I'm surprised Risk didn't make the list. Not because it changed the mechanics or anything, but because against the computer you could actually hope for a game to end in under 12 hours

No chore at all. It's one of the simpler games to manage. But for the physical version you do need a table and playing it in a moving vehicle would be ill advised.

Ticket To Ride on the iPad whittled a lot of hours away for my ex and I on a few long car rides (and one Amtrak ride, appropriately, haha) - never played the physical board game, but just looking at it on the screen I could imagine it being quite the chore to keep track of all the cards and game pieces

The Tauriel-Legolas-Kili love triangle has also been removed.

The 70s version was by Rankin-Bass, not Ghibli. Not being snarky... I love that version of the Hobbit and it's not a bad template. Rankin-Bass also did all those Christmas specials like Rudolph and Frosty, as well as The Last Unicorn in '85... one of my other favorites!

They already did it with Harry Potter: making the final part into two films. And since then we've had a slew of trilogies being turned into four installments. The Hobbit is just an extension of that mentality IMO. Damn you, WB and Harry Potter.

The blurbs for the 3rd movie should have been: "Obligatory!" and "Inevitable!"

LOTR was all about the extended editions. This time round, it's about the abridged version. How sad.

My favourite of these three films is still the first. And no, it's not fantastic or anything, but it was enjoyable. I had fun, tons of fun watching it. It felt like I was re-discovering sides of Middle-Earth that I had sort of forgotten about: the non-serious parts, the parts where a Hobbit goes out for adventure and,…

Guldur, not Guldor. You see, in the original Sindarin... Wait, where are you going?

But I'd be surprised if these fan attempts don't all end up at roughly the same place in the end: a much shorter story that does a better job at bringing Tolkien's original tale to the big screen, because they don't have to worry about contracts or studio money or whatever else drove Jackson to stretch the story as…

man, i thought it was a game... I was about to start doing a buy search.

awwwwww cuuute :3

I'd love to see an MMO actually go with the visual style of the first entry there, instead of the various shades of faux-realistic through moderately stylized that most go with.