Hogwarts Herald

About a week ago I bought the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince video game for the Nintendo DS. I thought it would be a fun adventure game to enjoy before the movie came out, but I was sorely mistaken. I still have not beat the game, but I hear it is not that hard to do. Personally I found it too boring to keep at it. The worst thing is that it really does not even seem to be about the 6th book or movie and could very well just be a general Harry Potter game just about exploring the world of Harry Potter.

The game is mostly about you going around Hogwarts completing various tasks, which for the most part involve finding items or trading for them to complete missions. There are some mini games along the way, such as Quidditch (pathetic tapping version), Exploding Snap (basically an okay matching game), Gobstones (just marbles), and Skittles (a poorly constructed pinball like game). Basically the game becomes a tedious one of plots loosely tied to events in the book/movie, but actually are just plain old regular things that the space or time is never devoted to in the book or the movie.

I could live with the tasks aspects being added in, as it is what gives you something to do in the game. Partially, though, it is a rather sad game because of the lack of the magical aspect. Sure you do spells to get items out of bookshelves and such, but in the actually tasks you never use spells unless you count the simplistic duels. The only magical world of Harry Potter thing I found somewhat recreated was the feel of running around Hogwarts and using the secret passageways.

The last straw for me, though, was finding several things entirely inaccurate to at least the book’s plot. It is not exactly excusable that they skip some major parts like the whole Dumbledore taking Harry from the Dursleys and going to see Slughorn, but it is entirely unexcuseable when they totally changed the plot. The first major thing is Luna unpetrifies Harry on the train and makes the whole incident not seem so dramatic as it is in the book with him almost going back to London, but Tonks finds him.

Overall this is a very sad game and I do not even recommend it for die hard Harry Potter fans. It just is a sad excuse for a game, especially when I remember the games for the first two movies being so much fun. Partially I had lower standards back then for games, so maybe they were not that awesome, but I do not think it is too much to expect them to be better and improve as the years go by. It is really disappointing that the games related to the movie releases have become like the majority of games based on movies that are not worth buying and only rarely worth renting. It really used to be in the minority worth buying instead of renting, but it suddenly has gone to not worth either. Perhaps the console versions are better, but I have heard the PSP version is at least basically the same, so equally worthless I imagine.