TWO games off the backlog this weekend.

First, “Lord of the Rings: War in the North”, or “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Other Guys”, in which you fight a ton of goblins, orcs, those bigger orc goblin guys, and trolls in a variety of funny hats.

Seriously, you’ve got cave trolls, frost trolls, armored trolls, trolls with big flaming axes… The LOTR movies were kind of lacking in enemy variety, is what I’m trying to get at here.

There are also giant spiders and if you are bothered by EXTREME CLOSE-UPS of giant spiders it is probably a good idea to give it a miss.

On the other hand, if you have enjoyed other action RPGs from Snowblind (Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Justice League Heroes), or if you are the sort of person who knows the names of Elrond’s sons, you should probably check it out.

I called them Herp and Derp because, seriously, elf names.

Second, “Enslaved: Odyssey to the West”, a post apocalyptic story based loosely on Dragonball, in which you are a surprisingly limber guy with a staff and a mad on for robots.

As luck would have it, post apocalyptic New York has lots of robots to kill.

OK, I know it’s ACTUALLY based loosely on a book, but I’ve never read the book and I’ve watched two episodes of Dragonball so that’s what I’m going with.

You’re protecting a woman who goes by “Trip” and who helps you solve puzzles and can fit through tight spaces and is in every way a somewhat hotter version of the girl from Ico, with the exception that the girl in Ico didn’t wire your head to explode if she dies.

Your name is “Monkey”, by the way, and I mention both of these character names only to contrast from the Lord of the Rings game, whose characters included “the dorf”, “the ranger”, “the elf”, and the aforementioned Herp and Derp.

Post-apocalyptic New York, and here I deliberately hyphenate it to emphasize the fact that I did not previously do so, is extraordinarily pretty.  It’s like the designers looked at every work set in the After The Vaguely Defined World War period and said, nah, that’s too much brown, let’s green this puppy up a notch.  It’s worth the play solely to look at some very nice vistas.

Note a lack of screenshots of Trip’s butt here. I am proving that occasionally I can write a post without channeling my inner 7th grade boy.

They are both also refreshingly short.  LOTR: The Other Guys clocked in at a shade over 14 hours, and Enslaved took 10.5 by Steam’s timer, which includes the times when I paused the game and went and cooked breakfast and did dishes and a few other chores.

I’ll go ahead and give it my unqualified recommendation here, because I loved the action bits and the dynamic between the main characters and there are no spiders to worry about.