"Draco was banging his goblet on the table. It was a nauseating sight..."

So I've been playing LEGO Harry Potter over the past few days. I actually got it earlier but put off playing it for whatever reason. And... it's pretty fun. Exploring Hogwarts with a giant world hub is pretty cool, and fans of the series would definitely appreciate all the continuity nods. Sometimes the puzzles are a little unintuitive, but not so bad as the Batman game. Seriously, some of those puzzles made no sense at all.

My only problem is that you really have to get deep into the game before you can truly explore. Among the things you need for a lot of puzzles to get 100% are a character with a key, a spell to destroy metal, and a character that can use dark magic. I'm partway through Prisoner of Azkaban's story and haven't got any of those. The spell and the dark magic character? Can't get any of those until Goblet of Fire. A character with a key? Only one, and you need that metal-destruction spell... ugh.

The character select is huge, I haven't played every LEGO game, but this is the biggest one I can remember since the combined Star Wars cast... and a lot of those slots cycle through variations of characters. Yeah, it's pretty big. One gripe, though, is that most of the characters I've unlocked are... boring. Lots of generic stuff like "Hufflepuff Prefect" or "Ravenclaw Boy" or just the generic "Boy" and "Girl." Huzzah. When do I get Dumbledore and the interesting characters? Oh, and they forgot Lavender Brown. You can get nearly every named character except for her. And Luna, who isn't until the fifth book (this game is only over the first four), but I really say that because, as I've said before, I have a massive crush on Evanna Lynch like every other reasonable person on the planet.

Perhaps it's something about a geeky, smart, head-in-the-clouds, yet incredibly pretty girl that hits the right buttons. That... that actually sounds about right.