Magic Carpet (video game)
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| Magic Carpet | |
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| Developer(s) | Bullfrog Productions |
| Publisher(s) | Electronic Arts |
| Designer(s) | Peter Molyneux |
| Engine | Magic Carpet |
| Release date(s) | 1994 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter, god game |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | ELSPA: 11+ ESRB: K-A USK: 6 |
| Platform(s) | PC (DOS), PlayStation, Saturn |
| Media | 1 CD-ROM |
| System requirements | 486, 8MB RAM |
| Input | Joystick, Keyboard, Mouse |
Magic Carpet is a video game released by Bullfrog in 1994. Its graphics and gameplay were considered innovative and technically impressive at the time. A revised edition, Magic Carpet Plus, included the Hidden Worlds expansion pack which added 25 levels and a winter-themed tileset. It had a sequel called Magic Carpet 2. Magic Carpet was considered by fans and critics alike to be a revolutionary game for its time and several aspects of it are still unique today.
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[edit] Gameplay
The player plays a wizard (on a magic carpet) flying over water, mountains, and other terrain while destroying monsters and rival wizards (which are controlled by the computer) and collecting "mana" which is gathered by hot air balloons and stored in the player's own castle. Greater amounts of mana stored in the castle allow the player to cast more powerful spells. As the player expands the castle, it spawns additional mana-collecting balloons and armed guards that defend the castle against attacks by enemy wizards. Besides storing mana, the player's castle also serves as a home base for the player. Victory is attained by storing in one's castle the necessary percentage of the total mana in the current level (or "world"). The magic carpet can be piloted in 3 dimensions, similar to a helicopter, although the player cannot roll and it is impossible to crash.
[edit] Spells
Magic Carpet has a wide range of spells (24 maximum) covering many categories.
For offense, there are scorching Fireballs, very accurate Lightning Bolts and devastating Meteors. For defence, players could Heal themselves, bring up a Shield to reduce damage from enemy fire, and even use Rebound to deflect certain fire-based spells back at the enemy. In multiplayer, there is no completely dominant spell, which often adds some balance to the game and results in several tactical dillemmas. For instance, the Meteor is usually considered to be among the most powerful attacks and can often kill weakened wizards with a single hit, but it becomes a double-edged sword if the target wizard has Rebound cast. However, Rebound is not a perfect defense. It costs a good deal of mana power and, as with all other spells, does not allow one's mana power to recharge while it is in use. Moreover it does not defend against lightning and many other powerful attacks. Lightning bolts are more accurate and more powerful than fireballs but lack the latter's longer range.
Exotic spells include Teleport to escape back to one's castle and recharge health and mana and then quickly return, and Skeleton Army which creates undead archer minions for either attacking enemy castles or wreaking havoc in civilian towns.
Revolutionary for the time were real-time terrain-altering spells such as Crater, Volcano, and Earthquake; it is possible for the player to carve through a continent (rather than splitting apart a land mass, Earthquake digs a twisting gorge in the ground), build up a volcano, or dig a lake (with Crater). Even the staple Build Castle spell is interesting; casting it in a suitable location would cause the ground to morph up into the shape of a fortress. Players soon discovered that the Crater was very useful against monsters and wizards alike on high ground, as (literally) sinking the earth from under the target was often sufficient to kill it, and for monsters the resulting crater would provide a handy hole in the ground to keep all of the mana together. Volcano proves to be an extremely deadly castle killer, creating damage both from the initial strike and from the rocks that fly out of the volcano to roll and bounce along the ground. Even the staple Castle itself is proficient at destroying legions of weaker enemies (indeed, it will kill nearly any kind of monster that happens to be over the player's castle at the time); strategically casting it right in the middle of a swarm would net a weak player lots of mana to quickly build up his strength.
Magic Carpet Plus replaced the rarely used Flamewall with the Guided Meteor (specifically for anti-player duels, as opposed to the regular general-purpose Meteor).
[edit] Monsters
The game also has a wide variety of monsters, including giant worms, apes, griffin, wyverns, genies, and crabs.
Krakens pose a deadly threat in bodies of water where they dwell; they use the Duel spell to prevent wizards from escaping and holding them within range of the Kraken's lightning bolts.
Wyverns are considered the most dangerous enemies (apart from other wizards), especially for weak players, and are one of the few creatures to actively attack both castles and towns.
Genies cannot directly harm the player's health; however, their Steal Mana spell will drain the player's mana power, limiting his capabilities in encounters with other wizards or monsters. Genies are not only unrelenting in their pursuit, but if sufficiently wounded, they will teleport away to heal themselves.
Griffins are usually unaggressive monsters, but when attacked, the entire pack will retaliate and will carry a grudge against the player for the rest of the game (unless another wizard attacks, causing the griffins to switch their attention to the latter). This has often resulted in the death of players who underestimated the numbers of these enemies.
The crabs are unique in that they can "consume" loose mana and by doing so gradually grow in size from tiny to large, gaining the use of increasingly powerful spells (first Fireball, then Lightning, and finally Meteor) accordingly. Sufficiently large crabs can even lay eggs to hatch new crabs to start this process all over again.
