Review:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Reviewer: Charlie and Katie Ewen
Edited by: Mike Dixon (12/7/02)
Mac publisher: Aspyr Media ($29.99 est. retail price)

Retrace the career of Harry Potter during his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. You will learn to cast a variety of spells, which will assist you in overcoming various obstacles en route to a final showdown with “you know who”. Besides making the world safe for decent wizards and muggles alike, you will have the opportunity to win the House Cup and Quidditch Cup for Gryffindor House.

The program installs both a OS X and Classic OS 9 version when you click the Easy Install button. Both work well and the game never actually crashed. Character movement is smooth and the sound is of good quality. The mouse movement sensitivity can even be adjusted (this is especially useful for the quidditch matches). The publisher is serious about the graphic accelerator requirement, since the game installed but would not play on my old beige G3 (300 MHz) desktop unit. There was no noticeable difference in game play between OS X and OS 9 or between the PowerBook G3 and my desktop G4 machine.

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (HP) you assume the role of Harry Potter during his first year at Hogwarts. Your first challenge is to endure the pointless preamble, which features a series of still shots chronicling how you came to be at Hogwarts. This prologue is pointless because if you’ve read the book (or seen the movie) then you already know all this and if you haven’t, then this introduction is totally inadequate. Fortunately, the action picks up relatively quickly from here.

Based on the Unreal Tournament game graphics engine, HP has the smooth graphics that are popular in many of today’s action games, but the characters are far more benign. No one gets killed. The worst that can happen is that you run out of stamina and faint, thus returning to a previously saved state. Unfortunately you cannot save at will, but rather, only at predetermined intervals along the game’s trajectory (usually after a difficult challenge).

The challenges range from dueling with Draco Malfoy to evading a rampaging giant troll. Throughout the contests you collect Bott’s every flavor beans, wizard cards and points for Gryffindor House. The most challenging contests are the quidditch matches in which you maneuver your broomstick to catch an elusive snitch while dodging bludgers and other players. The concept is simple; the execution is not!

My 10 year old daughter and I found the challenges difficult but not insurmountable. Our dual perspectives actually helped solve many of the puzzles and we were so busy working together during the game that we rarely found time to snap at each other. That achievement alone makes the game worth its retail price.

The control screen allows you to configure the controls to suit your style and ability. It is a shame, however, that you can’t turn off the video sequences as they can get irritating after the 4th or 5th viewing and the inability to save at will means you will be watching them often after repeatedly fainting during the more difficult challenges.

Still, it’s all good fun. The contests are amusing and winnable. You also can’t get lost and make endless loops through mazes like in some games where a photographic memory is mandated. Best of all, you won’t spend the better part of a month staying up to the wee hours of the morning fruitlessly trying to get past unkillable monsters or surfing the web for cheat codes. You won’t need them, since you can actually win this game on your own and so can your kids. The few negative reviews that I’ve seen about this game appear to be from older geeks who clearly need to spend more time outside.

No problems found.

If you like to spend days unraveling riddles that would stump the sphinx or battling hordes of demons with a double-barreled nailgun, then Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is not for you. However, if you (or especially your kids) are after some light entertainment that you can put down and pick up later, then this is your game.

Harry Potter is aimed at the 8 to 12 demographic or any Harry Potter fan who wants to relive some of the adventures of the first book without committing their lives to the game.