LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 – Idlermag.com

No more LEGOs

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:00:35 +0000

I’m done.

That is, I’m not quite done, but I’m done.

I own several of the Traveler’s Tales LEGO video games. I’ve played the first two LEGO Star Wars games on my GameCube. I unlocked all of the characters, collected all of the mini-kits, earned True Jedi on every level, and unlocked all of the bonuses. I played LEGO Batman on my Playstation 2. I unlocked all the characters, collected all of the mini-kits, earned True Hero or True Villain on every level, and unlocked all of the bonuses. And now that I’ve played LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 on my Playstation 3, I think I can safely ignore LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, and LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean.

In fact, I don’t think I need to play a LEGO video game ever again.

Gilderoy Lockhart. Annoying in the book. Annoying in the game.

According to LEGO Harry Potter‘s completion stats, I’m 98.7% done. I’ve earned True Wizard on every level, collected all 20 of red bonus bricks, all 24 of the house crest pieces, unlocked 166 of the 167 characters, rescued 49 of the 50 students in peril, and collected 198 of the 200 gold bricks. Even for all this, I’m closer to done than it sounds. And further away. You earn a gold block for rescuing students, so I actually have just one student and one more gold brick to find. Finding all 200 gold bricks unlocks a bonus level, where I’d find the final character, Lord Voldemort. So I have just three tasks left to complete. Except that I can’t find that last student in peril, or that last gold brick. I’ve even consulted the cheat guides, but there are just too many students in peril, and too many gold bricks. I’m not sure which one of each is the one I’m missing, so I don’t know what to go looking for. I’ve tried to systematically make my way through Hogwarts, but clearly I’m missing something. And there’s a substantial amount of time involved in walking again through Hogwarts, with its many twists and turns, in anything resembling a thorough fashion.

And it’s not fun.

In another game, that might be less of a criticism. In another game, the rewards would be set up differently. I might need to spend more time grinding to bring my characters up to a level where they’re strong enough to explore a new area without getting killed, but the payoff would be new weapons and armor, new side quests and new storylines. I might have to keep practicing until I could jump and grab and balance just right, but the reward would be access to a new level with new challenges.

In the LEGO games, the only reward is the sense of completion. Lord Voldemort may be the final character, but within the LEGO games, all the members of a particular character class are pretty much identical, except for the aesthetics. There’s nothing that Lord Voldemort can do that any other dark wizard can’t do, except to earn me a couple of trophies. (Which again, give you nothing but bragging rights and a sense of completion.)

Has anyone ever made sense of Quidditch? Or those white pants?

Even worse, when you do finally complete the game, there’s literally nothing else to do. Once you have 100% and all the trophies, there’s no reason to come back and keep playing. You really may as well just sell the game.

And at least for me, there’s something wrong with that. I want to have a reason to keep my old games on the shelf. It appeals to the collector in me. But as obsessive as I am, I still can’t justify holding on to a game where there’s actually less reason to play through a level once you’ve done it the first time. It’s still fun to ride around the Old West as John (or Jack) Marston. It’s still fun to solve the puzzles in Portal and Portal 2, and to stumble on a line of dialogue from GLaDOS or Wheatley that you missed the first time through. Once you’ve found all the hidden items in the LEGO games, however, they’re gone, so while most of the levels are designed to require at least two playthroughs to find all the bonus items, there’s no incentive to keep coming back. There’s actually less to each level than there was the first time through.

It may be part of the problem that I’m a Harry Potter fan, and the somewhat humorously mimed version of the storyline in the games actually impedes enjoyment of the game. It may be that the Star Wars movies were ripe for some light parody, and there are enough campy takes on the Batman rogues’ gallery that the silly, over-the-top feel of the LEGO version seemed like a good fit. But the Harry Potter universe, as it develops, becomes much, much darker. Without that sense of genuine menace, there’s little reason to watch as several hundred pages of character and plot are crammed into a few minutes of animated charades.

