OMG Nintendo.com

Electronic Arts recently announced and started doing demos for Wii and DS titles based on the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie, based on the absurdly thick and wangsty book that came out some years ago. Let me cut down on the amount of preview verbiage you have to wade through for these titles by using my amazing industry insider powers to make a prediction: they will suck. This is based on my clever observation of how every single officially licensed Harry Potter game managed to suck to an amazing degree.

So, EA and their Harry Potter license can go to hell. Let's talk about something far more interesting: insane Chinese Harry Potter bootleg video games. Go back and read that, maybe three or four times. The chances of seeing those six words in that particular arrangement together is rare, and yet one of the most wonderful phrases possible in the English language. YouTube has yielded up gameplay videos of three such highly illegal delights, and you can check out videos and my highly educated commentary behind the cut.

Harry Potter Scramble or Super Harry Potter

This sidescrolling shooter, with music that closely resembles the sounds stray cats make when they fight to the death outside my office window at night, inspired this entire post. I happened to catch a post about it by Spencer at Siliconera when trying to think of some way to cover the EA Harry Potter announcement that didn't involve posting a few paragraphs of vile cursing and whatever I could produce by banging my forehead on the keyboard. So I went off to look for more info on the game (like its title), and discovered that the world of bootleg Chinese Harry Potter games is like a beautiful rainbow kingdom of crap.

A few wise men on YouTube (and that's a first) suggested that this abominably generic shooter, where Harry appears to fire missiles out of his broomstick to annihilate oncoming waves of writhing bacon, is in fact not even an original terrible Chinese bootleg game. This is in fact the case: Harry Potter scramble is just a hack of another terrible bootleg called Magic Carpet 1001 that appeared as part of Caltron and Myriad 6-in-1 multi-carts. It appears in its "original" form at 1:18 in the video above. Note that turning it into a Harry Potter game apparently demanded better backgrounds and infinitely worse enemy sprites.

Harry Potter and Fist of Fury or Harry's Legend or just Harry Potter

This game is distinguished by throwing out J.K. Rowling's pansy-ass magic system and instead having Harry and Voldemort exchange in a kung-fu battle to the death, several times. It's quite an improvement, isn't it? No, I seriously mean that. Harry Potter Kicks a Fat Guy is vastly better than the action scenes in the actual Harry Potter books I've read.

This game seems pretty obviously hacked from some other game. Despite this being one of the better-known Harry Potter Chinese bootlegs, the internets still have no clues for me regarding what the original unfortunate game might've been. The graphics and sound are honestly pretty good by pirate standards, and this game looks like it would be... possible to play. Yes, hitboxes frequently exist far outside of any onscreen sprites, but if it wasn't at least a little crappy it wouldn't really be a Chinese bootleg Famicom game. This seems to be one of the more widely known crappy Chinese Harry Potter games, and it's not hard to find articles, blog coverage, and even a speed run for it.

Harry Potter 3, or Harry Potter 2

I'm not entirely clear on what system this game is supposed to be for. The internet suggests Game Boy Color, and that seems fairly consistent with the graphics, but there's no real absolute certainty there. What is absolutely certain is that this is another side-scrolling shooter, not quite so bad as Harry Potter Scramble, but definitely worse than whatever Parodius game it appears to be hacked from. The graphics are fairly cute and the stolen sounds catchy, but overall it's not one of the more interesting bootlegs Harry's been forced into.

Harry Potter 3

Yes, this is a different Harry Potter 3 for GBC, although it steals the intro from the one we just covered. This one's gameplay is just incomprehensible enough that it seems like it might be mostly an original game, although bits of the graphics and music were clearly repurposed in part from elsewhere. It's basically just a revolting platformer, though, with the incomprehensible emphasis on collecting things that makes most of the EA games so intolerable.

Harry Potter

Despite the generic name, this bootleg is fairly distinct. It is, after all, pretty much the only Harry Potter Genesis bootleg I've run across, and it's terrible in a wonderful, spectacular sort of way. What are your gameplay goals? Why are you constantly being killed by Death Eaters and, uh, King Tut? What does it mean when Harry turns blue? These questions, like zen koans, have no true answer.

The Genesis version superficially seems better than the others, what with the Sonic 3D-like graphics and the music that entirely consists of horribly downsampled loops from the sountrack, but is probably the hardest of the games to tolerate for long. It reminds you of the real reason why Chinese bootleg games exist: to get your hopes up a little, and then dash them to pieces, leaving you feeling worse than you would have if you hadn't played anything at all.

• << prev
• next >>