[edit] Innovation
The graphics engine was very cutting-edge for its time. It included such features as:
- dynamically lighted, gouraud shaded, changeable ("morphable") landscape.
- dynamic music that changes whenever the player enters a fight
- scene reflections in the water
- distance fog
- transparency effects, such as the transparent HUD, the water, and the Possess mana spell when cast.
- particle system, like the mana balls and flocks of vultures and other creatures. Often attacking one member of such a group is enough to attract the attention of the rest of the group.
In addition, Magic Carpet (as did the rest of the series) featured a 3-D mode that utilized red and blue glasses, and a realtime stereogram mode. A set of 3-D glasses came in the box. The game also supported many virtual reality headsets that were available at the time. At the time, Magic Carpet was one of the few games to be distributed using the new CD-ROM instead of floppy disk. It was the first game to be advertised as being optimized for the new Intel Pentium processor; the "Intel Inside" Pentium logo was shown if the game detected such a processor.
Well-designed for multiplayer, with a large number of spells geared specifically at human opponents, it supported up to eight players (Doom only supported four players) but it required a network card instead of the commonly used modem or null modem cable of the time.
With an innovative graphics engine, revolutionary gameplay, and designed to take advantage of the latest hardware, Magic Carpet was touted by its developers as being ahead of its time and it garnered many accolades and favorable reviews.
[edit] Lack of commercial success
Despite many highly positive reviews that the game got in computer game magazines, it was not commercially as successful as was expected. This was due to various factors:
[edit] Technology
Magic Carpet was heavily advertised as being technologically superior, but this alienated the mainstream customer base. CD-ROM drives were not yet widespread, and network cards were even further off from mass-industry adoption which robbed the game of its potent multiplayer selling point. The system requirements were rather high for the time; a 486 was the minimum requirement and the Pentium was heavily recommended for smooth gameplay and full graphics detail; many gamers still had 386 processors at the time and as a result the game did not sell well.
[edit] Doom
In addition to having technical requirements ahead of its time, Magic Carpet was overshadowed by Id software's Doom, released a year earlier in 1993. Doom's appeal was partially because it did not have Magic Carpet's high system requirements. Doom was distributed on floppy, could run on 386 processors, and had modem support for multiplayer.
Both games were frequently lumped into the same category of "3D first-person shooter", even though Magic Carpet bore little resemblance to Doom and other FPS games in terms of gameplay. This categorization not only benefited Doom since it was considered the definitive FPS game for its time, it also marginalized Magic Carpet's unique attributes.
Adding to the confusion, Bullfrog had a print marketing campaign that contained a slogan "BFG==BFD". (The BFG is a reference to the ultimate weapon available in Doom, == represents equality in many computer programming languages, and BFD is a TLA standing for "big fucking deal.") This likely backfired as it drew further attention towards Doom, instead of touting Magic Carpet's unique gameplay.
Lastly, Magic Carpet played it safe to stay within an ERSB E rating, like many other games of the time. Doom's gore and violence on the other hand was controversial, but that generated lots of attention and led to high sales.
[edit] Criticism
Dying without a Castle would force the player to restart the level since the game did not implement a mid-level save feature, requiring the player to adopt a more cautious and time-consuming approach. (As long as the player's Castle was at least partly intact, the player effectively had infinite lives.)
The levels after level 26 were dubbed the "mana-vampire" levels because the player could not retain spells picked up in earlier levels. This was implemented for the sake of balance, as this was supposed to present new challenges for players instead of always relying upon the same strategies and spells. For example, some levels' challenge depended heavily on barriers and mazes in the form of walls that the player could not cross over. Certain spells such as Crater, Earthquake, and/or Volcano would tend to make such obstacles useless. On certain levels, crucial spells, such as Castle, were left out entirely or were only available after the player had completed a desired task (usually along the lines of killing all of the monsters on the level), making them extremely tedious and frustrating.
Most of the bugs involved enemy wizards. For instance, one bug prevents an enemy castle from being destroyed, while another causes enemy wizards to be stuck in mid-air while not being able to be killed. The enemy wizard AI had limitations that were expected of it at the time; however, they often stood out more than they deserved, due to a mostly inaccessible multiplayer mode.
Despite being released a year after Doom, Magic Carpet still suffered from monotonous level aesthetics (the same tileset was used for all 50 levels, aside from some variation in civilian tents). Magic Carpet Plus attempted to rectify this by adding a winter-themed tileset.
[edit] Magic Carpet 2
Lastly, while Magic Carpet 2 fixed many of the design complaints present in the first Magic Carpet (repetitive levels, lack of storyline), Magic Carpet 2 was rushed by EA and the release shipped with lots of bugs including a fatal bug that often caused the game to crash. This fallout prompted Bullfrog designer Peter Molyneux to part with EA.
[edit] See also
- Magic Carpet 2 (1995)
- Sacrifice which is considered by some to be the spiritual successor to Magic Carpet
[edit] External links
- Magic Carpet at MobyGames
- Magic Carpet Plus at Home of the Underdogs
- Ogrian Carpet a game inspired by Magic Carpet
- Magic Carpet Plus download
