Magic Carpet Plus™

[review based on original release, not GOG release] One of Bullfrog's finest. When it first came out, this was one of the most beautiful games available. The rolling, deformable landscapes were more natural than in most other games for decades. In some ways, this is Populous in first-person 3D. The game delivers on its title. You are a wizard perpetually standing on a flying carpet. One of your spells creates a castle from flat terrain, letting you store mana and resurrect yourself after death. Needless to say, rival wizards and monsters attack your castle as mercilessly as they attack you. The game even incorporates RTS harvesting via a balloon that carries tagged mana balls back to your castle. If you can't beat a wizard head-on, poaching his mana supply is often the best alternative. The spell list is varied and useful, ranging from bursts of speed and weak fireballs to meteors, lightning balls, and even volcanoes that rise up from the ground. There is great diversity in monsters. Dragons and worms undulate. Archer hordes pick you apart from below. Huge, regenerating hydras advance relentlessly. There is also diversity in levels. The terrain types are often similar, but you will go from wide-open deathmatch levels versus other wizards and their castles, to narrow canyons with restricted paths forcing you into difficult monster encounters. Sometimes castle building is a priority, sometimes the castle serves only as a modest checkpoint for respawning. Most levels are packed with traps and surprises. A loud, magical click can herald the arrival of a field of hidden mana, the rise of a volcanic range beneath you, or a horde of dangerous monsters. I played this game exclusively with joystick, which worked very well. Keyboard is tricky. I can't say how well it performs with mouse. One weak point is selecting spells. I remember many situations where selecting the ideal spell would take too long, so I often stuck with a few general-purpose spells instead. People may also be frustrated by the hidden triggers in most levels. It's not always obvious what you need to do to set off a necessary trigger. Intuition and careful study of the map is often necessary. The sequel improved almost every aspect of the game. However, the original still stands as a classic. There really is nothing else like this series. The graphics look pixelated now, the difficulty can be high, and the gameplay eventually gets repetitive, but the experience of zooming over terrain that you can bend to your will shouldn't be missed.

While by no means new to gaming, I did overlook this particular title until recently, so I'd like to say a few things from a perspective that is NOT nostalgia glasses. Magic Carpet is simply an enjoyable, satisfying game. You may be put off by the incredibly dated graphics at first , and it could take some tinkering in the DosBox .conf to get everything to your liking (I was unable to get hi res mode to run smoothly on my powerful gaming pc, but applying a 2xSaI filter more or less accomplishes the same effect), but the underlying substance is a very playable and exciting experience. NOTE: It's quite confusing at first. You're dropped into the game with no explanation of your objective, and little understanding of controls. Like me, your initial reaction may well be that of disappointment, but I'll try to share what I've learned for the benefit of fellow newcomers. Control your flight movement with the arrow keys, as you would with WASD in a more modern shooter. Aim and steer with your mouse (inverted flight controls, tricky at first but it will get easier with practice), and one unique spell may be mapped to both the left and right buttons. Aforementioned spells may be found within red urns scattered across the map, and equipped via a selection menu/map screen (press Enter/Return, or click both mouse buttons at once). Alternately, you may equip spells by pressing the spell's designated number, similar to changing weapons in FPS games. The object of the game as I understand it, is to harvest orbs that are found throughout the map, and commonly dropped by enemies. This can be done by shooting them with one of your spells which will change their colour (beware of enemy wizards trying to do the same). Once you've converted the orbs, you can not simply pick them up. You must first build a castle (build and upgrade it anywhere you like by selecting your castle building spell), then a balloon will automatically collect them for you. When you accrue enough orbs, you win. The fact that the wizard somewhat aims on his own is this game's saving grace. Combat would be very difficult if not impossible, given how wild the carpet's controls tend to be. All things improve with practice. Have fun.

