The TGN Blog

Spoiler Warning - The characters and events depicted in this article are only tangentially related to Harry Potter. Any resemblance to actual spoilers is purely coincidental.

Welcome back to Lego Harry Potter as Explained by Someone Who Has Never Read Harry Potter. We're halfway through the story now, this installment will cover the third book Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Chapter 1 - News From Azkaban

After they have spent the last two years seeing just how far they can push their magic-powered stepchild, Harry finally snaps and unleashes his powers on the Potters. He then storms out to go down to the local wizard pub, but along the way sees a scary-looking black dog staring at him from a playground. When he arrives at the Leaky Cauldron, Harry is shown a newspaper reporting on a prison break at Azkaban. And seemingly because this chapter has been making way too much sense so far he is then attacked by a carnivorous book.

Spoiler Alert - This article contains spoilers for Harry Potter (Snape kills Dumbledore), Star Wars (Darth Vader is Luke's father), Citizen Kane (it was his sled), The Sixth Sense (Bruce Willis is a ghost) and the dictionary (zyzzyva).

Welcome to the second installment of Lego Harry Potter as Explained by Someone Who Has Never Read Harry Potter, in which I will be repeatedly failing to deduce the plot of a book series based on a videogame with no dialogue. Last time, Harry was unsuccessful in stopping the evil Dr. PurpleTurban from getting to the legendary Philosopher's Stone, but this didn't matter since PurpleTurban was physically incapable of picking it up and as such never posed any threat whatsoever. This article will cover the second book in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Chapter 1: Floo Powder!

Harry has moved back to live with his evil stepparents, who lecture Harry on how there is to be no magic in their house and send him to his room. When Harry gets upstairs, he sees White Yoda who apparently agrees with the Potters as he is throwing away all of Harry's magic stuff and trying to warn him about something or other. Harry doesn't listen to any of this though, and so he contacts Ron who flies in his car to pick up Harry and take him to the IDon'tKnowWhatHisSurnameIs family residence.

SPOILER ALERT - This article contains wholly inaccurate spoilers for a book that you read 10 years ago / have no intention of ever reading (delete as appropriate)

Welcome to the first part of Lego Harry Potter as Explained by Someone Who Has Never Read Harry Potter, or LHPaEbSWHNRHPP1:HPatPS as it is catchily initialised. If you haven't read it already the introduction is here. In this series I will be attempting to deduce the plot of the first four Harry Potter books based purely on the main story mode of Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 on the Xbox 360. This article will cover the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Chapter 1: The Magic Begins

An elderly wizard, possibly Dumbledore, is walking along a street at night with Green Witch Lady, when suddenly Mighty Beard Guy flies in on his motorbike and hands Baby Harry Potter to them. Naturally, they decide that the best course of action in this situation is to drop the baby off on a random doorstep. The story then jumps forward ten years to show Harry living with his comically abusive stepparents, completely unaware of whatever just happened in the opening. One day, Harry receives a letter inviting him to Hogwarts, but Mr. Potter will not have any of this and tears it up. This leads to a scene that was probably exaggerated for the purposes of the game, in which the house is flooded with duplicate letters, causing the Potters to flee to a deserted island. However, when they arrive Mighty Beard Guy is standing right there Bugs Bunny-style and hands Harry the letter.

• Game: Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4
• Format: Xbox 360
• Other Formats: Everything, everywhere, ever.
• Developer: Traveller's Tales
• Publisher: Warner Bros. Games
• Genre: Platformer

This is to be the first in a series of articles regarding Lego Harry Potter on the Xbox 360. As you can probably guess from the title, I have never read any of the Harry Potter books. Nor have I seen the movies, played any of the previous licenced games, visited the Harry Potter-themed area of Universal Studios or bought the T-shirt. It actually seems like the sort of thing I would enjoy, but through a mixture of hype aversion, missing the start and not being willing to catch up, and general Discworld fanboyism the series has more or less completely passed me by.

A typical review would therefore be fairly pointless, since I would not be getting the intended experience. The Lego crossover games are all about in-jokes and parodies of famous scenes from the series, 99% of which would fly right over my head. The silent movie style of the game also means that simply trying to follow the plot will be difficult, even by the standards of licenced games which have a notorious tendency of making no attempt to explain things for non-fans.

