Magic Carpet Plus™

When I first booted up Magic Carpet DOSBox crashed. It worked the next time though. When I first started the game, I was confused and had no idea what I was doing (essentially shooting worms and vultures and making gold orbs white) and then realised I had to download the manual. Moral: Download the manual. Actual review: In Magic Carpet you play as a turban-wielding, carpet-flying wizard, who has to restore worlds that were destroyed by evil, greedy humans in their lust for mana. To "heal" the world you have to collect sufficient mana by building a fortress and "claiming" mana (in the form of gold orbs), which is collected by hot-air balloons. Mana is created by ruthlessly shooting dozens of fireballs in the faces of the various creatures that happen to live in every single one of the 50 worlds you will explore, restore and conquer. Also there are almost identical clones of yourself trying to claim all the mana as well which may lead to some annoyance. Over the course of the game you'll collect a wide variety of deadly and useful spells including volcanoes, lightning bolts, fireballs and the most important: Possession, which you can use to claim mana, make villages fight for your cause and possess the corpse of your rivals to steal all their mana. All in all, Magic Carpet is a challenging, annoying, frustrating, superb, innovative and fun piece of computer entertainment, which is, in my most humble opinion, better than Doom. For $5.99 it's comparable to leisurely taking all the money out of a bank safe.

When I saw Bullfrog's catalog would be included in the EA addition I had hoped this would be one of the games included. 50 awesome levels that have you compete with enemy wizards, build castles with archer defenses, cast spells that change the terrain, and summon legions of skeleton archers that can terrorize the land. This game has it all and is still just as fun as it was back in the day. With some limited editing of the GoG files you can play with all the bells and whistles and hear the familiar "da doo doo doo" Pentium sound on start up. Check out the forums for these edits as it makes the game much more enjoyable!

Magic carpet is a unique classic, definitely worth the small amount of money GOG is asking. Only gave it 4 instead of 5 due to numerous technical issues (discussed at length in the forums) which can mean frequent crashes and inability to finish some levels without resorting to cheat codes (eg frequently the game generates too many objects and you can't use weapons any more, indestructible castles built by enemies, etc). But don't let that stop you, it's hours of fun when it's working.

This was back before EA became slaves to their own money and Bullfrog was still around being all awesome. This is just one of those games that can't be put into a genre at all. Unfortunately, this was also before the age of built in tutorial mechanics and in game guides so it's not always clear what you're supposed to do or how to do it. The game has not aged well at all. The visual look horrendous and, honestly, I recall thinking the exact, same thing when it first came out. Still, it's just stupid fun and it's something you need to try at least once, if you haven't already. They just don't make games like this anymore.

SPOILER alert. Very hard game, i played it even with datadisk when it comes out. I played hours and houre. Done it. I played it again. It was so amazing. Casting spells, ambushing enemy wizard, chasing insects for mana...When you start a level and there is only lots of enemies you should flyght into the bunch of them and cast the castle spell :). Instantly you get lots of mana and you are a wizard :). Ok you shod have some practis before doing this, but then you are almost invicible... almost.