any LEGO video game, letting players explore an open world map of Middle-earth (though locations are greatly decreased in size). It also has dozens of new features not seen in past LEGO video games. For example players can complete side quests, create items to use from mithril, access a large variety of collectible items from the "treasure trove", and also has a variety of characters with unique items possessing special abilities.
Muddy Armor / Shimmering Armor / Magma Armor / Calcium Armor / Wooden Armor Chef's Hat / Artist's Hat / Sun Hat / Statue Hat / Ferryman's Hat / Flower Hat / Rock Hat / Flaming Hat / Palantír Hat Narsil / Narsil (Broken) / Sting / Barrow-blade / Andúril / Sword / Hadhafang / Glamdring / Broadsword / Short Sword / Herugrim / Scimitar / Rohan Sword / Elven Sword / Ringwraith Sword / Moria Orc Sword / Easterling Sword / Orc Sword / Grima's Dagger / King of the Dead's Sword / Ghost Sword / Elven Great Sword / Ringwraith's Dagger Shield of Gondor / Elven Shield / Rohan Shield / Orc Shield / Lurtz's Shield / Easterling's Shield Bow of the Galadhrim / Lurtz's Bow / Bow Gandalf's Staff / Radagast's Staff / Saruman's Staff Party Favor LEGO Lord of the Rings - Gameplay Commentary Double Bearded Whirlwind Axe "Its a long way." "You have to toss me... Don't tell the elf!" -Aragorn and Gimli, at the gate of Helms Deep trying to get to the bridge
Based on The Lord of the Rings motion picture trilogy, LEGO® The Lord of the Rings follows the original storylines of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, taking players through the epic story events reimagined with the humor and endless variety of LEGO play. Trusted with the dangerous task to destroy an ancient magical ring that threatens all that is good, Frodo is forced to leave his peaceful home. But the ring wants to be found and the road to Mount Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed, will be perilous and riddled with Orcs and fouler things. To help Frodo, a Fellowship is formed — Aragorn the Ranger, Gandalf the Wizard, Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Dwarf, Boromir a Man of Gondor, and Frodo’s Hobbit friends Sam, Merry and Pippin. Players relive the legend in LEGO form, as they explore wonders, solve timeless riddles, and overcome endless foes in their quest to destroy the Ring.
Explore all of the open-world of Middle-earth and experience epic battles with Orcs, Uruk-hai, the Balrog, the Witch-king, and other fearsome creatures. Wield the power of the Palantír or Seeing-stone (‘one that looks far-away’), and jump between multiple storylines. Experience the LEGO The Lord of the Rings heroes come to life in an all new way, as they deliver the dialogue from the films. Collect, combine and forge new items in the Blacksmith Shop using Mithril, the most precious metal in Middle-earth . Discover and unlock over more than 60 playable characters, including Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, and many others. Collect and use a variety of weaponry and magical items, including the Light of Eärendil, Elven rope, swords and bows. Play with family and friends with easy access drop-in, drop-out gameplay option.LEGO Star WarsSee allLEGOLEGO bricks are a classic building toy enjoyed by the young and young at heart for generations. At Walmart, you'll find a wide seletion of LEGO sets, all at Every Day Low Prices.LEGO sets let you build new and familiar worlds in creative ways.
With LEGO Super Heroes sets, you can enter the worlds of your favorite superheroes, including Batman, Spider-Man and the Avengers. Enter the Star Wars universe with Star Wars LEGO sets. Recreate scenes from Jurassic World with LEGO Jurassic World sets. Or build your own urban landscape with classic playsets'>LEGO city sets. Fans will also get a kick out of LEGO Minecraft sets and LEGO Creator sets. For imaginative pretend play, check out the LEGO Friends sets. And for the perfect introduction to building with LEGO bricks, pick up a LEGO Juniors set.With a huge selection of LEGO sets and other toys at great prices, Walmart has you covered. One week ago, my 10-year-old niece turned me into a Minecraft addict. I’ve known about Minecraft for years, of course. The creative block-building game, first developed as a side hobby by one Swedish guy and now a massively profitable division of Microsoft, is the world’s biggest videogame. I’ve dabbled with it on occasion, if only because it became something my job as a game critic wouldn’t let me ignore.
Emphasis, though, on dabbled: I’d bring it up on a laptop and poke around its cubist worlds, my little block-arm waggling its endless Arsenio fist-pump, blocks of wood and cobblestone and dirt slowly filling my TARDIS-like pockets. I’d usually run around until I died from starvation. One time, I dug a hole straight down until, poof, magma! And then I’d quit. I’d quit because I wasn’t sure what to do next, or what the allure of vaguely accurate geological strata was, or why the game was as allergic to explaining itself as David Lynch. I relegated Minecraft to a mental bin labeled “experimental amorphous time suck.” I followed it half-interestedly, dutifully chronicling its burgeoning celebrity. I curated lists of players’ architectonic feats when editors requested them. I covered the game’s milestones the way armchair astronomers might describe some celestial phenomenon, distantly awestruck by the spectacle. And then my niece intervened. I’d noticed her playing the game on an iPad a few months ago.
She’d built a kind of amusement park slash farm with her cousin in the game’s monsters-free creative mode. It was an a-ha moment, seeing all of her ideas corralled and reified, thinking about all the time and thought that must have gone into assembling them. She’d crawl into a chair or lie on the couch while playing, clutching the screen like a doctor scrutinizing a medical chart, her thumbs skating quietly across the glass, gesturally willing worlds into existence. I’d just bought Apple’s phablet-sized iPhone, so I was sitting in the living room as she’s playing and thinking, OK, I have a few minutes here, let’s give Minecraft: Pocket Edition a try—partly to see how the game works on a phablet, partly to see if she’ll notice. As it’s downloading, I have my first latecomer’s epiphany: it’s only 24 MB! Worlds teeming with possibility are spawning from an instruction set you could fit on a pile of floppies. I fire it up. Minecraft makes little thwick sounds as you navigate its menus.
