In addition to tomorrow's release of the Knothole Island add-on for Fable II, there's a possibly more substantial threat to your wallet this week. You might not appreciate the severity of the threat if you've tried the Lord the Rings: Conquest demo. It's limited to a limp single-player tutorial and then the opportunity to jump unprepared into some rather unlovely multiplayer chaos. No sale, right?

But those of us for whom the Star Wars: Battlefront games were a guilty pleasure are moderately concerned that Lord of the Rings: Conquest may indeed constitute an elevated wallet threat level. I don't particularly need great next-gen graphics for a battle at Isengard in which an actual Ent comes stomping up, or to have a Nazgul on his fellbeast swooping over the Shire, or to pick off a hundred orcs with my flaming arrows while The Theme plays. In other words, I'm enough of a sucker for the license that the variety and spectacle (muddied as it may be by middling graphics) are all I need. Mumakils on Pelannor (pictured, albeit in a touched-up hi-res screenshot that probably little resembled the actual game)? I'm there.

Hopefully, this will be viable as a single-player game, with the option to populate skirmishes with AI players before jumping online. The variety of classes and powers is evident in the demo, where you can see how the basic warrior plays very differently from the archer, which plays very differently from the mage, which plays very differently from the scout, which is going to be seriously annoying online. It's not quite Team Fortress, but not for lack of trying. And if the Battlefront games are any indication, there should be some interesting tricks on the various maps.