Speaking of Harry Potter...

[the_gneech]

My favorite thing about the Harry Potter series is Quidditch, so for a few weeks now I'd been eyeing the Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup game. Laurie, who is way more of a Potter fan than I am, received an On The Spot award at work and with the attendant gift certificate bought herself a copy. Since we mistakenly had the idea that it could be played head-to-head over a network, I bought myself a copy as well. (It has a two-player mode, sort of, but it requires you to both play huddled around a single keyboard -- yuck. I suspect it's designed with platforms in mind.)

I played a little of it on Sunday night and a little more last night after getting scripts done for the next couple of weeks. So far, the game is very wonky -- controls act in bizarre ways, there's lots of weird and unnatural button combinations, and so forth -- but for all that, it's actually quite a bit of fun. What impresses me most about it, really, is that the actual gameplay does a very good job of capturing the Quidditch feel. The gameplay is fast and furious, but emphasizes teamwork -- passing the quaffle from player to player is a necessity, beaters are instrumental in both attack and defense, and so forth.

The basic thrust of gameplay is that at any given time, you control either the chaser who has the quaffle (if your team has possession) or who's trying to get the quaffle back. However, you can launch a bludger attack (taking over the role of beater temporarily), and after a certain amount of time the game goes into Snitch Chase mode, at which point you become the seeker. You can unlock special moves (that require weird button-mashing action to pull off), team combos, and other cool bits, and there's lots of neat little things going on all the time to make the game interesting.

All in all, it seems a cool game -- my only real complaints are the wonkiness of the interfaces/controls, and the lameness of the multiplayer mode. Head-to-head network Quidditch would rule utterly and totally.

-The Gneech, Gryffindor Chaser

Comments

Lets hope they put out a team player mode...

[teirandragon.livejournal.com]

You're darn right multi player Quidditchwould rock! Think about it, instead of bouncing between the different players, you could form teams of people, either three people, one to play each character of the major position, or even seven so everyone is controlled by a human. Though that would be a really hard feat to pull off, a 14 player game over a network. Talk about lag!

Controls

[laurie-robey.livejournal.com]

As an aside, the keyboard controls really suck. I need to get a joystick to be able to play my copy.

[maxgoof.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to figure out Quiddich.

I mean, you get 150 points for catching the snitch. This means that the job of the Seeker is to:

1. Catch the snitch as long as the opposing team is less than 150 points ahead.
2. Keep the opposing Seeker from getting the snitch.

I still don't understand why Viktor Crum ended the game when his team was behind. Perhaps it was to keep the game close, when it looked out of reach.

The author has yet to get into what magic runs the snitch. It has to stay in bounds, but if I wanted to win the game, I would have my Seeker watching that thing come out of the box and take out after it, right away, not hover high above waiting for it to appear.

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Well, there are probably league rankings based on points accumulated and such ... it may have been that he thought they were never going to get ahead, so it was better to cut their losses and run rather than let the other team take the snitch, too.

As for taking off for the snitch right away, again, there are probably league standings to think of -- rather than games won, your place in the league might be based on points accumulated, which means if you need 250 points to get to the championship, but catch the snitch and end the game right away, you'll win the game but lose the season.

And for tracking, well -- it's tiny, hard to see, and definitely hard to track!

-The Gneech