E3, the video game and entertainment conference, was held earlier this past week and CinemaBlend previewed Harry Potter Kinect. They shared a few thoughts on how they thought gameplay faired on the Kinect console:

One of the games I was most excited to get my hands on at E3 this year was Harry Potter Kinect. Like using the force in Star Wars, using spells in Harry Potter through the Kinect has been a hope of mine since the technology was announced. I pretend to hold a wand and cast spells most of the time anyway. Unfortunately, also like Star Wars for Kinect, this game too generally seems underdeveloped and generic.

Where the game has potential to be special is with voice commands, allowing you to call out your spell with your voice before you cast it, just like in the Potter universe. Here, it signals the game to change your spell to whatever you want to use. Even though I was rather unimpressed with the endless leaning left and right of Quidditch and the poor aim of casting spells on Death Eaters as I ran away from them, I’m still excited to see how the voice commands play out.

This concept sounds really cool with you playing as Harry, Ron or Hermione in 30 levels, but it also seems like it might become repetitive like other Kinect games, unfortunately. This game is aimed at 6-10 year-olds so maybe they will like the repetition. It has between 4-6 hours of gameplay so that’s a lot of yelling “Expelliarmus!” at a television screen. The game is set to come out sometime in the fall, perfect for the holiday season. If anyone buys the game, or gets to test it out before its release date, let us know how the gameplay is.

Now, this game looks cool and I’d love to play it and read the new writing by JK Rowling. The problem is, I won’t be able to. You need to own a Playstation 3, a Playstation Wonderbook, a Playstation Eye, a Playstation Move controller, and of course you’ll need to buy the game itself. There is no chance I could or would pay all that money for this. And this I’m sure will be a huge issue for most fans around the world.

With the new Wizard’s Collection DVD set, the re-release box-set of the three companion books, and now this, I really feel like the fans’ enthusiasm is starting to be abused. We are not made of money.