{"id":92,"date":"2001-11-19T13:39:55","date_gmt":"2001-11-19T18:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2001\/11\/19\/\/"},"modified":"2005-10-27T17:50:45","modified_gmt":"2005-10-27T21:50:45","slug":"hp-psx-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2001\/11\/19\/hp-psx-game\/","title":{"rendered":"HP PSX game"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After seeing the movie on Friday I had an irresistable urge to finally start playing the HP PSX game we bought last weekend. So other games are on hiatus until I finish it (which -should- be tonight).<\/p>\n

General Overview: The storyline is a weird amalgamation of the movie, the book, and changes made for the sake of playability. Harry’s arrival at Hogwarts is glossed over in narration and he’s sent forward to explore the castle. In between various stages of the game, the actual plot of Sorcerer’s Stone seems to be playing out: Harry was recruited for the Quidditch team, Norbert was hatched and sent off to Charlie Weasley, Hermione was rescued from the troll, Voldemort has been playing vampire with unicorns. But there are some weird additions — Draco Malfoy is overtly hostile, and even stranger, overtly criminal, having gone around stealing various items from the Gryffindor students. Instead of having a bit prior to Harry’s arrival at Hogwarts where he goes shopping in Diagon Alley, the game writers chose to stick this into the middle of the game, sending him off on a random shopping excursion with Hagrid. But video game plots are usually even further from the books that spawned them than the movies\/television shows are (ex, CCS Animetic Story), so I really can’t complain. So far it has at least made sense as a self-contained unit.<\/p>\n

Graphics: The graphics are middling. Say what you like about Square, but their graphics are top-notch. The characters here are large and fairly detailed, but they’re also blocky, and the bitmaps for the faces don’t look very good — sort of folded in half. Strangely, the Filch character has a very detailed face with lips that actually move, but none of the others seem to have this. The backgrounds are pretty simple in most cases — texture is mostly painted on rather than actually being there.<\/p>\n

Voice Acting: This would have been much better had they been able to get the actors from the movie — or even to use actual lines from the movie. As it is, the actors sounded as if they were trying to imitate the movie voices. The result wasn’t bad, but there was room for improvement.<\/p>\n

Gameplay: Here is my largest issue with the game. The way the game is played is sort of a combination of Spyro and Tomb Raider — there are things to collect (Every Flavor Beans), but the vast majority of time is spent playing minigames\/puzzles to clear a stage and eventually advance the plot. I appreciate the wide variety of games that are available. As Okina commented, one of the problems with the first Soul Reaver was the gazillion push\/pull the box type puzzles it contained. It just gets boring after a while. The trouble is, the games either seem to be ridiculously easy or insanely hard. For example, during my trip to Diagon Alley, I had to collect some purple toad warts. The game to get this was to locate the toad underneath some boxes and then zap him with a spell. This was made quite simple by the fact that the toad was making a lot of noise and shaking the box that he was under, so I always knew which one it was. During the same shopping trip, I needed to collect 3 peacock feathers. Again under a time limit, I had to chase down and press the square button five or six times while the peacock continued to dart around a maze of boxes. And I had to do this for each feather to be collected. The clue I got for this level was ‘try and sneak up on him’. I assumed, then that if you approached the peacock carefully, it might stay in one place long enough for you to pull out the feather. But this was not to be. There was even an invisibility cloak object available here, but it seemed to have no effect — the peacock ran away from you whether you were visible or not! But this wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that every time I got close to the bird the game would slow down and movement would become jerky. I’m not sure if this was a case of PSX incompatibility with the PS2 or what, but it was really difficult to control Harry precisely with it going on. There are also quite a lot of levels that involve flying on a broomstick — so far I’ve endured 3 flying lessons, 2 quidditch lessons, 2 quidditch games, and 1 chase with Draco. Unfortunately, the broomstick controls, at least to me, seem kind of twitchy and slow to react (possibly related to the same problem noticed above.).<\/p>\n

Length: Well, as long as a game is good and I enjoy it, I won’t usually complain about how long it is, but this one strikes me as absurdly short. My current gameplay time is 7:00, and that includes the 2 hours it took me to get past the frigging vault at Gringotts [Don’t ask.]. I’m over 80% done with the game, according to the save point. Then again, I only have 2 out of 17 famous wizards cards, so I assume it lets you save at the end and play through again — I know the GBA and GBC versions say you can link up with a friend and trade, but that’s clearly not an option for the PSX version. <\/p>\n

Overall: 6\/10. Not worth the $40 it costs right now. It’s short enough to rent, or wait for it to start showing up used at the stores. I’ve no doubt it will be, if it hasn’t already.<\/p>\n

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After seeing the movie on Friday I had an irresistable urge to finally start playing the HP PSX game we bought last weekend. So other games are on hiatus until I finish it (which -should- be tonight). General Overview: The storyline is a weird amalgamation of the movie, the book, and changes made for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}