Now this was a totally epic game. Never did figure it out since back then my English wasn't good enough to read the instructions, but that flying around in those caves with all those insects and those awesome motion blur gfx never got old.
Wow! I remember playing this when I was like 6 years old! My uncle had bought the golf game that came bundled with it and I saw something about a magic carpet and thought I'd try it out, but I had no idea what to do. After watching you play, it makes so much sense now!
As a kid, I never understood what to do in this game. But I did fly around for dozens of hours aimlessly, it was fun. After reading the comments, I see that I am not alone by far, lol.
Same. It came loaded on our new Compaq Presario and i had no idea where to find the manual(or that there even was one). I would fly around until I died, and I would usually die as soon as one of those worms showed up.
+Renhorable It's just too bad EA couldn't stop rushing the Magic Carpet games out the door, otherwise they'd be a lot more stable and the spell effects would likely be more balanced. :P
+Renhorable It even ran OK on a 486DX2-66. The title for most technically impressive game of all time goes to Ultima Underworld though. It had looking up and down, jumping, slopes, slanted walls, slanted ceilings, level over level and bridged, textured everything and was released before Wolfenstein 3D. The game had factions that you could become friends or enemies with; most obstacles could be defeated in several different ways; the game was a direct inspiration for System shock, Half-life, Thief and Deus ex. Fuck the pyramids; if aliens landed on Earth and helped mankind build something; it was ultima underworld.
I've been rewatching some of the old ADG episodes lately, and man does this bring back memories. Played the hell out of it, even though it dropped to like 2 fps occasionally when too much stuff was going on. I agree a remake would be fantastic, but fat chance of it happening in the foreseeable future. One thing I'd like to add is that th whole flying stuff felt extremely smooth and natural. Lots of games, both then and now, offer some kind of low-altitude flying experience, but Magic Carpet is absolutely the best in this department.
Back then in 94' I had a Pentium 60 with 16MB of ram, (at $6,000 the only one in my town) it played this game beautifully. I've been totally hooked ever since :-)
I had a DX2 66, cost £1,500 from Fona. I remember my mate ordered a PC through a mag and customised it with extra MB's of Diamond Stealth chips. 2 maybe 4, but it only came with one and he had a mare trying to get them to send the extra GPU chips or refund. How we ever lived without buyer protection back then I don't know.
This game blow me away back in the day... even today I consider it a great game and dont know why it wasnt remade or with new tech making something similar.
The "short" answer is the game's creator, Peter Moleneux, got pretty miffed at EA for rushing the release of both the first AND second Magic Carpet games, resulting in both having memory leaks which led to frequent crashes as well as incomplete spell effects in the second game. The first game ultimately got patched up with Magic Carpet Plus and the memory leaks were fixed, but the second one never got that treatment as Moleneux was so mad about the ordeal with EA he left not long following to form Lionhead outside of EA's influence. My best guess is EA still owns the Magic Carpet rights and Moleneux's feelings are likely too bitter to want to get the license back from them. :P
You know, I wasn't interested in this game back in the day because I thought flying around on a magic carpet looked really silly. Now I feel silly for missing out. Random dot sterio mode.... Wow..... just wow. Now I want to see a video of this game in that mode. I feel like it would be a trip!
I had the Floppy disc version on the Gateway 2000 PC back in the 90s, it came as a package with the PC. It ran so bad and I had no clue what I was doing! I remember clearly freaking out playing this game, it was scary at the time 😅
+Zidan Alag ...I had no idea there was a floppy disk release of this game... I did a search just now and actually did find a low-resolution image with enough detail to prove it exists, so... hunh... :o
In the year 2019 Magic Carpet is still the best sandbox game in the world. What's wrong with this world if the game from the year 1994 is the best in his genre?
I remember playing this game when I was very little. wasn't very good at it but I was entertained by my oldest cousin who beaten the game dozen times. He always had to ask my mother permission before getting on just because she had important files. (same for me and my brother) So yeah my mother had a really damn good computer for a lot of things and to this day I still don't know what they were. A lot of I believe has to due with her being a banker for 30 years.
This game gives me vibes of "Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child" on Amiga and Atari ST. They even share the inconsistent framerate. 🤭
8 ปีที่แล้ว +1
How did you manage to run it so smoothly? I am having a lot of troubles running it in DOSBox - in SVGA mode I can't get more than 10 FPS. Funny enough, Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds runs flawlessly in SVGA mode, apart from somewhat frequent crashes.
