Magic Carpet (Every FPS Ever Made)
1Magic Carpet is a first-person perspective game, in which you are a mage who flies on a, well, magic carpet and casts spells. The game has 50 levels, called "worlds"; each of those is set in a sea terrain with several mountainous islands. Your goal on each level is to amass enough mana within your castle to "restore the equilibrium" within the world. Once this happens, you can head to the next level.
To collect mana, you have to find it (it is represented by golden spheres) and cast a specific spell to make it "yours". To collect this mana, you have to use a special spell to raise a castle of your own out of the ground. A balloon will appear over the newly created castle; it will proceed to fly around the level and collect "your" mana. Initially, your castle will be small and won't be able to hold much mana, so you'll have to keep casting the "castle" spell at it to make it bigger.
The levels typically have monsters and rival mages in them. Not only they can hurt you with their attacks, but killing them is often necessary, as upon death they will release some of the mana you need to complete the level. To attack your enemies, you have a variety of spells at your disposal: fireballs, lightning bolts and meteors.
There are also many other spells available to you - they allow you to heal yourself, surround yourself with a protective shield, teleport around, summon a skeleton army, or even modify the terrain by creating volcanoes and splitting landmasses. Not all spells are available to you from the beginning, though.
Throughout all the levels, you are on your flying carpet, which can move in 3 dimensions. You can bring up a top-down map at any time.
Developed by: Bullfrog Productions, Ltd.
Published by: Electronic Arts, Inc.
Released In: 1994
Trivia
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One of the reasons Magic Carpet didn't sell well was that many gamers thought it was just a ripoff of DOOM, even though they are completely different. Bullfrog unintentionally fostered this idea with a series of ads they ran for Magic Carpet, which contained hooks such as "BFG = BFD". The BFG is DOOM's strongest weapon, and BFD is an acronym for "big f***ing deal".
Bugs
The original release of Magic Carpet contained a bug which meant you could not complete level 50. This was later fixed with a patch and was rectified in all re-releases.
Engine
Magic Carpet had what was perhaps the best graphics engine of that time. The engine features, among other things:
Dynamically lighted, gouraud shaded, changable ("morphable") landscape.
Scene reflections in the water
Distance fog
Transparency effects, such as the transparent "HUD".
Missing levels
Magic Carpet does not contain all of the 50 levels described in the manual. The missing levels are: 9, 18, 29, 34 and 40.
References to the Game
The game made several appearances in the Australian soap Neighbours, as the Kennedy family owned it and were frequently seen playing.
Technology
Magic Carpet was one of the first games to support 3D viewers/glasses in many different configurations. You can use virtual reality headsets, red/blue glasses... the program will even generate a realtime random dot stereogram!
The first game to be enhanced for the then-new Pentium processor (as advertised proudly on the front of the box). Bullfrog recommended a P75 as the minimum system requirement, although the game ran on 486 processors and was playable enough on a 486DX/100.
3rd-person view of the main character
Early version of the game actually shows the main character on a carpet in 3rd-person view as opposite to 1st-person view in the final game.
DOS
Business Model Attribute Image Commercial
Minimum CPU Class Required Intel i486
Minimum OS Class Required Attribute Image PC/MS-DOS 5.0
Minimum RAM Required Attribute Image 4 MB
Media Type Attribute Image 3.5" Floppy Disk, Attribute Image CD-ROM
Minimum CD-ROM Drive Speed Required Attribute Image 1X (150 KB/s)
Video Modes Supported SuperVGA, VESA, VGA
Sound Devices Supported Adlib, General MIDI, Pro Audio Spectrum, Roland MT-32 (and LAPC-I), Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE32, Sound Blaster Pro
Input Devices Supported Attribute Image Keyboard, Attribute Image Mouse, Attribute Image VR Helmet/Headset
Controller Types Supported Analog Joystick
Multiplayer Options NetBIOS
Number of Offline Players Attribute Image 1 Player
Number of Online Players 2-8 Players
Miscellaneous Attributes Attribute Image 3-D Glasses
You Can Buy Game Here: https://www.gog.com/index.php/game/magic_carpet