Seeing this in a charity shop got me misty-eyed for the shoddy movie tie-ins of yesteryear. Now it's just shitty F2P mobile games instead of janky console platformers and beat em ups. And we call this progress????

Nostalgia goes a long way but even if you tire of the low res textures and a time when Harry Potter was much more whimsical and less brooding, the game is still a fucking vibe, the perfect thing to play on a sleepy Sunday. For the most part the difficulty is non existent thanks to auto-jump platforming and a generous health bar that compensates for the fiddly lock on system. You're able to breeze through this hazy retelling of The Philsopher's Stone in which Harry arrives at the school, takes several classes, does his first broom lesson, fights the bathroom troll, joins the Griffindor Quidditch team and visits Diagon Alley in the space of a day. It's very chill, an accessible game for small children that doubles as mindless relaxation for adults.

The PS1 atmosphere is really fab, the textures are solid and evocative and the abstraction that comes from trying to render Hogwarts and its surrounding grounds on something as underpowered as the PS1 gives the whole thing a dreamlike feel that I got completely sucked into (see also: 80% of the films events occurring over one day). Hogwarts is open to explore between the main story beats and while its mostly empty and devoid of music, it's eerie and makes the game world feel like an actual place rather than a bunch of discrete levels.

Unfortunately said relaxing vibe is ruined by the final gauntlet to get to the Philosopher's Stone. Actual challenge? Shoddy checkpointing that drags you back thru unskippable cutscenes? No save points which means you haveta complete it in one sitting?????? No no no where did the chillness go???

This is where the pratfalls of playing old games on original hardware come in. If I had this running on an emulator with save states we'd be laughing but since I'm playing it with an OG playstation (complete with og analog-less controller which is suprisingly nice to use in a 3D game) I'm stuck with this horseshit and it made me rage quit after two hours. It didn't help that I was under time pressure to pick up drugs from my plug and found myself shackled to this playstation trying to complete the game, but it's winter, there's an energy crisis, I'm hardly gonna leave the PS1 on over night like ye days of olde.

So I've kinda abandoned it after rage quitting the final boss but I feel like I will return to it so I can look myself in the mirror and say that I, a 27 year old man, wasn't bettered by the PS1 adaptation of Harry Potter and The Philsopher's Stone (side note: fuck that American bullshit, it's The PHILOSOPHER'S Stone).

If you can past the difficulty bump in the last hour or so, it's actually a suprisingly enjoyable game. It reminds me of the low stakes PS1 throwbacks you see popping up on Itch.io all the time now, but polished to a high degree since it's an actual professional product. Viewed in that context, I can actually give it a firm, non-ironic recommendation.

Utterly vapid, hollow, literally not an RPG (1) , even the celebrated Bethesda Open-World Exploration is crippled by the absence of compelling characters, quests or backstories to make these locations anything more than pretty shooting galleries.

That said, holy fuck Todd Howard got me sucking on that glass dick "explore, kill, loot" loop, (you can tell Bethesda's acquisition of Id Soft was invaluable when it came to making gunplay that isn't total ballz). I almost felt bad playing this game so much, it's total junk food and a complete dumbing down of what Fallout games can be. Which would be fine if it was a spin-off but as we all know by now with 76, this is the future of Fallout.

And that is so depressing because coming off the back of a New Vegas replay, this game is infantile. Compare New Vegas' central conflict - three factions to align with, none of them wholy "good" and no matter what, you're compromising at least some of your morals to bring desperately needed stability to the region. It's a political and ethical mindfield. Meanwhile Fallout 4 boils down to "Do you want to be a robot racist... Or not?"

I used this game as a crutch during a time when I was working a lot of hours in a shitty job. It was numbing, it got my dopamine receptors going in a way my day-to-day life didn't, but none of that really makes it good. It wears the aesthetics and lore of Fallout like a skin suit to be a glorified loot shooter with half baked crafting and base building mechanics. Will I play more? Probably.. Will I feel bad about it? Oh hell yeah.

(1) Hiring two of the blandest, most white bread voice actors to portray your character destroys any glimmer of roleplaying within the extremely restrictive story and dialogue. Who is this fucking tool saying the lines, because it ain't my meek abused housewife Mia, or my smug, cunning sociopath Mr. Friendly.

Immensely enjoyable and responsive to play but once you get past that smooth Nintendo touch, there's nothing of substance here. And I know, I'm suuuuuch an asshole looking for a sliver of thematic depth in a Mario game, but honestly I feel a little bit guilty playing this. It's a beautiful time-waster I just wish there was something, anything going on here beyond "Gee Mario sure feels great to control". God help me, it made me appreciate Sonic Adventure, which as horribly broken as it is, at least it's evocative in its nutso fucking weirdness. The theming for the levels is just boring, people say that Nintendo are the Disney of video games but honestly, you get more depth in any Disney movie over this.