More than anything else, my gameplay has become pathological. I’m searching and searching for those last few items just because I’m so close to that magical but totally arbitrary 100%. I’m frustrated, and I’m just wasting time.

I’m not having any fun.

And I don’t need to do that.

Unless they make another Batman game. . .

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

]]>

THAT Camp and “casual” games

Thu, 05 May 2011 13:00:54 +0000

Greetings faithful readers!

1. My gaming time this past week was comparatively light, because I spent the weekend at The 2011 Great Lakes THAT Camp talking about video games, rather than at home playing them.

“What is THAT Camp?” you say? Excellent question! THAT is short for “The Humanities and Technology, and THAT Camp bills itself as an academic “un-conference,” where archivists, librarians, academics, and tech people (collectively, some of my favorite people in the world) get together to talk and work, rather than to present and listen.

As a pseudo-academic myself, it was wonderful. I was (not surprisingly) most interested in the game-related conversations, which ranged from using games and insights from game design in the classroom, to using games to explore past cultures (and the way that how we’ve understood past cultures has changed over time), to the nature of interactive narrative itself. Maybe most importantly, while I’ve always been deeply interested in how games (and literature) require the player (reader) to co-author their own experience, I’ve always viewed myself as a non-coder. That is, while I have the tools and capability to be a writer, I didn’t believe that I had the tools or capability to be a game designer. After THAT Camp, I’ve become aware of some tools and learned some things that might change that. (No, I won’t be designing Portal 3, but there are ways to create games that are much closer to the demands of indie, digital filmmaking than I ever would have imagined. That is to say, it’s not easy, but you don’t necessarily need a team of coders, knowledge of multiple programming languages, and support from Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo to do it.)

I’m sure that ideas from THAT Camp will pop up from time to time in this column over the next several weeks, and I’ll provide links where I can. You’ll get a great start by checking out:

The THAT Camp web site/blog, which includes notes from many of the sessions—http://www.2011.greatlakesthatcamp.org/
Play the Past, a site devoted to cultural/historical games—http://www.playthepast.org/
Inform 7, a tool for creating text-based games—http://inform7.com/
The Electronic Literature Collection, an archive of digital (usually interactive) fiction and narrative—http://www.eliterature.org/
Alabaster, an interactive retelling of the Snow White story—http://www.inform-fiction.org/I7Downloads/Examples/alabaster/

And there’s more, of course there’s more, but that will do for now.

2. What game time I’ve had this past week has been largely devoted to LEGO Harry Potter. (Probably, in part, as a break from “serious” or narrative games I was spending so much time talking about.) I’ve made no secret of the fact that on the whole I’m a fan of the Lego games, mostly because of the combination of humor, inventive visual presentation, and the way that it appeals to my OCD collector impulse. There are a million little things to chase after in each game, many of which require a second or third playthrough of each level to obtain, after you’ve unlocked a character with a new ability, or explored a little bit more.

Although I do have to admit that part of the appeal for me of the Lego games is the way that collecting items is primarily a function of time invested in the game. The game itself never really gets harder, and if there’s an item you can’t reach, it’s usually because later on you’ll unlock a character who can jump higher, or climb walls, or make things float, or whatever. The mechanic is one of collection furthering collectability, and not one of increasing difficulty and technical mastery.

That is to say, the core mechanic of the Lego games is a casual gaming mechanic, in which the game provides small, incremental rewards for investing a great deal of time into short, unconnected sessions of gameplay. The contrast to this mechanic would be “hardcore” games, which teach the player a specific set of skills and reflexes to allow progression through a series of increasingly difficult gameplay segments. (Think Halo, where you can clearly tell the difference between occasional players and those who spend hours and hours in online multiplayer sessions.) The true distinction between “casual” and “hardcore” games in this model may not be the total amount of time invested in the game, but the way in which the “casual” game allows the player to walk away from the game and return without having to re-learn significant proficiency in a particular skill set. If I’ve unlocked Jar Jar Binks in LEGO Star Wars, then I always have a character available who can double jump, and reach those out-of-reach items. If I’ve been away from Halo for a while, then I need to relearn the maps and re-exercise the reflexes and quick in-game judgments that let you pull the trigger before the other guy does.

