Entry 7: The Video Games – Games 1-3 and Quidditch

              Now that I’ve rambled on about the first game, let’s start discussing them more in general. The first game covered the story of Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, and I feel like I could say that a gamer who hadn’t read the book or seen the movie could pick up the game and get the idea. It’s still not the same as reading the source material, and I’m sure nothing ever will be, but the games had decent pacing and one event always led to another that gave good explanation as to what was going on in the world and what your motivations were.

            The second game in the series, The Chamber of Secrets, was a tried and true sequel to the original. Many of the locations removed the same, the game retained the same art style and general gameplay, astonishingly enough among all iterations of the game. Like the first game, this one was released among multiple platforms, and each one saw their own unique care put into making them. Looking at the first and second game on PS1, the games clearly belonged to the same series, and the same could be said about the PS2 games. These different versions of the sequel all again told the same story of Harry’s second year in different ways, and each one tried to build off of their predecessors adding more stuff to do in general such as flying cars, more in depth potion brewing, and new puzzles to be solved.

            The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third game, was the first departure for the series. The art style changed, and it didn’t find itself released on as wide a spread of platforms, leaving out some of the older ones. The transition for the third game on a console that kept up though, such as PS2, wasn’t all too bad. The PS2 versions of the first and second games were open world and allowed for many sidequests, and the third game did tend to retain some of these features. The world environments did change though, and again, so did the art style. This game also offered the ability to play as three characters, which was totally new from the one character gameplay of the others.

            A spin-off game, Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup was later released for the current gen systems of the time, and was completely different from the previous games. Where each other game focused on the story of a particular book, this game was a sports game based on the fictional sport of Quidditch. It was similar to football and basketball games of the time in that there really wasn’t a story, but you played through a season of Quidditch as your selected team and moved through the ranks. While the game starts out as just the school teams, it moved into fictional worldwide teams really expanding on the universe.