My niece’s head pops up. “Is that Minecraft?” she asks. Apparently there’s no mistaking that thwick.I’m just getting a world started,” I reply, nonchalant, like I’m making a martini. This is the part where the critic who’s supposed to think smart things about videogames foolishly pretends to know what he’s doing. My niece is smarter than this, of course, which means she has my number instantly. But she’s also kind. She watches me fumble around in survival mode after the game’s sun sets. I’m schlepping armfuls of resources but shelterless, like bait on the hook of a fishing rod held by no one. Something behind me sounds angry, then two or three things sound angry, and then, thwack, I’m knocked backward, then backward again.Goodbye, apples, sugar cane, black wool, and piles of raw pork. Hello, groaning, hissing, face-punching darkness. “You need to build a shelter,” my niece says after I croak. “To hide from the monsters.” So I do, after forging a new world to skip back to precious daylight, strangely compelled as she talks me through excavating the chocolate and tan speckled sides of a hill at the edge of a pond.
A duck-billed chicken squawks as it flaps in the water behind me. A pig clambers down the hill’s orthogonal slope and stops to watch. The dirt cubes disappear one by one, making sounds like gravel underfoot. I carve out just enough space to squeeze in a crafting table I made from raw wood, a furnace I made from stone, a torch I made by converting wood to charcoal and sticks, and myself. Another click and I’ve made a crude wood door to seal myself in, and crucially, the scary things out. It’s like a Lego hobbit hole, only in Mirkwood. This is where Minecraft‘s hooks begin sliding into my gray matter. I’m in here, the monsters are out there. I have light and fire and all this other stuff I can use to build better stuff, they have an overriding desire to chew my block-face off, but nothing like the trove of resources feeding a boundless catalogue of stone to computer age inventions, all of it lying in the world’s conceptual cracks and literal crevices, iceberg-like, if I’m diligent enough.
I know virtually nothing about the latter at this point, of course, but the part of me that shivered visualizing text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure‘s phantasmagoric descriptions of its subterranean rooms over three decades ago is suddenly awake and listening, the game spooling up old neural pathways. It’s atavistic, lighting candles against the dark. This is my jumping off point, my liminal moment. “Did you know you can build golems?” my niece asks as I’m puzzling out how to turn planks of oak into a pickaxe. No, I did not know you could build golems, sentries made from blocks of snow or iron and pumpkins. They protect villagers from monsters. The snow ones even throw snowballs. “And roller coasters,” she adds. Now she’s teasing me, to say nothing of the way the game lets you sculpt tree house hideaways, or underwater sea castles, or floating sky islands, on up to fortresses run by fully functional algorithmic logic units. Yes, players have built working computers inside Minecraft.
“But you have to get a bunch of stuff before you can do that,” she says. She’s talking about iron bars, which you craft from iron ore, which you get from hunting for caves and then going spelunking way down in the deep places of the world. If nighttime’s rough on recalcitrant Minecraft neophytes, heading underground is a nightmare, as claustrophobic and measureless and basically heart-stopping as Neil Marshall’s The Descent. I’ve been spooked more over the past week exploring a mammoth underground network near my spawn point than in any survival horror game I’ve played to date. “Hey, I see your world!” she yells. “I can come find you!” A phone, a tablet, all quietly dialoguing behind the scenes, worlds and characters and imaginations joining hands on millions of portable screens. She’s swiping at her tablet, frantic, thrilled, and though I’ve long understood Minecraft to also sometimes be a multiplayer experience, the ramifications are sinking in.
But Minecraft‘s worlds are massive, and in the PC or mobile versions, they’re theoretically infinite. Infinity’s a problem, because there’s no quick, vanilla Minecraft way to find someone else in survival mode. After a few minutes we give up on trying to find each other, and she slides back into her world, telling me more about what you can do, what she’s done, and of course what to avoid. Like spider jockeys, which is developer Mojang’s jokey way of referring to spider-riding skeletons. I’m scared just typing that. At some point over the course of this one evening, my brain’s telling me this is going to be A Thing now, however late I am to the party. The time suck cometh. I am going to keep playing Minecraft until I’ve seen it all. Which may be never, given Mojang’s penchant for periodically upending the game’s inner logic: Minecraft is less a sandbox than the idea of a sandbox, a proto-retro creation tool that’s still being dreamt into existence. After midnight, instead of crawling into bed with my wife, I slip into an unoccupied bedroom nearby, just so I can keep playing until my eyes won’t let me—adding rooms to my hobbit hole, then beds and pictures to the rooms, thinking about gardening and animal husbandry, thinking about visiting the tree-sized mushrooms over yonder or delving into the eerily lit cavern I noticed a few hills over.
I don’t want to stop playing, and so I’m up most of the night. As I’ll be the next night. And the one after that. I haven’t felt this way about a game in I can’t remember how long. When the weekend’s over and I’m back home, I download the console version and start again. Starting again is central to understanding the game, like the concept of shoshin, beginner’s mind, in Zen Buddhism. Every structure, every garden, every contraption is like a Platonic shadow of the one you intended. Minecraft is basically an idea chase, each thing you build or refine essentially rehearsal for the next grander or cleverly simpler one. As I’ll come to understand in the days ahead—erecting a cliffside citadel with daylight sensors and automated lighting, staking torches in vertiginous caverns like breadcrumb trails, bootstrapping my bulwark in the hellish Nether dimension, jamming to composer C418’s hypnotic grooves from a moonlit beacon above the clouds—the games I’ve played up to this point feel like training wheels for Minecraft.