And I think the fact that “casual” games may end up consuming every bit as much time, may reward every bit as much as investment as “hardcore” games—albeit in different ways—make “casual” and “hardcore” fairly misleading terms to use to describe the distinction. (After all, I barely got out of Mafia Wars alive. I still say there was nothing casual about how I played that game.)

3. I just got my hands on Portal. More on that next week!

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

]]>

Kirby and the failed motion control experiment

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 13:00:40 +0000

A few quick notes:

It seems like a bit of a waste of some pretty advanced technology

1. After writing about Kirby’s Epic Yarn last week, it struck me that I had neglected to write about the single quality that struck me the most when I started to play the game: for a late-generation first-party game on the console that pioneered motion control, it’s incredible that Kirby’s Epic Yarn uses motion control hardly at all. For the most part, the player uses the Wii Remote turned on its side to resemble an NES controller. On a few levels, you can tilt the controller to tilt Kirby as a spherical yarn tank, or you draw a track on the screen for Kirby as a locomotive, but these are fairly rare exceptions.

IGN.com's take on the next Nintendo controller. Keep in mind this is mostly speculation.

In light of the rumors of the controller design for Nintendo’s upcoming next-generation console—which would appear to combine the functionality of a standard dual-joystick, multi-button console controller with the potential to act almost as a standalone portable game system—it looks like Nintendo may largely be ceding motion control to the more accurate PlayStation Move, and the more accessible (and downright revolutionary) XBox Kinect. In light of Nintendo’s domination of the portable gaming market, this may be a smart move. Given the increased prevalence of smartphones and tablets as portable game devices, creating a console that in effect bundles a portable game system could create a market for portable game downloads from consumers who would otherwise download an app for their iPhone rather than buy a 3DS.

That is, of course, assuming that people are going to have room in their bag for a console controller with a 6″ screen. (And assuming that there’s any truth to the rumors at all.)

All the same, I was excited when I got the Wii to really explore what I hoped was going to be a totally different way of interacting with console games. I have to admit, that other than Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, I’ve largely been disappointed. How about it, dear readers, are there any really groundbreaking Wii motion-control based games that I need to get my hands on before I write off the Wii Remote as a fascinating experiment that was a clear marketing success, but a failure in terms of changing the way console games are designed and marketed?

2. I discovered as I was digging through the online strategy guide that is keeping me progressing through Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune that the game has 15 chapters instead of 10. So I thought that I was almost halfway through the game last week on the verge of chapter 6, but I’m actually about halfway through the game this week a little bit into chapter 8. My first reaction was disappointment, since I thought I was just going to blaze through the game, but that’s settled a bit, as I’m still making good progress, and more importantly, I’m enjoying myself more. I haven’t hit any sections as hard as that first encounter with the pirates in chapter 4 seemed to be, and I’m not sure whether the fights are easer, or whether I’ve just gotten better. (Probably the former.)

I’m also pretty sure I know what the big twist is going to be, but no spoilers, please!

3. Finally, all but replacing Kirby’s Epic Yarn in my current gameplay rotation is LEGO Harry Potter, which finally came down to $19.99. I had originally been excited by the idea of some cool wand action in the Wii version, but after playing Kirby, I realized that I couldn’t take that for granted, and just sprung for the PS3 version instead. (I’d be interested to know if anyone can report on the Wii version, since I don’t have another $20 to throw away on it. I need to save for Portal 2.)

First impressions are good. Not as great as LEGO Batman, at least at first, but it still has the potential to earn a great deal of affection from me, if for no other reason than that this is the first Lego game I’ve played on the PS3, so it’ll be the first to give me trophies as I obsessively chase after all the characters, bonuses, house crests, etc., etc.

That is, if and when the PlayStation Network ever comes back up.

—

Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

]]>