I've been playing some old games lately, and I wanted to share my findings. I've named this (and will name any future posts) The Grab Bag because I pick an old game I have very little to no experience with at random. The point of this exercise is to see how some of these games hold up specifically to someone who doesn't have that muscle memory or the nostalgia of someone who played the game at the time of its release. I would be really interested to hear anybody else's opinion on the game in question.
The first game I played is Magic Carpet. In this game the player competes with opposing wizards to capture the finite amount of mana in each level. There are a wide variety of neutral monsters: wyverns, griffins, giant bees, mana-stealing genies, mana-eating crabs, to name several. The player has a couple dozen spells found during the course of the game to deal with these threats, like Fireball, Lightning, Meteor, and even some terrain altering spells like Earthquake or Crater. I played the first six or seven levels and had a great time doing so, but by the time I had reached the fifteenth level I had a load of problems with the game.
To start off, there is this auto-aim that attempts to help one hit their targets. The key word in that last sentence is 'attempts'. Any and all ground targets were easy to hit, but hitting a bird, a bee, and especially something like a wizard with a projectile attack (Fireball, Meteor) was just frustrating. It doesn't lead its targets; it shoots where they are rather than where they will be. During the entire time I spent with the game (up until level 21 of 50, so at least seven hours) I never felt like I had a handle on shooting. I got a bit better at working around the auto-aim, but still missed easy shots right and left.
The next problem is another technical one. Your maximum height is dependent on the elevation of the ground below you. If you fly up a hill, and then from there start to fly away from the hill, your maximum height will decrease as you fly over land of a lower elevation. Your character is pushed down. Generally whenever I flew up an incline of any sort I would grind my face into the hill, as I could barely control what height I was from the ground. Flying from a high point is just as bad; instead of having the ground take up your entire screen you're welcomed with the all encompassing fog that obscures everything ten meters ahead of you. I spent more time looking at the minimap than the rest of the screen during my time with Magic Carpet.
The wizards AI was laughably bad. The monsters played their part well enough; if a crab got large enough it started throwing meteors around, and plenty of others had ways of making the players life hell. The wizards, however...well. They had to do everything that the player did. They had to collect mana, defend their fortress, harass other wizards, etc. They don't do any of these things that well. Most of them are little more than pests, avoiding all confrontations while they try and Possess as much mana as they can. Very few of them fight back or react to the players attacks at all; one may cast Invisibility, or Accelerate, but most just take it on the chin until they crash and burn. I came across one exceptionally aggressive wizard that did nothing but cast the basic Fireball spell slowly at my fortress, occasionally going Invisible to return home and heal. He did not claim mana. He did not defend his fortress. I had to fend him off a couple of times but quickly had enough mana to cast more devastating spells then he had access to and he immediately became irrelevant; and that's ultimately what all the wizards are: irrelevant. They aren't worthy opponents, they just waste your time.
Enough technical stuff. Lets talk about something I think anyone who has ever played a Bullfrog game expects: personality. The narrator from the Dungeon Keeper games or the wackiness of Theme Hospital, to name a couple. Magic Carpet doesn't have anything. The protagonist is of the silent variety, and the little orb of light that directs you (and narrates the opening cinematic) has nothing more to say other than "GOOD JOB"(not verbatim) at the end of each mission. The townsfolk NPCs have no interesting quirks or oddities to their behavior. Each level utilizes the same exact tile set, so prepare to see what feels like the same landscape time and time again. The music is...there. It's there. The game has a soundtrack. Some tracks feel drawn back, and others just don't leave an impression of any kind.
The main reason I put the game down was that it was just monotonous. You start off a level. You make a fortress. You spend some time defending the fortress, shooing other wizards away from the scattered mana you manage to find. Eventually most of the neutrals are dead and you start hitting the opposing wizards. You do some damage, you collect some of their lost mana; rinse and repeat, again and again. If there are many wizards (four or more) this section can take ages, as they all sense unclaimed mana like a shark senses blood in the water, and rush to the scene to take their share of the mana you're trying to steal. I think the problem here is that they tied the strength of the wizard to that of his fortress. Rather than have one gain levels for killing monsters and wizards, they instead obtain a higher mana pool by storing more and more mana spheres in their fortress. I wonder what they might have done with the level design (objectives not physical layout) if they had not made this decision. I think I might have liked the game more, but even with that one change the game would still have so many other issues.
I don't think this game has aged that gracefully. I've come to understand that it was quite impressive when it was released, but not now. I still think its a cool idea, this flying FPS. I just can't put any more time into it. If the game suddenly starts throwing some new locales or new objectives in a level later in the game I might be persuaded to go back in, but as it stands? I don't think this is Bullfrog's finest work.
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