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Review
Not the Lord of the Rings is an embarrassingly shallow game. It's full of immature "adult" humor. You'll run into characters such as Dildo Bumbite, Pipdick Brandymuck, and Stam Gangrene. Items you get include old underwear and smoked joints. Nothing in this regard is witty, funny, or even really has to do with the source material. It's just edgy and gross for the sake of it.
The game content doesn't fare any better, either. Walk through a bunch of rooms, pick up items (most of which are red herrings), explore some mazes. Whenever you come across someone, you usually have to give them an item, but there's barely any logic behind it. It's not fun to play, and none of the rooms or segments really stand out.
The parser doesn't respond to ABOUT, HELP, or most other out-of-world commands. The logic is inconsistent: you can't use GREEN to refer to a green key, but you have to use STONE to refer to a stone key, which is even more confusing because you already have an item that's a pile of stones. Even the speed at which it registers text is disappointing, and I had to type slower than normal or else it wouldn't pick up on everything. You also can't backspace and delete text you've already written, or use up and down to scroll through past commands.
Don't play Not the Lord of the Rings. It gave me Stiffy Makane vibes, if anything. There is nothing of value in this game.
Comments on this review
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Well, I'm definitely not going to defend this one. And I doubt Andy himself (RIP) would either, to be fair.
Just as a general comment, though... It sounds like you were playing this ZX Spectrum game through the archive.org link. Which is fine, but the difficulties with deleting is a quirk of the archive.org emulator rather than an issue with the game. Pressing SHIFT and 0 (zero) together in that emulator does delete/backspace... That's what you had to do on a real ZX Spectrum.
Ah, thanks for letting me know! Guess I shouldn't hold this against the game, then. It's the first ZX Spectrum game I've played, so I wasn't familiar with the controllers.
