Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4

I could regale you with a hundred childhood stories that would give you an insight into my relationship with Lego. The time I spent 2 hours making a contraption out of Lego Technic that ultimately did nothing but twitch a bit when you turned a lever but was nevertheless a source of amazement for my next-door neighbour. Another time when I got one of the smaller pieces wedged in my nose and nearly had to be taken to hospital. Most memorable, of course, was the time when I discovered my hamster's death was not quite the 'accidental drowning in his water bowl' I was initially led to believe but was in fact blunt force trauma caused by a family member dropping the elaborately constructed Lego mansion I had made onto his head. My point is that Lego had a vital place in my early years, as I suspect it had for many of us. It is this childhood reminiscence that is tickled mercilessly by the Lego games.

It was once said of Lego Star Wars, the game that started it all, that it takes you down two memory lanes at once: the one for our fond memories of Lego and the one for our equally fond memories of Star Wars. But as the series develops it becomes apparent that there is much more at work here. It's evident to me that as we've seen the release of Lego Star Wars (and sequel/prequel/rebundles), Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman and now Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, these games combine two far more powerful forces. The first being our love of Lego, the second being our inner geek. After all, what appeal would there be in smashing our way through the forests of Endor or wastelands of Hoth if not to have a go at riding a speeder bike or taking out AT-STs? Why would we spend hours combing Hogwarts, if not to seek out the character token for Sirius Black or Dumbledore? It's this faithfulness to the source material and attention to detail that keeps adults hooked for hours while kids happily mash through levels for cartoon thrills. Lego Harry Potter is no exception to this clever precedent and a surprising level of detail has been taken not just from the films but also from the books, evident in the presence of many playable characters that never made it to celluloid.

The game provides the backdrop of Harry's first four years at Hogwarts for this title (Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban & Goblet of Fire) serving as a predictable prelude for a future tie-in romp for the final 3 years. Although the story mode serves these faithfully, even when you've played these end-to-end you'll still find you've barely completed half of what's on offer here. It's not just about playing through the films, it's about discovery and the maze that is Hogwart's is the perfect playground for such an endeavour.



The driving force behind Lego Harry Potter is the the constant feeling of reward that feels almost as if it's been lifted straight out of an MMO. Traveller's Tales have done well to balance it perfectly with short term goals like collecting studs and unlocking spells pitched against longer-term objectives like the 100% game completion that is an ever-present reminder between levels and areas of how much there is still left to discover.

As with previous incarnations, LHP adapts the tested formula from previous games to fit the new context perfectly. Almost all of your interaction with the game world is now via one spell or another. The manual building of objects and manipulating most environmental elements is now done with Wingardium Leviosa (fellow Pottergeeks will have experienced the same ire when this is used at the beginning of the game to open a door. No Alohamora?) with other spells learnt along the way to uniquely dispatch with pixies, dementors, etc. LHP also introduces potion-making as a way to overcome puzzles. Orientated around finding key ingredients around a level, these are then used to create a potion necessary to advance, whether it be strength potion, invisibilty potion or the infamous Polyjuice.

One very unique feature this time around is the Lego Builder Mode. After completion of the initial tutorials at Gringotts, players can mess around in their own sandbox levels to create their own Lego arenas. It's a nice feature and it's good to see the boundaries of the series being pushed but it's ultimately unnecessary fluff. If the option had been included to share creations across Xbox Live (or PSN) it may have provided some extra longevity past completion but without it this is all too easy to leave buried in the vaults.



The game has still obviously suffered from the same slight buggy nature of previous titles but this is far diminished in this most recent outing. Tearing is still occasionally apparent in some areas but players will be hard-pressed to find themselves with unlockable achievements or glitched collectibles that stop the fun dead in it's tracks.

In summary, Lego Harry Potter is exactly what any fan of previous Lego adventures would expect it to be. Harmless fun, fierce attention to both the books and films and the kind of innovation we've come to expect.

Score: 9/10

In The Night Garden

As a teen, when I witnessed the merciless replacement of the time-honoured classic Playbus with a foursome of babbling gibber-wits called Teletubbies, I was outraged. A cheerful, educational institution had been budged aside to make room for disturbing technicolour babble-crap and my weekday afternoons would never be the same. Even now the Y-Bird must lie gathering dust on some long forgotten shelf in a storage shed round the back of BBC television centre. What's the sign on the lollipop? The sign of the times, that's what.

