some kind of snark faery (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
arcanetrivia) wrote2009-07-26 11:00 pm
arcanetrivia) wrote2009-07-26 11:00 pm
Entry tags:
Swag offer and HBP game review
1. As I said in my tl;dr Azkatraz post, a bunch of the meetup swag I just have no place to put, so I would like to give it to a good home. If there's anything you fancy, drop me a line, and I'll let you know whether it's in my mental give-away list (lots of good stuff in the Snarry pile, especially since I have duplicates of much of it). Also, I have a set of too-large Ravenclaw robes I'd like to recover some cost from if anyone is in the market for some of those. edit: Also also, specifically I wound up with three "Property of the Half-Blood Prince" dog tags, so I'm looking to send one of those out to a new home. edit 2: Taken pending address.
2. So. The Half-Blood Prince console game (PS3 in our case). Ugh. What a frickin' waste of $49.99 plus tax. I don't know what gaming blog or show it was that said this, but they were right: You'd better like Quidditch (Seeker only), potions brewing, and duelling, because that's all there is to the game. Almost the whole narrative part is bits of plot video stitched together with the minigames of brew this potion, go to the Quidditch pitch and fly a prescribed course to catch the Snitch, duel this person. Lather, rinse, repeat. Almost nothing in the way of problem solving (which was heavy in PoA and GoF because you had the whole Trio there, and even two-player gameplay, for both puzzle rooms and combat situations) or being able to run around doing side-quests (a good deal of that in OotP, as well as some puzzles and combat). G4's review page said they managed to drain all the dramatic tension out of it, which is totally true (even more than I was already disappointed by the film, imagine that).
I finished the main narrative of the game in about ten hours over two days, which I again agree with G4 is "almost criminally short". I mean, I don't expect Final Fantasy kind of length of gameplay here (I tend to try to complete as much as possible, so I can rack up several hundred hours on a FF game, but even if you do a speed run, you still get ~80 or something hours), but five dollars an hour? That's just dumb.
The actual game mechanics are fine, for the most part. We sampled the Wii version at Azkatraz and like G4, found spellcasting pretty complicated, but on the PS3 it's quite simple and intuitive, an improvement over the OotP system which required fancier stick movements and/or could sense the movement of the controller (so you could flick the whole controller upwards to cast Wingardium Leviosa, for example). The duelling system is fine, although it's hard to know where you're aiming. Potions brewing, well, I found it hard because I couldn't see where I was aiming the bottle mouths and solid objects (rat spleens, dragon dung...) so I often had a hard time hitting the cauldron, but that could just be my lack of spatial ability; overall I preferred it to the OotP system. Quidditch was simple, but boring; as I said above, you fly prescribed course (marked with stars you fly through) and it's simply accuracy on that until you've done it long enough to catch the Snitch.
So... yeah. There's just no substance to the game. It's like they skimmed over the entire book even more than they already did to make the movie. After you finish the main plot, you get "Endless Day" just like in OotP so that you can finish collecting the Hogwarts crests (150 of them, which unlock various things in the game, such as characters in the 2-player duelling or health bonuses) and mess around in the flying, duelling, and Potions clubs to maximize your scores there. The prize you get for getting all 150 possible crests is to have Severus Snape as a duelling character (everyone else is students: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Crabbe, Goyle, Draco) but it's totally anticlimactic somehow, partly because, of all things, his animation for being hit by Levicorpus doesn't turn him upside down (!!!), unlike everyone else. It would have been more fun if, I dunno, each character had had a unique spell only they could cast in this play mode, or something. As it is, it's just the same thing as within the main gameplay, and not something I really feel the urge to play any more of.
All of this is even more of a shame because the world is beautifully rendered, quite faithful to the films, and the characters are well done even if they are often in the uncanny valley of being too lookalike to the real people whose faces were obviously scanned to make the models. It should by all rights be a lot of fun to play, and it just isn't. It's boring and tedious and makes me angry I spent the money on it. Feh.
2. So. The Half-Blood Prince console game (PS3 in our case). Ugh. What a frickin' waste of $49.99 plus tax. I don't know what gaming blog or show it was that said this, but they were right: You'd better like Quidditch (Seeker only), potions brewing, and duelling, because that's all there is to the game. Almost the whole narrative part is bits of plot video stitched together with the minigames of brew this potion, go to the Quidditch pitch and fly a prescribed course to catch the Snitch, duel this person. Lather, rinse, repeat. Almost nothing in the way of problem solving (which was heavy in PoA and GoF because you had the whole Trio there, and even two-player gameplay, for both puzzle rooms and combat situations) or being able to run around doing side-quests (a good deal of that in OotP, as well as some puzzles and combat). G4's review page said they managed to drain all the dramatic tension out of it, which is totally true (even more than I was already disappointed by the film, imagine that).
I finished the main narrative of the game in about ten hours over two days, which I again agree with G4 is "almost criminally short". I mean, I don't expect Final Fantasy kind of length of gameplay here (I tend to try to complete as much as possible, so I can rack up several hundred hours on a FF game, but even if you do a speed run, you still get ~80 or something hours), but five dollars an hour? That's just dumb.
The actual game mechanics are fine, for the most part. We sampled the Wii version at Azkatraz and like G4, found spellcasting pretty complicated, but on the PS3 it's quite simple and intuitive, an improvement over the OotP system which required fancier stick movements and/or could sense the movement of the controller (so you could flick the whole controller upwards to cast Wingardium Leviosa, for example). The duelling system is fine, although it's hard to know where you're aiming. Potions brewing, well, I found it hard because I couldn't see where I was aiming the bottle mouths and solid objects (rat spleens, dragon dung...) so I often had a hard time hitting the cauldron, but that could just be my lack of spatial ability; overall I preferred it to the OotP system. Quidditch was simple, but boring; as I said above, you fly prescribed course (marked with stars you fly through) and it's simply accuracy on that until you've done it long enough to catch the Snitch.
So... yeah. There's just no substance to the game. It's like they skimmed over the entire book even more than they already did to make the movie. After you finish the main plot, you get "Endless Day" just like in OotP so that you can finish collecting the Hogwarts crests (150 of them, which unlock various things in the game, such as characters in the 2-player duelling or health bonuses) and mess around in the flying, duelling, and Potions clubs to maximize your scores there. The prize you get for getting all 150 possible crests is to have Severus Snape as a duelling character (everyone else is students: Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Crabbe, Goyle, Draco) but it's totally anticlimactic somehow, partly because, of all things, his animation for being hit by Levicorpus doesn't turn him upside down (!!!), unlike everyone else. It would have been more fun if, I dunno, each character had had a unique spell only they could cast in this play mode, or something. As it is, it's just the same thing as within the main gameplay, and not something I really feel the urge to play any more of.
All of this is even more of a shame because the world is beautifully rendered, quite faithful to the films, and the characters are well done even if they are often in the uncanny valley of being too lookalike to the real people whose faces were obviously scanned to make the models. It should by all rights be a lot of fun to play, and it just isn't. It's boring and tedious and makes me angry I spent the money on it. Feh.