Game Review: Magic Carpet (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

You need to navigate your way through three caves, avoiding the obstacles and enemies along the way.  As you go through the caves, make your way towards the red doors.  The goal is to collect the magic lamp, which is protected underneath The Green Dragon.

Magic Carpet in a sense, has a countdown timer in which to complete it.  Your score is constantly depleting and if it reaches zero, it’s game over (losing all remaining lives in one fell swoop). The Green Dragon fires what looks like iced blue whirls horizontally across the screen.  When you’ve reached the lamp, the game goes returns to cave 1, but with the enemies moving that little bit faster.

Playability

Although Aladdin moves around quickly, this can be an issue.  If you hit something, you’ll instantly be put back to the start of the screen.  Should you have been pressing the up or down button at the time, you can accidently move straight into the wall when re-appearing losing lives.

Collision detection isn’t great.  For example, if you go near the boulders, you’ll see the colour clash when touch them, but you won’t lose a life, unless you pretty much fly straight into one of them.

Teleportation

This is just a matter of moving into a yellow blocked area and reappearing on the other section of cave 2.  Other than that, there is a bit of colour that lights up that screen for a couple of seconds.

Graphics and Animation

Throughout the entire game, the sprites flicker very badly with plenty of evidence of colour clash.  This is especially noticeable when Aladdin goes near any object that needs to be avoided and navigate his way around.

The first screen has three badly rotating boulders (which you’ll notice this straight away).  The bats on the second screen are awful with constant flickering and on the third and final screen, The Green Dragon is just as bad.  Despite all of this, the first screen does have some colourful boxes whizzing around the edges (which, I quite liked).  It’s just a pity that the game didn’t concentrate on the animation of the enemies just as well as those fast-moving boxes!

The loading screen is reasonable, although the next loading header goes through half a row of it as it loads the main game in.  This could have very easily been avoided and ruins the presentation.

Sound Effects

There are very limited sound effects with the game constantly repeating an annoying noise.  The exceptions are when you hit an enemy, part of the scenery or a brief change in sound when you go through the teleporter.

The only piece of music you’ll hear is when you complete the game and that sounds awfully out of tune. If you lose all of you lives or run out of time, there is a high-pitched squealing noise (whilst clearing the screen downwards).

A Noticeable Error

Once the game has loaded, there is a brief description of the game with the keys shown at the bottom of the page.  You’ll also note that Aladdin is incorrectly spelt as Aladin [sic].  That’s not a great start and you’ve not even begun playing the game yet.

On A Final Note

This review may read very critical of Magic Carpet, but it just isn’t enjoyable to play.  I do feel that this game was rushed out without anyone saying this isn’t good enough to release.  If the flickering and animation had been sorted out, it may have scored very slightly higher.  On the plus side, the artwork on the front cover is good, but that’s all really!

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