When Pottermore was first announced, J. K. Rowling made fairly clear that this interactive experiment was of her own design. It was her brainchild. It was not about money, because, apart from the ebooks and audiobooks in the Pottermore Shop, there was no money to be made from Pottermore. Membership is entirely free. There is…
From start to finish: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 is a much more difficult game than I had previously anticipated, compared with the relative ease of the previous games to complete. Also by comparison, this is the only game in the franchise that is not set within Hogwarts. (The Goblet of Fire video game did…
From start to finish: Where Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gave me what I really wanted out of a Harry Potter game–authentic free exploration of a realistic Hogwarts–Half-Blood Prince really improved on that concept. Even more previously inaccessible locations were added to Hogwarts (thanks to the Aurors for opening them), making the…
From the very beginning, this movie feels intense, like the open of the close that it is. Our first glimpse of Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour, with his unblinking stare (he actually blinks three times but who is really counting), starts the film, followed by the incredible music composed and conducted by Alexandre Desplat, underscoring…
Half-Blood Prince continues almost directly from where Order of the Phoenix ended, showing Harry and Dumbledore at the Ministry of Magic shortly after the battle with Voldemort. Reporters are taking pictures of them for the Daily Prophet. I love this opening. I thought it was brilliant. From there, the film continues in a muggle office…
From start to finish: I understand that I’m writing these last few reviews of the Harry Potter video game franchise out-of-order. I vastly preferred this game to its predecessor, Deathly Hallows Part 1, in part because this game features Hogwarts, where the previous one did not. Of course, the story for the Deathly Hallows Part…