Me and my girlfriend are gaming as Metroid and Vania as we discover new games to play together. This week we are playing Lego Harry Potter to find laughter and get a little frustrated.
“Do you want to ride my plunger?”
Vania 2019
One of the many, genuine moments of hilarity we shared, as we trampled each-other with a ridable plunger. This is what the lego games (at least before they introduced voice acting) brought to players with the sense of humour a six-year-old. That’s why I chose Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 to start for Vania’s Journey of discovering video games, we’re both big kids and having someone to laugh at the same silly jokes was great. She also loved seeing a universe, the harry potter world, which she adores in a new light and perspective. Sharing inside jokes and we bounced of each-other well creating a buddy act for comedy to entertain ourselves.
Since the story was familiar, it was therefore quite simple to understand the plot but it seemed like there was no real point to paying attention besides the comedy and the cutscenes are few and far between. Aspects of the story got a little fleshed out during gameplay but that’s about it, what the real appeal was seeing beloved characters and set pieces brought to life in lego. Arachnophobia Warning! if you don’t like creepy crawlies look away.
Being able to fight Aragog as a team was incredibly fun. We managed to co-ordinate with each other as one person fought the smaller spiders and the other took on the big boy.
As an avid gamer, I know that I have to become familiar with the ins and outs of every game so that I can use my intuition to figure out how to complete each new level. Gamers learn to interpret and understand each challenge and can guess how to solve it; they speak the ‘secret language’ of the game. When playing Lego Harry Potter, it clear to me that developers designed the game with the knowledge that the majority of gamers ‘speak’ this language. So I know as an experienced gamer that in a lego a game if you are stuck, destroy everything! I’ve developed an intuition therefore i can solve puzzles with no logic, just destroy and build which leads to points of frustration if you’re unaware. We had to get to a higher platform and we could raise ourselves higher through levitation but just not quite make it. Turns out the way to get to a higher place, had nothing to do with the thing already there that elevates your position. Just destroy and rebuild. A similar thing happened to one of my favourite you tubers Dadcubed, he had a similar issue where the water in the environment wasn’t the solution, he had to build a water pump from destroyed bricks…Not the most logical solution.
“This is so frustrating!”
Therefore it wasn’t mentally challenging but annoying, not requiring skill, but persistence. I’m stubborn I will smash three controllers in half to get five stars in a mirror’s edge race but for someone just starting? It doesn’t seem worth it. Luckily I was there and I helped us push through it and comedy swiftly made us move past it.
Overall the simple controls helped her grasp what the different face buttons did and move around a 3D space and thanks to the split-screen feature we could go on and do our own thing which meant she sometimes even progressed the puzzle without me. Only slightly proud. She said that she would only play for an hour as it is essentially the same joke told over and over with no challenge but never the less she enjoyed it, but only because I was there.
My favourite childhood games were the PS1 Harry potter games which I still have, which I’ll definitely have her play in addition to other lego games with a little more freedom like lego city undercover and lego worlds.
Next week time to explore her love of detectives!
L.A Noire
[…] Sebastianlondono96 from The Platformer […]
Thank you 😀😀 it was great fun to write!
Great post 🙂
[…] Prison breakout – The Platformer […]
[…] sends his minions but he is always prevalent, mocking, building to the epic encounter. Last week (Read my review…
Leave a Reply