Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup
Encyclopedia
Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup is a video game produced by EA Games and EA Sports
EA Sports
EA Sports is a brand of Electronic Arts that creates and develops sports video games. Formerly a marketing gimmick of Electronic Arts, in which they tried to mimic real-life sports networks by calling themselves "EA Sports Network" with pictures or endorsements of real commentators such as John...

 that features the fictional sport of Quidditch
Quidditch
Quidditch is a fictional sport developed by British author J. K. Rowling for the Harry Potter series of novels. It is described as an extremely rough, but very popular, semi-contact sport, played by wizards and witches around the world...

 from the Harry Potter
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is a series of seven fantasy novels written by the British author J. K. Rowling. The books chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard Harry Potter and his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, all of whom are students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...

franchise. The user plays in the Hogwarts
Hogwarts
Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or simply Hogwarts is the primary setting for the first six books of the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, with each book lasting the equivalent of one school year. It is a fictional boarding school of magic for witches and wizards between the ages of...

 Quidditch Cup competition, competing amongst the four houses of Hogwarts: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. Players victorious in the house competition qualify for the Quidditch World Cup, competing against the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...

, Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 and Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

.

Hogwarts

In this stage, the player competes for the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup using the Hogwarts house teams, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Slytherin. The teams are represented by a specific character from the books for each team (Harry Potter for Gryffindor, Draco Malfoy for Slytherin, Cedric Diggory for Hufflepuff, and Cho Chang for Ravenclaw). When the player chooses a team, the character flies off on its broomstick. If this is the player's first time playing a team, the character will give a short statement praising the player's selection, then the house challenges appear. These challenges focus on specific areas of a full Quidditch game and are used to learn the game for new players, or polish skills as a returning player.

There are seven house challenges: Passing, Tackle and Shoot, Seeker, Beaters and Bludgers, Special Moves, and Combos.
Only the first three challenges - Passing, Tackle and Shoot, and Seeker - are initially available to the player, with Beaters and Bludgers, and Special Moves unlocked after the first Quidditch match, and Combos unlocked after the second match.

Completing the first set of challenges allows the player to play their first full Quidditch match. The team the player faces depends on what team they are playing as. Winning the game unlocks the next set of challenges which must then be completed to unlock the next match. Winning the second game unlocks the final challenge. Completing that challenge unlocks the Hogwarts Cup final match.

During a Quidditch match, the player controls the Chasers who try and score goals with the Quaffle to earn 10 points per goal. The Chasers' abilities depend on which challenges have been completed (for a first time player) (Example: in the player's first game, he will be unable to perform special moves or combo moves). Abilities also unlock by collecting certain Quidditch cards. These cards are earned by doing certain tasks, such as winning without conceding a goal or performing a certain number of steals in a game.

Along the top of the screen, each team's score display also features a thin bar with one half of the Golden Snitch. Actions performed in game by the Chasers such as any successful pass increase the bar slightly, and performing a successful string of combo passes and shots can increase the bar by an amount proportional to the length of the combo string, up to seven actions. The player can continue to chain actions to the combo but the counter will not go past 7. The bar will increase until both halves join.

The Chasers can also perform moves to drain the opposing team's bar such as successfully hitting the opposing chasers with a bludger, performing a successful Special Move steal, or performing a Team Special move (which is unbreakable). Every team in the game has a unique Team Special Move that triggers a short cinematic of spectacular teamwork between the team Chasers (and sometimes Beaters) and has a possibility of scoring multiple goals. For example, The Ravenclaw Team Special Move scores three times for 30 points total.

Once both halves of the Snitch join, the game moves into the Snitch Chase, regardless of score (it is possible, though unlikely, to engage in the Snitch Chase with the score at 0-0). During the Snitch Chase, the player now controls the Seeker and follows the snitch, in a race against the opposing seeker to catch it. The player can use a speed boost which drains a boost bar directly proportional to the size of the snitch bar accumulated during the Chaser portion of the game. If a player doesn't have a boost bar of maximum size, staying in the Snitch's slipstream (which normally refills the bar) with his bar filled will increase its size. Using the boost, once the player is close enough, he can try to grab the Snitch. If he is successful, he earns 150 points for his team and the match ends. This typically wins the match but is not always the case (example, if the player's team is trailing by 160 points, catching the snitch would end the match but the player would still lose).

The Cup is based on points, not wins, so high scoring teams have a better chance at winning, and the team with the highest point total after all three games have been played wins the Cup. Winning the Cup with any team unlocks the Quidditch World Cup.

Exhibition

Exhibition allows the player to play a one-off match between the Hogwarts house teams at Hogwarts during summer or winter. The player can also choose to play an international match, controlling a country team of their choosing. Only the venues of the England and United States teams are available to players initially, but as players win against international teams in an 'away' game in the international tournament, more venues are unlocked. This mode also offers the game's multiplayer option. The team that the second player can choose depends of the team pool that the first player selects. In either single or multiplayer, a Hogwarts team cannot play against a world cup team or on any international field, and no world cup team can play at Hogwarts.

World Cup

The World Cup stage is similar to the Hogwarts stage in terms of gameplay, with the exception that there are no challenges available to the player and the teams are named after real countries instead of Hogwarts houses. Several different team choices are available to the player, including Japan, Australia, the United States, England and Bulgaria, the latter of which features the 'star seeker' from the book series, Victor Krum. However, Bulgaria is unavailable to the player until they collect enough Quidditch cards.

The key difference between the World Cup and the Hogwarts cup is that after team selection, the player must choose what model of broom he will use, which is essentially a Difficulty selection screen.
the four models available are:
Comet 260 (Easy)
Nimbus 2000 (Medium)
Nimbus 2001 (Hard)
Firebolt (Very Hard)

Only the Comet 260 and Nimbus 2000 are available in the beginning, the others being unlocked with Quidditch cards. The different brooms offer different handling in-game, although this is hardly noticeable. The broom selection more directly affects how hard the AI will play.

The player will play against every team in the World Cup twice, once at their home stadium and once at the opposing team's home ground. The Cup is awarded the same way as the Hogwarts Cup, so the team with the highest score total at the end of the season wins the World Cup.
The player can play multiple separate World Cups with different teams simultaneously, but can only run one World Cup with any given team.
For example, the player can play a World Cup as the USA and a separate World Cup as France at the same time, but cannot play two separate World Cups as France at the same time.

Quidditch

When you win the World Cup, it unlocks the game's secret mode, Quidditch Marsh. This is an Exhibition mode between Hogwarts teams at the special Quidditch Marsh venue, which is the birthplace of Quidditch. The location is also multiplayer enabled.

Reception

The game has received mixed reviews. GameSpot gave the game a rating of 6.5/10, citing sluggish controls and shallow gameplay, but praising the inclusion of easily recognizable characters from the books and films, and good graphics. IGN gave the game a 7.2/10 and GameSpy gave it a 3/5.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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