Aspyr Media Inc. on Tuesday announced that it is shipping its Mac conversion of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, the action game based on the hit movie.
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is the third and final installment of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy about a fantastic realm called Middle Earth. The books were famously turned into movies that have been released over the past several years. Directed by Peter Jackson, Return of the King walked away with 11 Academy Awards.
The game was released for consoles and the PC last fall, and it’s a straight up hack-and-slash action game featuring the same characters and imagery you saw in the movie. The game follows three parallel tracks — the path of the wizard, path of the king and path of the hobbits — as you take turns playing different major characters from the story to help save the realm of Middle Earth from Sauron and his minions.
The Mac conversion of The Return of the King is based on the PC conversion of the game, and features support for two player multiplayer action using “hot seat” gaming — two players on a single computer. Shipping on DVD, the game enhances its play with cut-scenes from the movies and the voices of actors featured in the film, including extensive in-game narration from Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf.
Aspyr expects the game to hit store shelves by this Friday, April 2. Rated T for Teen by the ESRB, the game costs about $50. System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.2.6 or later, G4/800MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, 2.2GB hard disk space, ATI Radeon 7500 or Nvidia GeForce2 MX or better 3D graphics with at least 32MB VRAM, and a DVD drive to install and play.