Review: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an action-adventure game set in Middle Earth, which is most famous from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit. As far as game inspirations go, it is most clearly inspired by Assassin’s Creed and the Batman: Arkham series of games, which it manages to blend together with a mix of the former’s intriguing stealth and the latter’s brawling fisticuffs, and add some of its own twists to the mix.

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Back From the Dead

I’ve been really bad about updating this blog, so here’s a brief overview of things that I’ve had going on:

I’ve been working on a number of tiny side projects, none of which have ever really been taken to fruition; d20m was a hybrid modular d20 system that I need to polish up a bit and then release the core elements of, and The Gods Left Them, which is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction game that needs a setting rewrite. I was also doing a weekly video game stream, but lack of time really began to interfere with that and I stopped doing it.

The main thing I have to show for the time since I last wrote is my honors project, which has continued along more or less as planned, though a little more slowly than I would have liked because of class. I’m still using XMICAE, with all the slowness that comes with that, but I’ve made a couple of improvements to the code and stability. I plan to release XMICAE 0.1.1 eventually, though I don’t feel comfortable with releasing all my content to the public until after I defend my thesis (just to make sure that people know it’s mine). If you’re interested in seeing its current state, though, you can check out xmicae.homoeoteleuton.com.

Finally, over this weekend I made a mockup of a game, tentatively titled “The Inky Depths”. It’s a steampunk tactical game with roleplaying elements, plus giant mech suits and a needlessly complex system. I’m including its 72-hour build here, and I hope to eventually polish it and put it up on 1km1kt (as it stands it’s not really “finished”), but this is its “rough draft” if you will. The Inky Depths Rough Draft can be downloaded here. The main changes that will come in the upcoming days are to fix some things that came as a result of deadlines (I was going to do this as an early entry for 1km1kt’s 24-hour competition, but it dragged out to about 72 hours of time and 16 man-hours of work (which should be a testament to just how messy my weekend was),