New Preview of “Half-Blood Prince” Wii Video Game

EA, the makers of the Harry Potter video games, recently gave a preview of the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince video game to Kotaku.com, who now has a report online detailing their experience with the game on the Wii platform. The article states the demo they played two parts, one being a potion-mixing minigame. Of this the reviewer states : “you’ve got a bubbling cauldron and a desk full of ingredients like little vials, bottles, leeches and caterpillars, and symbol-based instructions for each step of the potion-making scroll up in a little wheel to the screen’s right. A potion-making sim was a first for me, and I exploded the thing a few times, but it was mostly pretty fun, especially when you can tilt the Wii remote to spill a beaker’s contents into the cauldron and then make a stirring motion to whirl it up until the color changes. It’s all timed and ranks your precision, which was pretty fun.”

The second part of the demo involved a duel with Harry and Draco Malfoy, with the reviewer and a cohort doing battle, described as follows: “We faced off at either end of a long room, and you hold up the Wii remote to charge your wand for a powerful attack (leaving you undefended), or simply shake the remote in your opponent’s direction to fire off a series of quick bursts.

You use the Nunchuk to move side to side, and swinging both Wii remote and Nunchuk across your body causes you to produce a deflection shield that can send your opponent’s projectiles right back at him. Shaking both produces a special attack that can knock your opponent down or stun him.”

As we first reported a few days ago, the PC edition of the HBP game is now available for pre-order with a tentative November 30, 2008 release date, today the Wii platform is also available for pre-order in our Cauldron Shop at a price of $49.99 with the same release date.