+Krešimir Cindrić One important note about the SVGA support in both games is that Magic Carpet 2 can use the VESA Linear Framebuffer, which speeds up SVGA memory access dramatically. The original can't do this, so its SVGA support is slower in general. If you can't get a decent framerate out of the original given the DOSBox settings I recommend then your computer may simply not be powerful enough to handle it. One thing you can try doing is turning off the various detail features in-game using the function keys, but that's about it. Also double-check that your graphics drivers are set to disable vsync with DOSBox as DOSBox can have some weird speed issues if it gets vsynced.
+Tyrian3k Yeah pretty much. I've seen a couple spiritual successors which are OKish and I've even mused about making my own, but there's yet to be a successor which really captures the feel the original Magic Carpet games had. :P
He doesn't mention it in the video, but it also has motion blur. Of course, it makes it really hard to tell what's on screen (especially if you set it to the maximum setting, which basically makes it look like that Final Fantasy Type-0 mess a few years ago), so you generally wanna keep it disabled, but that's still incredibly impressive for 1994, it really didn't become common until almost 10 years later with more advanced PS2 games.
One of hundreds of PC games I have, but have never played. It looks much less straightforward than Doom, so together with its higher system requirements, it's not hard to see why it didn't sell nearly as well.
+Giga Bowser Yup! I put a link in the video description awhile ago. This is a pretty old ADG ep so Magic Carpet wasn't available on GOG when I first made it. :B
MagicCarpet is still a best send box game. Unique control system, unique genre. Unfortunately, my dosbox does not works properly, so the game is too fast flying and i can't play it for this reason.
I remember playing the shareware version of this when I was a kid. Made me wanna puke, I got so disoriented. Just started playing it again here, after having gotten Magic Carpet Plus off of GOG. It was like that first time, all over again lol
I bought this back when I had a 486-33DX and it *just* barely playable. Even the opening cinematic ran slower than the soundtrack. When I got a Pentium though, it was much more playable.
Back when this game was released you would be; EA was considered one of the leaders in gaming back then, built upon the concepts of computer gaming artistry, as demonstrated by the way they physically presented their earliest titles, and most of what they put out back then was extremely good. But... as the company grew their ideals and motivations kinda got more and more twisted; Magic Carpet was one of the first signs things weren't so hunky-dory over at EA anymore. :P
@@Pixelmusement I know. Hell, on of the first games I ever beat and that I bought with my own money was NFS3. For me, EA started going down the drain the moment they discontinued Westwood Interactive.
@@Pixelmusement Really? I remember EA being associated with hot garbage back in the 90's, and when the Playstation and Saturn arrived on the scene everyone was hoping EA and THQ would finally die so they'd stop polluting the industry with junk. They published more than they developed, and their logo was definitely not a symbol of quality. Dark Castle, Sword of Sodan, Mutant League Football, Shaq-Fu? Not exactly the same level of excellence or artistry as Capcom and Konami. If it wasn't for Fifa and Madden EA would have perished.
@@markg5480 EA goes all the way back to the 80s though, and back then, they were awesome. But yeah, as they grew things got a lot more corporate and a LOT more about money. By the early 90s, EA was still producing good games but people were starting to suspect things might be rotting under the hood, and then things just sort of went downhill slowly but surely as the rot festered. The thing is, EA never stopped making good games, I mean really, you don't get THAT BIG with that much money if people aren't buying/playing your stuff, but the corporate side of things there is freaking cutthroat now, and they're SO laser-focused on making money that if they don't like where a project is going or don't think it will be super-popular, they just cut their loses and either cancel it or rush it out the door; a practice they started just a little into the 90s.
@@Pixelmusement EA was just the publisher. The game development was purely done by Bullfrog. Doubtless EA might’ve pressured BF to release before it was ready, though there was at least one patch revision to fix level 50 et al.
