This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on February 8th, 2020.
Welcome back to the PlayStation Basement, a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasize the review itself. Now, let’s go!
Today, we delve back into the fantastic past with Magic Carpet. Magic Carpet was originally released for PC in 1994 by Electronic Arts and developed by Bullfrog Productions, the studio created by the now infamous Peter Molyneux. The game was ported to Sega Saturn and PlayStation in 1996 (Europe and North America) and 1997 (Japan) by Krisalis Software. Magic Carpet is a combination of light flight-sim and strategy. You play as a young wizard who must gather mana, portrayed here as colored orbs, to restore the equilibrium of various worlds that resemble a fantasy Middle-East.
Magic Carpet features some very different cover art by region. The first PlayStation port, the one released in Europe, is a dark image of fire with the title displayed in shining gold. Company logos take up a lot of this cover. The North American version was a longbox release and shows graphics from an in-game cutscene of the main character fighting a wyvern. It’s an okay image, but the in-game cutscenes are not particularly good looking compared with ones from later in the generation. The color is also kind of washed out but simultaneously resembles something Arabian. The Japanese release goes with the dark color scheme of the European release and the general idea of the North American release. It shows an exciting image of the hero fighting a wyvern, this time rendered in a comic book style. This one looks really cool with high contrast, detailed textures, and a dramatic pose. It’s interesting to see how this title received such different cover artwork in different regions.
The graphics of Magic Carpet are great! The game uses a first-person perspective to show the fantastic worlds of palaces, wizards, dragons, and other monsters. Large seas and various terrains such as mountains or scrubland cover each area. There are also villages and towns full of people. From the townspeople to the monsters to enemy wizards, everything moves in real-time. It’s cool to fly around and suddenly run into a gigantic worm or a dangerous troll. Seeing the opposing wizards fly around is neat too. All of the land and buildings are also destructible with continued fireballs putting holes in the ground by visibly lowering the terrain. You can also raise the terrain by creating a castle to protect yourself. It’s not too dissimilar, in certain ways, from a 3D Populous, another Molyneux creation. I’m really impressed with what Bullfrog was able to accomplish visually in this title.
The sound in Magic Carpet is very solid as well. The musick mixes odd, otherworldly ambiance with Middle-Eastern sounds to create something that sounds unique. It even adapts to what is happening in the game as in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with combat horns sounding when a battle begins. The sound effects include various wind sounds, scorching flames, whooshes, and the sound of crashing rocks. The one big critique I have here is that all of the sound is a bit repetitive. The musick loops quite a bit, and the sound effects are going to play often in this title. For example, you need to shoot like twenty or more fireballs to kill some monsters. You’re going to keep hearing that fireball sound each time. It’s a bit much sometimes, but it’s not the end of the world.
As mentioned, Magic Carpet is an action-strategy game. You fly around on your carpet like a simple flight sim. One button controls your acceleration forward and one controls your acceleration backwards. You can strafe with two of the shoulder buttons and turn with the D-pad. The D-pad is also used to move up or down just like a plane or helicopter might move. The game is a bit awkward to control sometimes, as you don’t seem to be able to move that far upwards into the sky; sometimes I felt like I couldn’t move far enough from the ground to really pass over obstacles in a way that wasn’t just running into them, which doesn’t do anything to you other than just looking weird. The camera also moves very quickly and might make you a bit dizzy, sort of like the amusement park ride with the same name that used to be at my local Kennywood.
The main objective is to gather enough mana to put the world back into equilibrium. To do this, your wizard must build a castle, destroy monsters, and possess the mana. You do all three with various spells, the most obvious being the spells that build a castle, shoot fireballs, and possess mana or buildings. These spells all cost mana, so you become more powerful as you collect more of it. Furthermore, there are also more spells to collect during the game, displayed on the map as a red urn you must run into to pick up. Gaining a new spell allows you to cast it for the rest of the level and in later levels. There are spells that let you zip away, heal, or shoot fireballs more rapidly. In opposition to you, there are also enemy wizards who can do basically all of the same things. They have their own castles and collect their own mana. In most levels with enemy wizards, it is prudent to fight them, destroy their castles, destroy their mana gathering balloons, and otherwise beat them to collect the mana first. Sometimes this is kind of arduous: one level took me nearly an hour due to the enemy and I being at a near stalemate. Thankfully, the opponents are not particularly smart, but they are conservative in managing their health and castles. It can get annoying kind of quick. Repetition is a big thing here.
Overall, Magic Carpet is a pretty good game. It’s really fun to fly around in a world that moves all on its own. I like the graphics and sounds, though I wish there was generally more variety. By the seventh level, I had seen at least half of the enemies already. Still, I really did enjoy the strategy here, the challenge of competition with the computer-controlled opponents. It reminds me of the obscure PC game, Sacrifice from a few years later (2000). There’s a lot to play here in Magic Carpet with 50 standard levels and 20 extra levels (from the Hidden Worlds expansion). I think that it’s worth your time if you are interested in something that might feel like a dream.
Magic Carpet receives a Good.
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