LEGO Creator: Harry Potter

by Lego Media

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005LLTU
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 2 x 9.5 inches
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: October 26, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,733 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Combining one of childhood's most enduring toys with the current craze for Harry Potter, this game has a capacity for entertaining young players that is almost magical. LEGO Creator: Harry Potter lets you use standard LEGO blocks to construct a world for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Then you get to turn them loose in it! Whether setting up a postal route for Harry's owl, practicing spells with the kids of Hogwarts or using the workshop to configure the LEGO buildings and structures, players will find this game thoroughly absorbing.

LEGO Creator: Harry Potter is atypical of children's programs, which usually run players through a fixed set of activities or educational challenges. Instead, game designers have made a serious effort to leave things wide open and flexible, sticking close to the reason why kids enjoy LEGO in the first place. Players can place LEGO units--animals, characters, blocks, doors, chests--around the landscape of Hogwarts. But this is no mere simulation of a real-life play experience--this LEGO world is animated! With a single mouse click, players bring their creations to life. Place a LEGO snake onscreen in this game, and it will promptly slither for cover. Likewise, the Harry Potter characters--who are incredibly charming when rendered as standard LEGO people--will move around the environment created for them, even interacting when they come together!

While the complexity of this package makes it tougher to master than many games, a series of tutorials disguised as challenges can smooth out the learning curve. Users explore the school, build LEGO trains, and find lost animals, and as they do, they learn the lay of the land. The challenges have another motivator built in: without them, you can't cast all the magical spells otherwise available to Harry and the others.

LEGO Creator: Harry Potter frees you to build a stage and place upon it the well-known characters from J.K. Rowling's novels. What happens next is limited only by your imagination. --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description

The third title in the LEGO Creator series takes kids into the magical world of Harry Potter and his friends. LEGO Creator: Harry Potter lets kids construct and play with 3-D interiors in a virtual LEGO world where they can re-create the mystical environments from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

In addition to the range of classic LEGO bricks, kids can play with all-new features taken right from LEGO's Harry Potter line of toys. Design and build train tracks for Hogwarts Express to follow, or build furniture from LEGO bricks for the various rooms of a virtual Hogwarts Castle. LEGO Creator: Harry Potter also features a new 3-D character designer that allows kids to build their own mini-figure pupils. Then, click on the virtual Sorting Hat to place them in the appropriate houses of Hogwarts. How Hogwarts' pupils interact with each other will depend on what house they are from. For example, a virtual Slytherin mini-figure may react differently to a Gryffindor pupil than they do to a Ravenclaw student.

There are 12 optional challenges that add to the interactive play, including the option to download new LEGO bricks and virtual models from LEGO.com. The game also gives players the ability to create building instructions, so that they can build their own virtual models using real LEGO bricks.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bad controls, November 7, 2001

By 

A 12-year old gamer (Harvey, LA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: LEGO Creator: Harry Potter (CD-ROM)

This game is actually pretty cool. However, be aware that it is an extreme challenge. The instructions are pretty bland. I find that the greatest challenge is moving around. Also, be aware at what this game is. You actually BUILD the Hogwarts interior, meaning the building is set up, but you have to place the furniture. Try to split your activities up, because constantly just placing furniture can get boring. It actually is a very cool game, but the controls bring the rating down ALOT. They are really confusing. It would have been better if lego had put a simple key bord movement-maybe even strafes. Having to controll a trax ball that is super sensative and page movements that you have to time or else you lose site completely can really start ticking you off. So, if you can figure controls out easily and get used to them quickly, this is the game for you. If not, then strongly reconsider this game.

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ok..., November 9, 2001

By 

"rhasodie" (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: LEGO Creator: Harry Potter (CD-ROM)

I bought this because I thought it looked like alot of fun. It...was I suppose. Why then, I hear you ask, did you give it only TWO stars? Well...
1. this is probably my main point...whenever you put a decent amount of stuff in 1 area, so that it actually looks cool, the background and most of the objects there go brown until you set the colour setting down to it's lowest, whereupon your carefully designed characters end up looking like little yellow bricks, and the spiders little grey bricks etc.
2. Relating to the first point, there is a limit on how much you can put in, and it's TINY! Just when you think you've got it looking brilliant, you try and dump in the people and it says you've got too many items! I find this HIGHLY irritating.
3. The trains. It is IMPOSSIBLE to put the Hogwarts Express together. IMPOSSIBLE! You can't even connect the carriages to the train.
4. It is really hard to master the building techniques. It took me 4 tries before it finally clicked, and my PASSION is computers. I even beat my Computing teacher. So I would not recommend this to ANYONE who doesn't like fiddling with computers.
5. It is eternally freezing. I have a VERY fast computer, and it still freezes up every other time I play it.
6. If you get a decent looking place, when you activate it it makes a strange buzzing noise and the characters walk and interact like badly designed ungreased robots.
7. Following characters and telling them what to do, although considered to be one of the main features of the game DOESN'T WORK! I COULDN'T BELIEVE IT! I read the manual 5 times before coming to the conclusion it just wouldn't work. You can't cast spells, mount broomsticks or do anything that the manual suggests from the player. You can't even direct them properly, they won't move for like 5 secs after you give them the order.
8. If you finally manage to get it working, like I did, on bad resolution and simple plans, it just isn't enormously fun to play. You can't play it for more than an hour before getting bored.

**Now I hear you cry, "you must have a faulty programme!". Nope. I've replaced it twice, and it just comes out the same. My advice is, read the books, see the movie if you want, but don't waste your money on this game.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Try again Lego (well maybe not), November 20, 2001

By 

Fred L. Stephens (Oak Ridge, TN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: LEGO Creator: Harry Potter (CD-ROM)

Avoid this game. They did not get it right. First, I could not get it to work on XP. Oh, well. I should have looked more closely at the package. It makes no Windows claims. I did get it to work on Windows 98. But my 9-year old and I had a very slow go at figuring out how to make it work. The graphics are poor. Everything ran slow compared to our other games. (Working with 256MB memory, 32mb video memory, lots of free defragmented disk space.) The help is disfunctional much of the time and extremely slow the rest of the time. Too bad the Harry Potter enterprises did not contract with the Humongous crowd to do this. (Humongous are the makers of Pajama Sam, Freddy Fish, etc.)