HP games

[Allison]

Grrr.  Small rant contained within.

I had to watch some of my parents' friends' children yesterday, two 
girls ages 8 and 11, so naturally they're Harry Potter freaks.  (One 
of them even had a Snitch T-shirt on.  It was actually kind of 
cute.)  And they brought an HP game with them.

I thought, "Cool, I haven't played any, this ought to be fun."  
Wrong.  The game they brought was "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's 
Stone," the game version of the first book.

It's actually 6 separate games (or 6 & 3/4, as the box proclaims), 
one for each of the traps set to keep people away from the Sorcerer's 
Stone (Dumbledore's doesn't count as one of the six - it's the 3/4).  

The instruction booklet is 21 pages long.  First clue something's not 
right.

It is the most confusing thing I've ever seen.  You have an order you 
go in for the first game (trying to get past Fluffy), but you switch 
orders on some of the others, and then the instructions say to go 
back to the "correct order."  What does that even mean?  Go back to 
the first order?

And then for some of the games, the first person to finish just 
precedes to the next game without waiting for other players to 
finish, and on others you have to wait.  Each game seems almost 
completely unconnected to the next, in that winning all but the last 
one doesn't even guarantee you the lead.  Basically, all the six 
games don't mean anything because the last game, the "Mirror of 
Erised" one, is the one that determines the winner.  

And the games are just stupid.  Once you figure out what you're 
supposed to do, it's really boring.

And then there's the art.  It's crap.  If you want to put Harry's 
scar off to the side in the movie, well, it's not what I would have 
liked but I can live with it.  But in the name of all that's holy, it 
goes _vertically_, NOT horizontally.  And all the other people look 
just as wrong.  Did the artists ever read the books?

Ahem.  Sorry about that.  I know this is an old complaint, but 
really.  Merchandising has gone too far.  So if you have kids are 
want to buy them an HP game, don't buy the "Sorcerer's Stone" one.  
It's a giant waste of money.

Rant over.

Allison