Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Harry Potter and the Throbbing Wand




As many of you will now be aware, the new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is upon us. While the title is clearly a reference to author J.K Rowling's well publicised hatred of race-mixing, fans have been clamoring for plot details or 'spoilers'.
If you don't want to know which Snape-like character dies, go to another page now.
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Somebody called 'Snape' dies.
Now this didn't mean an awful lot to me, since I don't really know who Snape is, nor have I read any of the books or watched the films. Nevertheless I had a journalistic obligation to review this book, despite having no interest in reading it nor time to read it in.

Availability

Adults, actual grown up adults with lives and jobs and who have probably had sex and everything, stayed up until midnight on the day of release to get their copy. Some of them were dressed as characters from the books.
This gets an availability score of 0 because there's no way I would actually buy it.

Graphics

There's like this kid on the cover, and Gandalf is there, and they're on fire. In the adult edition there's a book on a desk.

Sound

As with many books of this size, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince makes a pleasant percussive sound when thrown at something. The sound a page makes when turned over is the finest since Voltaire's Candide.

Gameplay (+free R.E.M reference for no good reason)

Okay, so there's Wizards right, it's a fantasy book so you have to suspend your disbelief and believe that there are actually Wizards. There's some bad ones and some good ones... Muggles... Death-Eaters... Dumbledore... yeah yeah yeah yeah... Malfroy... Hermonie... a Gryphon... yeah yeah yeah yeah....

Totally Hot Slash Fiction

Having not read the book I decided to browse the internet for fan-fiction, in order to really get inside the minds of the characters. Good Slash is the literary equivilent of Modding, but when I really don't care about the characters, hot Slash Fiction really doesn't do it for me. Here's a sampling of Harry Potter slash, taken from a novella called Irresistible Poison, about a budding romance between Harry and his archenemy, Draco Malfoy:

"His hands moved up to hold Harry's startled face, and in the space of a next heartbeat he was kissing Harry, hard and full on the lips, his manner deeply passionate, hopelessly desperate ...

"What just happened?

"He knew bloody well what just happened. He just kissed Harry Potter, that's what happened. The thought of it made him nauseated, even though at the very same time an entrenched part of him yearned for the perverse, forbidden pleasure of it all over again."
Utterly tame.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince gets my lowest rating ever:
Minnie Driver.