Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup: Balancing on a Broom with Your Gameboy

By Jonathan Berohn

Just to make sure you (and especially your kids) don't forget about Harry Potter between book 5 and movie 3, Electronic Arts has released a new video game: Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup. This review focuses on the Gameboy Advance version, but Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup is available for PC, XBox, and Nintendo Gamecube as well.

If you're just crawling out from your rock and don't know much about Harry Potter, Quidditch is kind of like water polo played on flying brooms. Like many of the latest EA games, you don't just turn on Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup and play. To get access to the best teams and the most exciting events, you have to train. This fits in well with the whole Harry Potter milieu as most young gamers will find Going to Hogwarts to be fun rather than the chore it might seem to older gamers (I personally want to able to get right into the action-the idea of paying for a game but not being able to use part of it until I do something else first just doesn't sit all that well with me-but then I'm not the target audience).

Anyway, after you hone your skills a bit in the training you can progress through school matches to the Quidditch World Cup and glory throughout the wizarding world. Overall game play is fairly exciting if a bit spotty. I found it hard to control where your players shoot, and some teams seem to have the uncanny Electronic Arts' ability to suddenly snatch your hard-earned victory away at the last second with a little computer cheese. The game also suffers from a little of the press-as-many-buttons-as-you-can-at-once syndrome to pull off special moves. Again, this is definitely a game for the younger crowd who haven't been brought up on the delightful simplicity of the original Mario brothers.