+All Outta Gum I own the Saturn version of this game. I bought it specifically because I was still playing the original release on PC which crashed all the time so I was like, "A console version! Perfect! That should run rock solid!" ...except it locks up all the time too. :(
That seems... unusual... It's far more likely the game either exacerbated an existing issue which in turn caused the computer to brick, or that the compy was going to brick at that moment regardless of what program was being run in that moment, but then, I don't know the details and it's not IMPOSSIBLE, just incredibly unlikely. :P
@@Pixelmusement Hard to say. I was very young at the time and they never touched their "newfangled computer machine" but all I used it for was to try to play this game to the extent it would allow. Haha
@@Pixelmusement No, it’s impossible. What you said about faulty hardware being set off by the game is the culprit. If it wasn’t that game or application, it’d just be another one. If the game was indeed “bricking PCs”, this would’ve been reported & known as surely he wouldn’t be alone. This would’ve resulted in a mandated patch being released to avoid this hypothetical issue. Any time a game has done damage to PCs, it’s been both well-known & a catastrophe for the company (EG - Ruins of Myth Drannor).
Well, i played the whole first part including Hidden Worlds addon without any crashes, not even in dosbox. So was Magic Carpet 2. For what i experienced a good old almost bug free game.
i got tons of gameplay hours when i was young. i love this game.
Now this was a totally epic game. Never did figure it out since back then my English wasn't good enough to read the instructions, but that flying around in those caves with all those insects and those awesome motion blur gfx never got old.
This game blew my mind back in the day, thanks for the nostalgia trip :)
This game, along with Doom and Wing Commander 3, had many kids begging their parents for Pentiums back in the day. Good times.
word
Also: Ultima Underworld
Wow! I remember playing this when I was like 6 years old! My uncle had bought the golf game that came bundled with it and I saw something about a magic carpet and thought I'd try it out, but I had no idea what to do. After watching you play, it makes so much sense now!
As a kid, I never understood what to do in this game. But I did fly around for dozens of hours aimlessly, it was fun. After reading the comments, I see that I am not alone by far, lol.
Same. It came loaded on our new Compaq Presario and i had no idea where to find the manual(or that there even was one). I would fly around until I died, and I would usually die as soon as one of those worms showed up.
woah this game looks really great for 1994
+Renhorable It's just too bad EA couldn't stop rushing the Magic Carpet games out the door, otherwise they'd be a lot more stable and the spell effects would likely be more balanced. :P
+Renhorable It even ran OK on a 486DX2-66.
The title for most technically impressive game of all time goes to Ultima Underworld though. It had looking up and down, jumping, slopes, slanted walls, slanted ceilings, level over level and bridged, textured everything and was released before Wolfenstein 3D. The game had factions that you could become friends or enemies with; most obstacles could be defeated in several different ways; the game was a direct inspiration for System shock, Half-life, Thief and Deus ex. Fuck the pyramids; if aliens landed on Earth and helped mankind build something; it was ultima underworld.
I've been rewatching some of the old ADG episodes lately, and man does this bring back memories. Played the hell out of it, even though it dropped to like 2 fps occasionally when too much stuff was going on. I agree a remake would be fantastic, but fat chance of it happening in the foreseeable future.
One thing I'd like to add is that th whole flying stuff felt extremely smooth and natural. Lots of games, both then and now, offer some kind of low-altitude flying experience, but Magic Carpet is absolutely the best in this department.
Back then in 94' I had a Pentium 60 with 16MB of ram, (at $6,000 the only one in my town) it played this game beautifully. I've been totally hooked ever since :-)
I had a DX2 66, cost £1,500 from Fona. I remember my mate ordered a PC through a mag and customised it with extra MB's of Diamond Stealth chips. 2 maybe 4, but it only came with one and he had a mare trying to get them to send the extra GPU chips or refund. How we ever lived without buyer protection back then I don't know.
Excellent video. I remember thinking how cool the mana balls reflecting in the water looked.
ALT + S - save game on level, ALT + L - load game on level. Damage castle on one level - SHIFT + D
this game is on my wishlist now. thanks!
I remember getting the Intel jingle when we played this on the family P60.
+azz666 Yup! It does that if it detects the presence of a Pentium processor and subsequently turns on all of the detail settings! ;)
This game blow me away back in the day... even today I consider it a great game and dont know why it wasnt remade or with new tech making something similar.
The "short" answer is the game's creator, Peter Moleneux, got pretty miffed at EA for rushing the release of both the first AND second Magic Carpet games, resulting in both having memory leaks which led to frequent crashes as well as incomplete spell effects in the second game. The first game ultimately got patched up with Magic Carpet Plus and the memory leaks were fixed, but the second one never got that treatment as Moleneux was so mad about the ordeal with EA he left not long following to form Lionhead outside of EA's influence. My best guess is EA still owns the Magic Carpet rights and Moleneux's feelings are likely too bitter to want to get the license back from them. :P
@@Pixelmusement Thanks for the detailed answer.
