Introduction:

If there is one name that invokes a legacy in the world of PC games, it's Electronic Arts (EA). It's a sure bet that anyone who has ever played a game on a computer has played a game from EA. One of their latest releases in their Tolkien Enterprise licensed Lord of the Rings library, "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth II", is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) based game built upon their first release. EA took a lot of heat from their fans with their previous releases, and they hope that this new release will serve as an apology to those fans.

For the un-enlightened reader, "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth II" is based upon the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien in his trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a story about a mythical land called Middle Earth, in which the forces of good and evil wage war for control of a magical ring that grants unbelievable power to its owner. Within the camps of the good and evil forces are several different races, all unique with their own strengths and weaknesses. If you are really out of the loop, just arriving from the distant past on a time machine, or returning from the NGC 604 nebula in the Triangulum Galaxy on your "personal spaceship", the Tolkien trilogy was recently made into a groundbreaking film (in three parts) that you might have seen in the theaters.

Back in 1994, the groundwork was set that laid out what forever would be the basic format for RTS games by a release that many of us have played or at least heard about. Once that format was set, breaking the RTS mold would prove difficult at best; however, there have been many modifications that have enhanced the gameplay. There was a lot of industry hype surrounding this new release from EA. Is it possible that they have further expanded the RTS world or is this a game that will be lost among the other average RTS games?

Install

To begin, we have to be sure that my computer meets the minimum requirements for game play. Currently, I am running an AMD Athlon 2600+ on an Abit NF-7S v. 2.0 motherboard with 1G of Kingston Hyper-X PC-3200 RAM, and an ATi Radeon 9800XT 256MB video card. Ripped shamelessly from the official website for the game from EA shows the minimum requirements to be:

The install on the PC platform went surprisingly fast, and smooth. The only real hiccup I had was trying to track down the registration number to enter once the installer begins. The label states that it is on the back of the CD case or the manual. Typically, I try to find a sticker but instead it was printed on the top back of the manual. Can't fault them for my confusion, though.

As usual with most games LoTR:BMEII, asks if you want to install in the default directory or another directory of your choice. Once it was installed, I browsed through the folder it installed in my Start Menu. The game installer put a total of nine different program links, giving any user the ease of finding what they need instead of having to search through the typical "Read Me" text file. One link I was delighted to see was the "Check for Update" link.

Prior to playing the game, I thought I would check for updates to ensure that the game ran smooth and was surprised to see that there has only been two minor patches so far. According to the release notes on the two patches, neither was considered to be game-breaking, but rather minor improvements to two or three of the game features. Now once I had installed all the updates, it was time to get my Game On!