Saturday, August 23, 2008

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry returns for his fifth year of study at Hogwarts. The wizarding community is in denial about his recent encounter with the evil Lord Voldemort. The Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, appoints a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to keep watch over Dumbledore and the Hogwarts students. The young wizards are woefully unprepared to defend themselves against the dark forces threatening them, leaving Harry, Ron and Hermione to handles things themselves. Harry prepares a group of young wizards calling themselves "Dumbledore's Army" for the extraordinary battle against Voldemort and his Death Eaters that lies ahead.
Customer Review: Harry Potter - Filch's Replacement in Training
Welcome to the world of Harry Potter - Year 5. You've progressed from ordinary magic, and have begun to apprentice yourself to the castle's infamous caretaker, Argus Filch. As such, you will complete the following chores: - Sweeping the courtyard - Mopping up puddles in not one, but *two* entrance-ways - Stacking wood in torches - Picking pears and putting them in baskets - Repairing pots - Lighting lamps - Making beds in the hospital wing - Pruning back overgrown devil's snare plants... and much, much more! 50% of the way threw the game, and this is all I've found. You spend 90% of your time completing random, pointless tasks that serve no higher purpose than to extend the total playtime of the game. The health bar found in previous versions of the Harry Potter gameverse has disappeared. Why? Because there's no need for one silly! There's nothing out there waiting to get you...maybe some grime in the bottom of the Prefect's Bathtub (which, thankfully, you don't have to scrub...or might, I wouldn't know, not having completed the *entire* game yet), but certainly no dark lords! So here's how I broke it down: Pros: - Interesting graphics, well-organized castle layout. Cons: - Endless chores that any muggle could do - Lack of actual, interesting discoveries that appeared in past versions - Bad camera angles (to the point of obstructing gameplay)with no way of adjusting them - Inability to adjust sound while in-game - Inability to adjust window size - No experience in-class Well...the list goes on and on... Avoid this title, there are certainly better ones out there. It's obvious they made it like this to take advantage of the new Wii controller, but that technology is lost on a PC. (Most gestures just aren't the same.)
Customer Review: Good, and at points, really fun
The Harry Potter video game series has been a mixed bag since the beginning. There have always been some really nice elements to the series--the quidditch scenes in the earlier episodes, for example, were quite fun. But when it all comes down, these games have been about finding stuff. A *lot* of stuff. If you like finding stuff in the environment of Hogwarts, you are going to love this game more than any of the others. This game tells its story only by sugestion. There really is little hope of following the story line unless you are already familiar with the story. I suppose that it really would be asking too much of the game to tell such a complex yarn, but still, with such great source material, one could hope for a little more. That is the biggest complaint, in my opinion. If you already know the story, then you will be able to follow on without issues. The graphics are really lovely, and at times are actually breathtaking. Hogwarts, more than ever, is a fully realized environement. Threre are secret doors and moving portraits, gliding staircases, and hidden entrances galore. There are tons of people to interact with, although the types of interaction is a little limited at parts. You are tasked with a lot of finding of secrets. If you are (like me) a little obsessive in your approach to video gaming, you are going to be enchanted here. You literally have hundreds of secrets to get. You get little rewards when you collect enough of each. There are also a wide variety of tasks to complete--unfortunately, most of these are simply of the "find the x" category. Cut scenes are nicely rendered. There are some mini games that are actually quite fun (playing gobstones against the other houses), and some that are more frustrating (playing wizards chess against the other houses). I found this frustrating not because the game was bad (it wasn't) but because I am not a chess champion, and you literally cannot complete every task unless you can win in chess against a pretty good AI. All in all, we ended up playing this game for about 25 hours, prety steadily, and although at times we wished it were a little more varied, we couldn't stop. I guess that is ultimately a testimony in favor of the games. I would hope that for future installments EA will try to use a little more creativity, but based on past performance, probably not. This game is recommended for HP fans (Hogwarts is so beautiful and so fun to run around, it alone is worth the price of admission), and for folks who enjoy finding tons of little things in games. Otherwise, rent it.




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