Some companies make games, some companies make total conversions, and some companies crush hopes and dreams. It is pretty rare that a company makes a business out of latter of the three. Thankfully, or not, Turbine has gone and done all three things I listed above for the Lord of the Rings franchise. 

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), and isn\'t actually a total conversion, although it sure feels like one at times. I\'ll explain later.

Before even fully launching into this game, I saw something that is both good and bad. The screen I make mention of is a little window that\'ll pop up when you hit your LotRO shortcut, this screen will take you through a few steps before you ever play the game. These things are checking/downloading updates and allowing you to specify which account for LotRO gold you want to use. The good end on this is that you\'ll be able to download and apply updates before you ever fully launch the game, and thus aren\'t kicked out of the game to download an update, it does it from the get go. The "bad" is that it lists all the types of accounts you have and have had for LotRO gold. What this means is that you\'ve a good chance to see old non-playable accounts under your uh... account after you login.

When I say account, it can get confusing, obviously. What I mean is that you have your main Turbine account, right? You also have an account for each version of your LotRO gold game. This means that you\'ll see your beta, retail, press, and so on, and I\'ve found no means on which to remove them from this list. They are there, period. What this means is that if you are one of those types that likes multiple copies of the game under your name, you can do so and go to them easily without remembering that many more passwords and account names. Which I guess could be good, for the handful of people out there who do that.

During character creation you\'ll notice a few things, first and foremost is that each race has different nations they can come from. That\'s neat, I don\'t care who you are, being able to say exactly where your human, elf, or what not came from is neat. This nationality choice can also affect your appearance as well. Much like we humans in real life will have varying skin tone based on where our families have lived for thousands of years, so too will your race in Middle Earth, a good amount of detail was taken in when they decided to do that. Another thing we all may find neat, if not downright comical, is that they indeed go with a straight "dwarf" race, no male or female options. Remember, you can\'t tell them apart very well.