So... I will try to program my own magic carpet then lol
You know, I wasn't interested in this game back in the day because I thought flying around on a magic carpet looked really silly. Now I feel silly for missing out.
Random dot sterio mode.... Wow..... just wow. Now I want to see a video of this game in that mode. I feel like it would be a trip!
I had the Floppy disc version on the Gateway 2000 PC back in the 90s, it came as a package with the PC. It ran so bad and I had no clue what I was doing! I remember clearly freaking out playing this game, it was scary at the time 😅
+Zidan Alag ...I had no idea there was a floppy disk release of this game... I did a search just now and actually did find a low-resolution image with enough detail to prove it exists, so... hunh... :o
In the year 2019 Magic Carpet is still the best sandbox game in the world. What's wrong with this world if the game from the year 1994 is the best in his genre?
I loved this game back in the day.
Interesting. I've heard about these games before, but they didn't appeal much to me. But now I'll wishlist the digital release.
I remember playing this game when I was very little. wasn't very good at it but I was entertained by my oldest cousin who beaten the game dozen times. He always had to ask my mother permission before getting on just because she had important files. (same for me and my brother) So yeah my mother had a really damn good computer for a lot of things and to this day I still don't know what they were. A lot of I believe has to due with her being a banker for 30 years.
Great video thank you for reviewing
This game gives me vibes of "Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child" on Amiga and Atari ST. They even share the inconsistent framerate. 🤭
How did you manage to run it so smoothly?
I am having a lot of troubles running it in DOSBox - in SVGA mode I can't get more than 10 FPS. Funny enough, Magic Carpet 2: The Netherworlds runs flawlessly in SVGA mode, apart from somewhat frequent crashes.
+Krešimir Cindrić One important note about the SVGA support in both games is that Magic Carpet 2 can use the VESA Linear Framebuffer, which speeds up SVGA memory access dramatically. The original can't do this, so its SVGA support is slower in general. If you can't get a decent framerate out of the original given the DOSBox settings I recommend then your computer may simply not be powerful enough to handle it. One thing you can try doing is turning off the various detail features in-game using the function keys, but that's about it. Also double-check that your graphics drivers are set to disable vsync with DOSBox as DOSBox can have some weird speed issues if it gets vsynced.
Thanks for the info, it helps a lot!
Actually I can list probably 20 PS1 games I can crash on demand. Not coincidentally they are PC to PS conversions.
Hey, what do you think about testing an indie game called Strayspells? Its on windows.
+JoarMusic I'm way too busy with things to be able to do any solid testing on stuff nowadays. :/
No problem. Have a nice day. :)
I never really knew what to do in this game. So weird.
"Needs a modern sequel and remake..."
"Published by EA."
Well, there goes that chance.
+Tyrian3k Yeah pretty much. I've seen a couple spiritual successors which are OKish and I've even mused about making my own, but there's yet to be a successor which really captures the feel the original Magic Carpet games had. :P
Terrain deformation and 360 flying combat in 1994? Fuck.
He doesn't mention it in the video, but it also has motion blur. Of course, it makes it really hard to tell what's on screen (especially if you set it to the maximum setting, which basically makes it look like that Final Fantasy Type-0 mess a few years ago), so you generally wanna keep it disabled, but that's still incredibly impressive for 1994, it really didn't become common until almost 10 years later with more advanced PS2 games.
One of hundreds of PC games I have, but have never played. It looks much less straightforward than Doom, so together with its higher system requirements, it's not hard to see why it didn't sell nearly as well.
such a great game
Excellent game!
Lol no need to pay $15+, just get it for $5.99 on gog.com (frequently goes on sale for $2.39 if you watch for it).
+Giga Bowser Yup! I put a link in the video description awhile ago. This is a pretty old ADG ep so Magic Carpet wasn't available on GOG when I first made it. :B
Yeah, I was wondering that. I didn't know exactly when it came out on GOG, but I expected as much.
MagicCarpet is still a best send box game. Unique control system, unique genre. Unfortunately, my dosbox does not works properly, so the game is too fast flying and i can't play it for this reason.
I remember playing the shareware version of this when I was a kid. Made me wanna puke, I got so disoriented. Just started playing it again here, after having gotten Magic Carpet Plus off of GOG. It was like that first time, all over again lol
Remake of Magic Carpet in VR. yeah baby!