With all the fan gushing in these reviews, I thought I'd ( try to ) save my own and give a more thorough gameplay review for the potential buyer's consideration. Magic carpet is a series of open, 3D levels in which the player flies around ( on a magic carpet, no less ) with the goal of bringing the level - aka that "world" - to equilibrium. Doing this requires mana, a magic energy represented mostly by gold spheres. To claim the mana, you must cast a spell on it to mark it as yours, create your castle using a separate spell, and allow your air balloon to pick up the mana and return it to your castle. The more mana you have in your castle, the more spells you can use and the more you can use them before you have to wait and recuperate. Once you reach that level's goal, you win the stage. Most mana isn't just lying around, though. Sometimes it appears when you fly though specific areas, like stone-circles or deep valleys. You can gain some by casting your mana-claiming spell, Possession, on village houses. But mostly you have to gain it from destroying some of the games diverse enemies. Giant worms, Krakens, Genies and Trolls, just to name a few, will roam the stages in droves, each giving up a specific amount of the precious substance when you destroy them. Each have very unique behavior: Krakens will lock you in place and try to bring you down with lightning bolts, and Skeleton Archers will march through villages, shooting citizens and turning them into yet more Skeleton Archers; Griffons will fly around peacefully in herds until you attack them, after which their reflection of fire spells and their powerful lightning attacks will make you regret it. Eventually, you'll begin to encounter enemy wizards as well. They're gathering mana just like you, and as the only wizard among them trying to restore balance, you'll find yourself fighting them often, destroying their castles piece by piece to obtain all the mana their own air balloons have collected. To permanently destroy a wizard, you need to kill them when they have no castle. Whittling them down to that point takes a lot of skill and persistence, but there's nothing more rewarding than the little message saying that they've been removed from the stage. As you progress through the game, you gain additional spells, but you can't always use the most powerful ones right when the stage begins. Most spells require a certain amount of mana in your castle; you'll have to build yourself up to that point, killing weak enemies, claiming their mana, and protecting it to make sure a rival wizard doesn't claim it for themselves. Through each stage you'll move from fireball to lightning bolt to meteor, battling against other wizards doing the same. Since there's no real dialogue or narrative to Magic Carpet, it might seem like there's not much other than raw gameplay. This might be true if the atmosphere wasn't thick enough to cut with a knife. Beautiful, haunting music and sound effects perfectly substitute the environments; and even though the game shows its age pretty hard, the terrain does still manage to impress from time to time. Each stage is also riddled with hidden mana, enemy spawn points, and teleporters, giving each stage its own unique depth. Some have their own themes as well; particularly memorable is the stage where you begin in a teleporter-filled maze, requiring you to find your way out before you can build your castle... and go back in to get the mana you need. Another favorite of mine is the world that's almost entirely made up of a city. God help whoever shoots a villager there, as the entire level's archers will turn on you in an instant. The most notable sour point for this game is probably its challenge. Magic Carpet is very, very hard. Sometimes unfairly so. Those first few minutes of struggling, where you can't shoot more than five fireballs without taking a second to recover, can be hell if the game decides to through you into something challenging right off the bat. In later levels, this happens frequently. Getting attacked by a swarm of hornets with nothing to fight them off is almost certain death, and often it can take a frustratingly long time to get to the point where you can survive, dying and respawning at your castle upwards of 10 times before either getting your foothold or losing the stage entirely. Glitches can grind your game to a screeching halt as well. I should note that I encountered these on the playstation version of the game, so I can't say whether or not they're in the PC version yet. But few things are more frustrating than realizing your rival wizard's castle has somehow become part of the terrain and can never be destroyed or upgraded, leaving him to harass you for the rest of the level. Worse is when this happens to -your- castle, meaning you can't finish the stage at all and have to restart. Still, these are mercifully rare and... like I said, may not even be in the PC version at all. (I'll be buying it once I finish this review, and I'm sure I'll find out.) Magic Carpet is one of the few games that tried a new, interesting idea and made it work. There's no game that's really comparable, and after all this time I think that says a lot about it. Six dollars is an easy commitment for a long, challenging, and supremely unique game like this.

I played this game for the first time at the CEBIT 94 at Bullfrog's exibition booth, I believe. I played it using an early Cyberhelmet. I also stood on a carpet-style surfboard used to control the flying carpet. It was truly magic. Bullfrog, we miss you.