Where are all the idyllic Lord of the Rings games?

How game designers are missing the point with all these grimdark Lord of the Rings adaptations

One of my great gaming guilty pleasures was the 2003 adaptation of The Hobbit. It wasn’t great — in fact, it was pretty a bad action platformer — but it allowed me to do something I’d never been able to do before (outside of the abysmal Fellowship of the Ring game on Super Nintendo, which is better left unmentioned): explore Middle-earth on my own. Of course my mind had wandered the fields…