Yes, it's good that those two "fiascos" turned out to be two killer games ;)
And I have to agree with you about LOTR. The books were a million times better, and then I didn't fancy those all that much either. I wouldn't be too excited about it, if Jackson hadn't been behind much cooler stuff like "Bad Taste" and "King Kong".
: My first reaction was "ehhh... remember last time Bungie tried running
: several game projects in several studios at once? I recall one of those
: titles was a huge time and resource sink (which still turned out a pretty
: good game) that collapsed the new studio that was developing it, another
: was suffixed 'too' rather than 'two' by many fans (though I still liked
: it) and had a pretty fatal installer bug necessitating a complete recall
: of the product, and another dragged on for years and years and years
: before finally coming out last of all for the platform it was first
: debuted on, after having to sell off 20% of the company to one publishing
: behemoth and the rest of it to The Evil Empire."
: Then again, that was a tiny little independent Bungie trying to personally
: develop three games at once in two of their own studios. This is big huge
: MS-backed Bungie delegating most of the work to two other established
: studios (well... Wingnut Interactive is new, but they've got plenty of
: resources from Wingnut the movie company to handle this. Hell, Massive
: alone is most of a game engine right there).
: And that's where I shifted my opinion from "ehhh..." to
: "coolness". Despite some story butchering, I was really, really
: impressed with the LotR movies. Production quality, art and sound and all
: of it, was astounding. I wasn't very impressed with any of the LotR games,
: but Wingnut wasn't behind them. King Kong had similarly good artistic
: flare. I'll be quite exited to see what they can do with Halo, both in
: movie form and in this new game form.
: Halo Wars... we'll have to wait and see. I'm not too familiar with Ensemble.
: I just hope it's done more Myth style than traditional RTS style. It would
: be sad to see a (partially) Bungie RTS that's not even as innovative as
: their last (and first) one.
