Lord of the Rings   -   Hound Dog, 3/.50; El Dorado, 3/.50   -   Three Stars

I want to love this table more than I do.  It's got so much going for it, most notably its great geeky theme, executed without shyness through what must be one of the most complicated logic maps of any pinball machine ever.  This thing is packed with different modes, including at least four multiball modes, each with its own goals and jackpot sequences.  The number of different things you're working on accomplishing is breathtaking, and there's not too much of the repetitious "now do it again, but this time it'll take three shots instead of two" that somewhat degrades games like Medieval Madness.  And there's just something really satisfying about a game tackling so many of the highlights of the Lord of the Rings series.  You get wargs, orcs, Gollum, the balrog, the palantir - of course, all licensed games do a quick round of cherry-picking for suitable catchphrases and so forth, but the variety of modes in this game allows for a lot of buried treasure of this sort.  The graphics on the video screen are far and away some of the best I've seen (no actual video mode, though, as far as I found) - there's a dedication to detail and fluidity not yet seen in any Stern machine.

So....what's not to like?  Well, unfortunately, the playfield itself has a rather dull layout - we've got five different ramps, some of which feed to some bumpers, and a precious handful of targets (some of them dressed up as toys)....  and that's about it.  Yes, this is another Terminator 3 style game that subscribes to the "all ramps, all the time" philosophy of pinball design.  Now, I love ramps as much as the next pinboy, and games without them often feel clunky and terribly lacking to me.  But I'd prefer an overcrowded playfield (like, say, the one for Ripley's Believe It Or Not) to all this dead space in the middle of the table.  The main purpose of this space is to give you a great view when your ball gracefully drains straight down the middle from insufficiently powerful shots - in this particular game, the One Ring Ramp tends to be involved.  In any case, once you get the knack of the five ramp shots, there is nothing left for you to master in this game. 

The audio clips are sort of underwhelming, too, with only Gandalf and Gollum getting any memorable lines.  I normally don't care much about this kind of thing, but if you're going to spring for a big movie license, especially for a trilogy of movies with a giant ensemble cast, surely you can put together a better assortment of voice snippets.  It's just kind of odd, is all.

Also, where on Earth is Tom Bombadil????  (Okay, just kidding on that one.) 

To be fair, Stern does seem to be on a gradual upward curve, with this and the excellent Sopranos standing leagues above earlier dubious licensed tables like Austin Powers.   If they can combine the ruleset depth of this game with more interesting table designs, they could possibly surpass the heights of overstuffed 90's tables like Theatre of Magic.

(One final minus - Hound Dog's table has a couple of mechanical goofs going on - both of the devices that catch the ball before launching it up into a waiting habitrail operate erratically.  The one on the lefthand side of the board fails almost every time.  This actually makes the game easier because during multiball, the extra balls will tend to pile up in this corner of the machine, leaving you free to target one ball towards all the shots you're trying to make.  Aside from the fact that this is kind of cheating, the defect means that regular play has an irritating stop-and-start quality.  This wreaks havoc on your flow, as you can imagine.)

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