Game Review: Magic Carpet (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

Magic Carpet was one of a series of games made with The Games Creator, but had up to three releases.  The original release was on the ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment) label, and then reissued on Hitech Games Plus (bizarrely in this case still with a run of ACE cassettes) and then it was handed over to Mastertronic for a second reissue.  Several of these were by David and Richard Darling, including this one.

Aladdin’s Cave

The on-screen instructions do not fill you with confidence, with Aladin spelt with one D.  The plot is that the treasure has been stolen by the evil sultan Abdulla, and Aladdin must venture through several caves from the top of the mountain that his magic carpet took him to. The game promises stalactites, moving floors, bats, and fire spitting dragons along the way before the treasure can be retrieved to be rightfully his once again.  The cover art at least does its best to show that part of the plot off well.

Nick Cave and a Bad Seed

Once the game has loaded, Aladdin is in the first cave and must work his way left to right, dodging the boulders, then head through the portcullis before dodging the stalactites on the way down to finding the door to the next cave – and no key to collect either, just getting to the door opens it.  Is Aladdin a secret lock picker in disguise?  Maybe.  In any case making your way along is normally not too difficult once you have worked out the patterns of the enemies, and at least Aladdin on his magic carpet is reasonably responsive to the joystick movements.

His Kingly Cave

On the second level, Aladdin must time a move up the left side of the screen along with the elevator (yes, in a cave!) and this is the trickiest part to get right – you will often lose all your lives in around five seconds due to the unforgiving nature of this level.  Once you have mastered that, the second cave also contains many bats to steer round, and to learn the pattern of (the first one after the elevator being nasty) then through a teleport, and time to dodge more bats.  The collision detection often does not always help here and if anything, this does put many people off playing any further – it does feel very unfair to some and that is an understatement.

Puff the Magic Dragon

The final cave contains a bat and a dragon who is spitting out balls of fire heading towards Aladdin.  Dodge those and the bat, and then steer around the dragon to get towards the bottom right of the screen and to get the treasure – and pixel perfect accuracy is required, which to be fair, is doable as long as you time your run correctly to get into the little recess in the lower chamber to the right of the dragon.  If you manage that, congratulations, you have completed the game. And when you play it the second time, the difficulty appears not to change massively, and so it is a case of going through the same motions over and repeatedly.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Magic Carpet are not very good.  Aladdin at least has some basic animation on the carpet, when moving up and down or left and right but most of the enemies apart from the bats with their wings, are static, with only the dragon on the final cave being a reasonably large size.  The caves as backdrops work okay.  The sound is nothing like the “catchy tunes” promised on the game’s inlay, with a repetitive ten second piece for the first cave and a longer but out of tune piece for the final two caves, which really are an insult to the SID chip, and typical of the output of The Games Creator at the time.

Final Thoughts

Magic Carpet is unfortunately a classic case of a cynical cash in and the third release of the same game in all.  It promises at least something with the Aladdin theme, but once you have explored the caves and worked out what to do to complete the game, there is no lastability and interest wanes away very quickly. And if you get constantly stuck attempting to pass an enemy, it will frustrate you in equal measure. It does not look or sound anything like an acceptable standard either, and the fact you can complete the game in less than two minutes (and yes, I did time it) says a lot about how much gamers were being milked for absolute bobbins like this.

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