I used to defeat the Wavern using meteorite and rebound
this game played perfectly ion a p100mhz with 8mb ram
+Grinx It was pretty much designed for those specs. ;)
This really neeeeds a remake,,,i im still under influence of mostic psychedelic world of magic carpet
+Millard I still have an idea for how to do a spiritual successor which I may attempt to make someday, but not anytime soon.
@@Pixelmusement There actually was a spiritual successor called Arcane Worlds. Its good but not as good as good old Magic Carpet
I bought this back when I had a 486-33DX and it *just* barely playable. Even the opening cinematic ran slower than the soundtrack. When I got a Pentium though, it was much more playable.
bought this back in the day, nice graphics but kinda weird gameplay.
Hypnotic kind of gameplay, drift away for hours playing this game.
Obligatory comment:
An EA game that's an unfinished, buggy mess that's rushed to market for $$? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
Back when this game was released you would be; EA was considered one of the leaders in gaming back then, built upon the concepts of computer gaming artistry, as demonstrated by the way they physically presented their earliest titles, and most of what they put out back then was extremely good. But... as the company grew their ideals and motivations kinda got more and more twisted; Magic Carpet was one of the first signs things weren't so hunky-dory over at EA anymore. :P
@@Pixelmusement I know. Hell, on of the first games I ever beat and that I bought with my own money was NFS3. For me, EA started going down the drain the moment they discontinued Westwood Interactive.
@@Pixelmusement Really? I remember EA being associated with hot garbage back in the 90's, and when the Playstation and Saturn arrived on the scene everyone was hoping EA and THQ would finally die so they'd stop polluting the industry with junk. They published more than they developed, and their logo was definitely not a symbol of quality.
Dark Castle, Sword of Sodan, Mutant League Football, Shaq-Fu? Not exactly the same level of excellence or artistry as Capcom and Konami.
If it wasn't for Fifa and Madden EA would have perished.
@@markg5480 EA goes all the way back to the 80s though, and back then, they were awesome. But yeah, as they grew things got a lot more corporate and a LOT more about money. By the early 90s, EA was still producing good games but people were starting to suspect things might be rotting under the hood, and then things just sort of went downhill slowly but surely as the rot festered. The thing is, EA never stopped making good games, I mean really, you don't get THAT BIG with that much money if people aren't buying/playing your stuff, but the corporate side of things there is freaking cutthroat now, and they're SO laser-focused on making money that if they don't like where a project is going or don't think it will be super-popular, they just cut their loses and either cancel it or rush it out the door; a practice they started just a little into the 90s.
@@Pixelmusement EA was just the publisher. The game development was purely done by Bullfrog. Doubtless EA might’ve pressured BF to release before it was ready, though there was at least one patch revision to fix level 50 et al.
Sega saturn 👌
+All Outta Gum I own the Saturn version of this game. I bought it specifically because I was still playing the original release on PC which crashed all the time so I was like, "A console version! Perfect! That should run rock solid!" ...except it locks up all the time too. :(
@@Pixelmusementi must remember it with rose coloured glasses. Was a terrific game tho.
This game actually bricked my grandparents computer
That seems... unusual... It's far more likely the game either exacerbated an existing issue which in turn caused the computer to brick, or that the compy was going to brick at that moment regardless of what program was being run in that moment, but then, I don't know the details and it's not IMPOSSIBLE, just incredibly unlikely. :P
@@Pixelmusement Hard to say. I was very young at the time and they never touched their "newfangled computer machine" but all I used it for was to try to play this game to the extent it would allow. Haha
@@Pixelmusement No, it’s impossible. What you said about faulty hardware being set off by the game is the culprit. If it wasn’t that game or application, it’d just be another one. If the game was indeed “bricking PCs”, this would’ve been reported & known as surely he wouldn’t be alone. This would’ve resulted in a mandated patch being released to avoid this hypothetical issue. Any time a game has done damage to PCs, it’s been both well-known & a catastrophe for the company (EG - Ruins of Myth Drannor).
Correlation doesn’t equal causation.
hated this game back in the day =|
The PS1 version if this game is actually very poor. Shame really because there's a lot to like about this game...
Well, i played the whole first part including Hidden Worlds addon without any crashes, not even in dosbox. So was Magic Carpet 2. For what i experienced a good old almost bug free game.