A Christian ministry (read 'octogenarian village-green zealouts') once argued online that the Teletubbies represent an attempt to promote a new global paradigm of earth-centered spirituality. All I knew was that we had ventured into a terrifying new world where giggling demons with televisions in their guts rolling around under the gaze of a demented sun-fetus now amounted to kids telly.

Spin forward a decade or so. The Teletubbies, having firmly cemented their place in history as both new-wave educators and soulless harbingers of a faceless armageddon, have retired happy in the knowledge that children no longer have time for wasteful things like numbers, sentences or compassion thereby making them ideal pawns for the eventual war on humanity.

In their cultural wake arrived their inevitable successor, from the same production company, In The Night Garden. Continuing the tradition of sun-dappled nonsense, the 'night garden' (where it is ironically never bloody dark as far as I can tell) is home to a myriad strange and bizarre inhabitants all, as far as I can tell, named after thinly-veiled racial slurs.



Iggle-Piggle

Iggle-Piggle is clearly king of the garden and as such gallops around the lunatic landscape like Lord Bastard of Shittington Manor content in the knowledge that his smug face adorns all the mortifyingly over-priced tie-in merchandise touted toward the well-meaning, sleep-deprived zombies that look after their target audience. He routinely can't be bothered to go to bed and is a force of chaos in the garden.

The Tombliboos

The Tombliboos are three excitable, unblinking novelty pen-toppers that live in a giant green microphone. Their day mainly comprises bumping into each other and laughing. Major dramas have included all three of them simultaneously forgetting where they put their trousers and getting lost in their own house, all of which puts them on par with cocaine-addled university students.

Makka-Pakka

Makka-Pakka is the meekest of the garden's inhabitants and the others have spotted this and have made him their bitch. Forced to live underground in a pitiful ditch hovel, he spends his time doing 'favours' for the other residents such as finding all the shit they've lost whilst in a giddy haze and washing their faces. He travels the garden with a push trolley collecting rocks (which he sleeps with for comfort) quietly wittering to himself like a homeless man with dementia. How do his friends repay this quiet, selfless being? On one occassion his trolley ran away on it's own and The Pontipines stopped it. With a rock. What a bunch of cunts.

The Pontipines/The Wattingers

The Pontipines are a huge family of miniscule wooden people who all live squashed into a tiny house like refugees. They are rarely seperated and travel everywhere in a conga-line. Likewise, their next-door neighbours are an unnervingly identical family called The Wattingers, who are indistinguishable from The Pontipines except for the fact they are blue instead of red. The whole lot of them are pathologically flatulent and at times even appear to replace their squeaky language with a series of rasping guffs.

Upsy-Daisy

Upsy-Daisy is the sole female inhabitant of the garden, save for the mostly sexless Pontipine/Wattinger wives. In what appears to be a staunchly patriarchal society, Upsy-Daisy is not permitted her own house and instead is forced to keep her bed in the middle of the garden. She spends her day singing nonsense and spinning in circles.

The Ninky Nonk & The Pinky Ponk

The Night Garden is home to two sentient vehicles which appear at random to ferry the garden's inhabitants between nowhere and somewhere else, seemingly ignorant of their huge size difference. The Ninky Nonk is a hobbled-together gypsy caravan convoy that pelts around at breakneck speed which is in stark contrast to the Pinky Ponk, a farting airship that travels painfull slowly and is still incapable of avoiding trees. When the Pinky Ponk collides with a tree it is referred to as a 'ponk' which is far cuter than 'unnecessary and terrifying crash'.

The Haahoos

The Haahoos occupy a biological space somewhere between sentient foam gods and garden furniture. They are massive gurning shapes that loom through the garden and are in all respects the stuff of fucking nightmares.

The Tittifers

Just birds. They painted them pretty colours but they're just heavily stage managed parrots.

The surprising thing amongst all of this is that I actually love In The Night Garden. I really do. Why? because I have a 14 month old son and it doesn't matter what wacky shenanigans he's in the middle of (climbing the radiators, investigating plug sockets), when In The Night Garden comes on he walks calmly to the sofa and is quietly entranced by this tomfoolery for a solid 25 minutes. Any other parents will attest that discoveries like this are rare. Disturbingly, therein lies its devillish power. It speaks directly to the ludicrously nonsensical child-mind at a level we mere adults can never understand and as a result I, like my own child, am powerless to resist.