• Game: Castlevania: Harmony of Despair
• Format: Xbox Live Arcade
• Other Formats: None
• Developer: Konami
• Publisher: Konami
• Genre: Platformer

Ever since hitting on the "Metroidvania" formula with Symphony of the Night on the PlayStation, the Castlevania series has been stuck in something of a rut. There have been a lot of good games, but the problem is that, bar a few ill-advised 3D excursions, they have all been essentially minor variations on the same game. Explore Dracula's castle, find new equipment to open up new areas, and fight through an army of public domain monsters to reach a confrontation with the Prince of Darkness himself. This XBLA release is probably the biggest change to the familiar Castlevania gameplay since 1997, but is it a successful one?

The big difference this time is that instead of the regular single-player focus, this is now a six-player cooperative game. Players enter one of six castles and must work together to find and kill the boss before either they all die or the time runs out. Another change is that rather than the discrete rooms that make up a regular Castlevania game it is possible to view the entire map at once, and certain enemies can move into or attack adjacent rooms. There is also a single player option, but this gives exactly the same game as multiplayer, right down to treasures that cannot be reached without another player's help and an inexplicable lack of a pause button.

• Game: Portal
• Format: PC
• Other Formats: Mac, Xbox 360, PS3
• Developer: Valve
• Publisher: Valve
• Genre: Puzzle, First Person

Welcome to Aperture Science Laboratories.
You wake up and find yourself in a glass room, listening to what sounds like a Radio show from the 60s, after a short period of time you hear what seems to be one of those annoying automated messaging systems that always seem to call you while you're having dinner or you're in the bath. What she says seems to be helpful though and you can't help but listen to the sweet sounds of the "girl" that calls herself GLaDOS. This is the world of Portal, of which you will be spending the next couple of hours of your life creating portals, traversing obstacles and generally annoying GLaDOS and Aperture Laboratories. You'll be playing the role of a cyborg by the name of Chell.

The Portal idea was originally to be called Narbacular Drop and was the creation of a few American College students. Their game concept was very similar to the Portal that you can play now. There is a reason for this, and this is because those plucky young students were hired by the majestic and ever so mighty Valve.

• Game: Crackdown 2
• Developer: Ruffian
• Publisher: Microsoft
• Format: Xbox 360
• Release Date: 09/07/10

The original Crackdown was somewhat of a surprise package when it hit the Xbox 360 back in 2007. The fact that it came packaged with access to the Halo 3 Beta led many people to assume it was a sub-par game being given a leg-up; many joked that they were getting a free game when they purchased the Halo 3 demo. The sneering soon stopped once the game was released, however; the game was a cracker, a massive, open-world toybox that was innovative, fresh and immense fun. A sequel seemed inevitable. So, over three years down the line, what’s changed in Pacific City?

The answer, unfortunately, is not a lot. The game returns to Pacific City, but since the end of the first game, things have gone wrong. A virus is turning the civilians into mutated freaks, zombie-like creatures that have caused chaos, rampaging around the city at night. Many of the humans that do remain have been drawn into a resistance group known as ‘The Cell’, led by a former Agency employee who now wages war against them. And this is where you come in; as an Agent, you’re turned loose on the streets to take them back from The Cell and defeat the Freak menace. And hence, the game begins with you as an average Agent, with core skills of Agility, Driving, Strength, Firearms and Explosives, all of which are improved through experience and orb-collecting.

• Game: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
• Developer: Infinite Interactive
• Publisher: D3Publisher
• Release Date: 13/03/2009
• Format: Nintendo DS

Don't get it. It's shit.

That's all you really need to know but I should probably try and explain why it's shit. Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is another game in the Puzzle Quest series made popular with the stellar Challenge of the Warlords, which merged Bejewelled and RPG elements to make a compulsive and fun game. Galactrix on the other hand moved away the traditional square grid to a hexagonal one with gems entering the grid in the direction that you swap gems rather from the top. It takes a bit of getting used to but you're able to understand how you can control the board a little more than in the last game. That's probably the last of the good bits.

Music is a great passion of mine. Games are a great passion of mine. And while both have been consistently wonderful and entertaining throughout my life, it is strange to think that only in recent years have the two properly and truly met.

When I say ‘music’, in this instance I mean film and television scores – a media which has had the privilege of a full orchestral ensemble to perform said scores since the early days of cinema. Fast-forward to about 40 years ago (that’s the 1970s to those of you reading in future land) and the video games sector hasn’t had such a luxury for about 30 of those years. Instead of relying on the full sound spectrum at their fingertips, composers working on games had to really think about how best to use a single melody – as that was generally the only thing that could come through the speakers as a digital output at any one time. This fact leads into my theory of why video game music is so catchy; because the sound designers simply had no choice but to make it good or instantly forgettable.