Gilly's Games - Lego Harry Potter

First - thank you to those who have friended my FB page and Twitter accounts. I will definitely need some time to grow into those as companions to my blog. I don't want to turn them just into references or referrals to the blog, or they would serve no real purpose. I'm certainly open to suggestions on those two fronts.

It was another busy, but great weekend with my dad having been up from Florida. Now that he is returning home later this week however, I do plan to update with some new posts - and for those who saw my recently played games on Coffee With Games.

Anyway, my son Chris wrote up a Pokemon DS review a couple of months ago that generated quite a few comments, and he's been excitedly working on a couple more reviews for the near future (he's been playing Dungeons, Mass Effect 2 and some other games I haven't reviewed yet). My youngest overheard this the other day and wanted to write her own game review. Probably her all-time favorite game is Little Big Planet for the PS3, but runner-up is likely Lego Harry Potter on the Xbox 360. She doesn't beat very many games, but she's beaten this one at least once. This was her first time trying to use Word for anything like this, so here goes:

Hello I’m Gillian and today we are going to talk about Lego Harry Potter years 1 to 4. Now it’s very easy in years 1 and 2 but as you go on it gets harder and harder and may become impossible. Not for me though it was pretty easy, and this may be shocking but I was 8 when I beat it but right now I’m 9. It's really funny, cool, scary and misunderstood at parts in the game and it wasn’t always like the movies in parts. But enough of the chit chat and let's get on with the game. So if you want to play the game on a different difficulty you need to beat the game first. It need to know you can beat the game on normal mode and then go into settings and change the mode.

The parts I liked were when Ron got smacked in the face with his broom because you were supposed to say up for your broom to come in your hand. Ron here wasn’t paying attention so much. Then he said it to much making the broom come up alright… then whap! He was smacked in the face by his broom and I’m guessing it hurt. So if you chose to play it hop you l-o-v-e it.


My thoughts:

Basically I've seen Gilly play this game quite a bit now, and even parts she's seen before, she laughs at. The usual Lego humor shows up in this game as well, but there were definitely some darker parts of the game that she considered 'scary' as well - which does fit with the constantly maturing theme of the books/movies in the series.

I have not actually played this game yet, so there's a lot of things I wouldn't want to comment on - but the graphics were good (for what they are - they're not going to win any technical awards but the Lego aesthetics retain their charm), the sound and music fit, and there seemed to be more you could do in general with this game than some of the earlier Lego ones. With plenty to collect, explore and unlock, my daughter has played this game heavily even though she beat it several months ago, so I think that speaks to the game's replay value for her.

I've always found the Lego games cute (I've had Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter and Rock Band - and I have a friend who will be giving us Pirates soon) - but they don't hold a lot of value for me. I tend to bore of them somewhat quickly - but my daughter? The game was a very good value where she is concerned. This is easily the Lego game she has played the most - her favorite in the series.