Yeah, the sequel was a huge disappointment for me. I mean, it's hard not to get a kick out of summoning Tom Bombadil to wreck some orcs just because of the sheer ridiculousness of it, but it's a very inferior sequel all around.

There's also War of the Ring, a very traditional rts not based on the movies. I just replayed it recently and it's still a lot of fun. Yeah, it's very by the numbers in terms of gameplay, but it is fun to see a slightly different version of LotR.

You get to summon Tom Bombadil to wreak havoc? That I've got to see!

Never played WotR myself but I looked at some gameplay clips and screenshots, based on which I thought a comment by a friend of mine served as a pretty apt description of the game : "it felt like a green orc would jump out of the bushes any second" :)
I'm a huge rts fan, and Warcraft 3 is my favorite in the genre, so I just can't shake the feeling that WotR looks like a WC3 reskin :P Kind of like how I find SW:Galactic Battleground difficult to play after AoE2 since I keep expecting to find catapults and archers around every corner...

It pretty much is. But then again if you like both LotR and W3, that's not really a bad thing. It's not an all time great game, but it is a lot of fun.

I actually often like such "reskins" more than the original game. Like Star Trek Away Team is basically a reskin of Commandos, but that mix of a a gameplay type and setting I both like is exactly what makes it great. Now that I think about it, the Commandos template could be used for so many settings I'd love to see... including even a Hobbit game.

I'm not totally adverse to playing it, but it might be a while before I get to it, if ever, because even among my rts backlog there are several more pressing titles I missed. Incidentally one, Armies of Exigo looks like a clone of WC3 but with a pretty neat aesthetic of its own and an absolutely killer intro.

Commandos type hobbit game? Hmmm, I'll be honest I can't quite see it sorry :D By the way, if you like commandos in other settings then Satellite Reign might be worth checking out. It's a bit rough around the edges sometimes, but I was surprised to find how much it scratched that Commandos itch when I took the stealth approach.
Commandos template has been used in a broad range of settings by now come to think of it
Western : Desperado
Sci-fi : Star trek Away team + arguably Satellite Reign
Medieval : Robin Hood, Legend of Sherwood
Historic Japan : Blades of the Shogun
A Star Wars one could be pretty amazing too, where you have a bounty hunter and his team for example.

I played it, but never finished it. But I remember thinking at the time it looks great, and the intro was indeed fantastic, one of my all time favourites.

Come on, easye peasy - Bilbo has stealth and can crawl through small spaces. Gandalf can cast light spells to blind enemies and maybe set things on fire to distract guards or make smoke to hide the team. Thorin is the fighter, the "green beret" of the group (minus the agility). Fili and Kili are ranged fighters with bows, can either attack or activate elements of the environment with their bows (like in Legend of Sherwood). Balin could get some healing skills or something. Even adventure from the books could be adapted easily, though with some obvious changes, into stealth commandos-like missions - distract the trolls untill the sunrise, evade the goblin patrols and escape goblin tunnels, distract the giant spiders and rescue the dwarves, get the keys to the elven dungeon and then make your way to the barrels without raising the alarm, steal the cup from Smaug. Basically the only change required is to make them all more of a team effort, but that's easily done.

That actually sounds pretty amazing, and the Hobbit story line indeed allows for several Commandos type levels as you point out. Escaping from the elven dungeons could make for an especially incredibly level!
The only real challenge I forsee comes from considering Commandos 1&2's levels. Often you only play with part of the team. In fact there's perhaps only 1 or 2 levels with the entire team present. And in the first commandos there are only six commandos total. Thorin's company has thirteen, not including Gandalf and Bilbo! And even managing all six in Commandos can be very taxing. So one has to think carefully how to go about this.

If I was actually making that game, I'd take a page from Legend of Sherwood, and make the dwarves other than Thorin sort of like the Merry Men in LoS - interchangable characters with two or three sets of skills. And then youd pick a team from among all the available characters a team for every the mission. The rest would just sort of be "presumed" to tag along after you. Yeah, takes some suspension of disbelief, but if the game would work well I don't think anyone would complain.

The problem with Conan is that Arnold's shadow looms over and distorts everything that happens with the character in movies. People really love that original movie and if you point out that Arnold's Conan is nowhere near as cool as the literary version, people act really threatened and defensive about it.

As you say, production-wise you could certainly make a really good movie, but it's hard to get people to view the genre from a perspective that isn't torn between Harry Potter on one end and Game of Thrones on the other. Something like Conan should be its own thing, not a reaction to or cash-in on something else but that's the only way producers seem to think.

As I often say on my movie forum, you gotta let that stuff be what it is and take each movie for what it is. Judge not the name on the poster, judge the film itself as an achievement (or not) in cinema. It really leads to a lot less stress and annoyance and a lot more easy going enjoyment. Trust me, I have my own beloveds which have been radically altered... best to just take the result for what it is, a movie.

But the whole point of having a poster or a trailer is to offer the audience something to form an opinion on and ultimately judge. We don't just blindly walk into a theater, sit down and wait for some random movie to start playing. We go into a film with certain amounts of prejudice. This gets further complicated when a film is based on a book, because the film maker needs to either deliver on the preconceived notions of the books' fanbase or create something that expands on and overrides those expectations.

I've always wanted to watch Memento... but every time I would have to the time, I'm usually too tired and choose something "easier".

Same here. It sounds interesting but it could also just be a gimmick to make a bland story somewhat intriguing. Plus I'm not 100% sure about Christopher Nolan, I've only seen two of the Batman movies and was thoughly unimpressed. Memento is the only film that looks at all appealing to me. I've heard nothing but praise about Inception, but I think the previews look utterly stupid.

Hmm... I liked Nolan's Batman and found Inception brilliant...

It's not, trust me, but it does take patience and concentration to watch, but it's by no means impossible to follow. The movie is shown in segments that go backwards in time and you just need to remind yourself every now and then "This is what just happened."

The story and the ending are actually quite brilliant, IMHO, though if you follow REALLY CLOSELY you can figure it out early on.

Agree with almost everything, but this:

I don't think, you really have to remind yourself about that.
I mean - that's the whole shtick of that movie...it repeats everything for you, it only adds a new angle each time.