LOTR 360 demo goes live

By Tom Bramwell Published 14 July, 2006

Battle for Middle-earth.

As promised, EA has released a demo of The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II through Xbox Live Marketplace.

The demo weighs in at 848.84MB and includes single and multiplayer elements.

Offline, as well a tutorial to show you how you're meant to play an RTS game on a control pad, there's the first mission of the War in the North campaign.

That's not all the Lord of the Rings content on Marketplace either - with a theme pack having been added recently too.

The Battle for Middle-earth II is out in Europe on Xbox 360 today.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Skooch #1 6 years ago

    Is this game any good?

  • bloodflowers #2 6 years ago

    If you can tolerate the jerky graphics engine, probably. Usually it's not a problem, but when you try to move quickly around a wider area, it turns into a flickbook. Very unpleasant for people sensitive to that.

  • sharpfish #3 6 years ago

    I have noticed a few demos that have slowdown and jerking, I hope to god that this isn't what is meant by High Def Next Gen graphics (i.e throw every effect at it until the engine crawls, in effect CURRENT gen being driven too hard).

    there are some gems for the 360 already and plenty more on the way but I have seen far too much carelessness in some of these early wave titles.

    What happened to a console being plug n play, super smooth? Heading down the same route as PC's, 'cept we can't upgrade the CPU or GPU to get rid of the performance problems.

    Developers, please remember SMOOTH FRAME RATES and GOOD GAMEPLAY are more important than good looking static shots and overused effects.

  • Darren #4 6 years ago

    I remember playing the BFME II demo on my aging Athlon XP 3000+ PC with a GeForce 6800 GT and on maximum settings at 1280x1024, it ran as smooth as silk so if the Xbox 360 version is jerky and prone to slowdown then either:

    1. The game is poorly optimised for which there is no excuse; or

    2. The Xbox 360 simply isn't as powerful as Microsoft claim it is and we have no choice but to live with it.

    I'm getting a tad fed up of poorly coded Xbox 360 games to be honest, especially when you consider they cost £20 more than on other formats. They all look pretty but suffer from either a juddery framerate or, worst of all, v-sync tearing. Not quite what I was expecting from a next-gen console...

  • Darren #5 6 years ago

    @ Sharpfish - Good post, I completely agree with you. It seems that developers are more keen to make everyone's jaw-drop when they see static screenshots of their games but that excitement usually turns to absolute horror when you actually see the game move... well it does for me! Chromehounds and MotoGP 06 are two recent games that looked superb in the screenshots but look messy when you play the game thanks to tearing...
    Edited by 1 at 14/07/06 @ 21:04

  • cyacomini #6 6 years ago

    @ Wonga

    Sir, you may be on to something there - I played the demo through and had no sign of poor frame rates. I've also tested the demo on my PC along side the 360 version and to be honest, there's not much in it bar resolution being higher on the PC...

    I'm also wondering if perhaps demos are more prone to poor frame rates because the demo's data lives on the HDD. But, i suspect also that streaming data from the HDD should be quicker than from DVD.

    Can anyone confirm this ?

  • lurcher #7 6 years ago

    Yes, if anything the demo should be faster. I've been browsing some other forums, and some people's slowdown problems with the full version have been fixed or improved by clearing their cache partition, so it may be more an I/O thing than a problem with the rendering. If your hard drive is pretty full, I guess you could run into similar things with the demo, due to disk fragmentation.

    Roll on a version of Diskeeper for X360. :p

  • Nostromo13 #8 6 years ago

    i played the demo and i like it, i don't think it is something that could be properly executed on current gen machines and even though people are saying that it can run more smoothly on the pc i still think it is a decent effort. I will probably purchase it eventually.

  • lurcher #9 6 years ago

    Nostromo, I'm sure I heard that they were initially working on porting it to Xbox, but I guess they didn't get very far with that. Sounds like a hellish job. The CPU and GPU on the Xbox aren't bad - memory would have been the big problem.

  • Zero Beat #10 6 years ago

    This game has realtime pixelly shadows. Super-awesome EA! You offended my eyes!

  • brutal #11 6 years ago

    quite enjoyed this.

    ordered the PC version as it's only £17.99 from play, rather than the ridiculous £39.99 for the 360 version, i'm also hoping the view will be somewhat broader and controls less clunky.

    FFS it's an RTS. You're supposed to play it on a PC with a mouse and keyboard. Why pay more than double for less functionality?!

  • darkbhudda #12 6 years ago

    @Brutal

    Why don't you form your own game company then?
    You can call them KKK games.

    How far do you take your stupid segregation?

    Or are you just pissed off poor people who can't afford a $5000 PC are playing the same games as you?

  • skuzzbag #13 6 years ago

    Prey isn't region locked so go to http://www.play-asia.com and get it for 22 quid for the 360.
    Edited by 1 at 15/07/06 @ 08:10

  • jlaakso #14 6 years ago

    You could just not get games at full price, at all. I have no problems waiting for the price to come down or buying them second-hand. If new games were priced more sensibly, I probably wouldn't do this, but as things stand, I have trouble understanding exactly who is paying the 60-70€ ($75-90/£40-50) for new Xbox 360 games in the supermarkets. (Finnish prices.)

    Anyway, I'm downloading the demo right now. I don't have a PC nearly capable enough to run this.

  • NthSimulachum #15 6 years ago

    Well, it's fun. And after a bit, very fast to control (ie. usage of groups, powers, heroes, waypoints). Just takes a bit of time to get used to.

    Everyone I've played so far though online has been laughably poor however, I hope the real game has a ranking system, to match up similarly skilled people. Plus, it can't be too much fun for a strategy novice to be repeatedly raped by rushes/ gigantic well organised pincer attacks

    Only real problem is with the shadows, I'd prefer blurry messes, to pixelly under res stencil shadows.

  • chupachups #16 6 years ago

    "Um... I think Brutal has a point, very basically. It IS a bit rich that console versions of games cost as much as double what they cost on PCs. For example - Prey can be had for £25 on average for PC, in the shops, and the 360 version (with lower resolution graphics) is £50. They even came out simultaneously. Insane."

    It's not that insane that console games cost more. Just because you pay £300 for an Xbox 360, that doesn't mean that you've actually paid for the console. Microsoft (like all other console makers) loses money on the console itself, and they have to get that money back somehow, otherwise the whole thing is pointless. The only real way they can do this at the moment is by adding some extra to the price of the games, so console titles are bound to cost more. How much more is a matter for debate of course...


    "Developers, please remember SMOOTH FRAME RATES and GOOD GAMEPLAY are more important than good looking static shots and overused effects."

    I totally agree with you from a gamer's perspective, but is there a chance that good stills sell more games?

    I've got no idea if that's true, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was, and publishers seem to have been doing everything they can to put impressive but misleading stills on game boxes for 20 years now (remember the disappointment of buying a Spectrum game only to find out the screenshots were for the Atari ST?).
    Edited by 1 at 15/07/06 @ 12:42

  • lurcher #17 6 years ago

    Big companies like EA can be quite brutal about this sort of thing, and the troops on the ground very often don't agree with it either. Spend some time on more tweaks or move those expensive programmers onto something else? Release now or wait a month, and run into the typical drop in sales as summer comes to an end?

    Anyway, I downloaded the demo this morning, played through the single player mission and a couple of online matches, and can't say I had any real problems with framerate. It does stall and slow down from time to time, but nothing worse than I've seen with other RTSes. Controls seem to work very well - think I'll probably pick this up next weekend; off on a annoying work trip tomorrow so will be 360-less for the week. :(