This game really is magic!
With that said, I loved this game when it came out in 1994 and still play it today in 2008. Ths game is simply at heart, shoot things and gather points (mana) to build your castle. The graphics cannot compare those of the current genre but still flying around on your carpet is an experience.
You start off in a basic land we're your given a couple of spells, this is where you need both hands, to press your function button whilst controlling with your mouse or keyboard. Fly around and shoot a couple of innocent looking caterpillars. They explode leaving behind some nicely gold coloured balls. These will vary in size depending on their worth. They will roll down hills and into holes. Once you gained enough, you can build your castle. The balloon will then come out and pick up these balls and take them back to the castle. Again once enough mana is collected to can build your castle to the next level. As the game progresses you'll get more spells which are weapons, defensive, teleportation and other special ones. You'll eventually encounter more players, upto 8, which are different colours. In a world of mana everyone's on their own and must change the mana to their own and stop their balloons from pinching yours. Your enemies are just not the other players but beasties that can have much more power than you to start with, e.g the flying nightmare which will kill you on sight. Your conquest of the land will stop when you've collected enough mana.
There's a 100 levels to complete and there's another version of the game, Magic Carpet Plus, that's has more levels but ultimately the same but with much harder levels. Its a shame that the developer never released a level editor for this as you could go nuts building your own lands. That said, again ashame that LAN multiplayer was not even around in these days and was a function never introduced.
The graphics aren't anything exciting anymore, its purely gameplay for this one, you can choose different modes, 3D if you've got some red/blue glasses or the mind altering magic-eye mode, which will give you the worst headache your ever likely to experience. The sound is well sound blaster 8-bit quality so don't go fiddling your card settings cause there's nothing there in the rear channels.
Just grab your mouse and get ready for an addictive game if you can see past the graphics.
One of my all time favourites.. 9.5, took off .5 cause it crashed once when I was playing one of the hardest levels and almost had finished it.. So there!
Just kidding its worth a 10!!!