Magic Pockets

 

 

Amiga 1200, Magic Pockets (1991) game

Why do I do this to myself? I've had a run of pretty average games in recent months so I should probably have gone for a certified winner or at least something that was relatively easy, but instead, on a whim I fancied playing this game as one of few that would actually work on a 1200. It's a 2D platformer of the kind you have to complete in one sitting, which means many sessions of getting just that little bit further before losing the limited lives and plunging all the way back to the beginning again! No passwords, no saves, not even infinite continues as in 'Aunt Arctic Adventure,' just the long, hard, painful slog of trial and error... The way the lives work in this game is that you get five at the start of a level and if you lose them you have three continues. You can pick up baby bottles to refill one life or milk bottles which will max you out to five again, and if you can scrape by to the Exit you'll be refilled again at the start of the next level. And at every 100,000 points your lives also refill to maximum (and your weapon comes out faster and more numerously, be it whirlwinds, clouds, ice blocks or snowballs). But there's no way to increase the number of continues you have so you have to be very careful not to lose that last life because that really will set you back and lower your chances of progression.

Why am I going on about the lives? Because they're the gauge by which you measure how likely you'll get anywhere in the game - though the 100,000 point marker seems like an encouragement to go for as many points as possible rather than the shortest or safest route, there really is next to no incentive in that direction since you can't control when your life will be refilled, so you could easily 'waste' the achievement by reaching that many points when you've already got full lives, which is very annoying. I learned it's much better to simply play it safe, don't go out of your way in search of a high score, concentrate on preserving those lives as long as possible, keeping track of how close you are to unlocking more milk, and hopefully making it to the end of a level without using a continue. When I say route, there aren't really multiple ways through levels, it's pretty linear, but you can go off in slight deviations which may house more goodies, but unless you're in need of another life it's rarely worth the exploration and replaying levels over and over allowed me to determine the shortest route through each level making it slightly less of a chore to get through. According to the manual there is a way of doing something in the first level of each World which will warp you to the first of the next World, but I have no idea what it was you're supposed to do: I couldn't find any hidden passages in The Cave, I tried destroying every enemy in the level, but nothing I did made it apparent how to find this mysterious warp capability. I even got as many Transport Helmets as I could, and on the third was taken to a cave housing a single bronze chalice - I thought that would be it, but no, even then I never warped...

As it is, I got World 1 down to about fifteen minutes, which is five levels and a bicycle race against some blue rock ogres, though it didn't matter if you won that or not. The Jungle was much harder and took me around half an hour to get through the six levels there, but then you face this huge hairy gorilla in a boxing match and after forty-five minutes to get there he'd wipe me out in seconds so it was very demoralising to spend all that time with no reward. It was at this point I began to seriously question if I had a chance of beating the game if I found it so hard and time-consuming even to get to the halfway point and became quite disillusioned by it. I hate to abandon a game, especially for being too hard, but I was seriously wondering if I may have to. Fortunately I have a good temperament when it comes to repetitive tasks and eventually found a way to beat the gorilla: you can't really avoid his attacks so you just have to go all in and whenever you've been hit you have to run over while you have a few seconds of invulnerability to lay as many hits on him as you can, and it was only around nine before he was beaten. From then on I had hope I could eventually succeed, helped by World 3 being relatively easier. The Cave was easiest, as you'd expect from the first level, third World, The Lake I'd rank second (though you have to take it slow and keep your wits about you, especially when dropping down to a part of the level you can't see), fourth and final World, The Mountain I'd have said third originally, with Jungle being the toughest, but it took me so many attempts to clear Mountain it showed it really was the hardest, as you'd expect from a final World: times when you'd start a level and be unable to escape a snowman, or the final level proper where you have all manner of nasties and almost no way to escape!

When I finally did it, succeeded at one of the toughest games I've played, completing it, getting through that final section after the last level, bouncing past the evil snowmen, dodging the bubble as it pursued me to the final Exit, I thought I'd experience euphoria, since it had been almost exactly a month to the day I'd begun this game. Some games you play for fun, others you play for the challenge. This became 100% the latter and 0% the former - it didn't begin that way, but it was such a tough, unforgiving master that although I made progress over time, getting to later and later levels, it was an upward curve at the end that felt like climbing a literal mountain: I'd get to level 25, but then there was one more. I'd reach level 26 and suffer instant death after all the Bad Things (as enemies were designated - each World had it's most dangerous, the rock ogres in 1, the wasps in 2, the pearl-spitting oysters in 3, and snowmen chucking deadly snowballs in 4), swarm you and there's nowhere to go - until you realise the best tactic is to rush past them, accepting damage and then leaping up to the first platform, jumping off it to create the spin attack which will take out a few around you, then doing it again until you'd dispatched them all, carefully navigating what was otherwise a small, simple vertical level.

Even then it's not over, you have the final section of a walled off area with pits containing a Bad Thing in each, and the ledge between where another is, but if you wait too long the dreaded bubble comes for you with instant death (where in every other level it merely trapped you for a few seconds). So then you think you have to get through as quickly as possible, but no, there's a dead end, so what do you do? Ah, of course, you must create a Transport Helmet - to do that you need to kill a certain number of enemies which cycles through each power-up until you get a Silver Star, a quite unique system since you can go between simply shooting an enemy or trapping him within your full-power projectile, until you touch it and it turns into either sweets or power-up. You do the same until you can get a Gold Star and only then do you transport out to the last of the last areas with bouncing snowmen to deal with and a run to the Exit where all you're rewarded with is The Bitmap Kid standing over the four collected toys from each World to the sound of applause. Applause is nice, but not even a new piece of music over the scene? No end credits scrolling down? No message to tell you to turn off your computer and go to sleep, turn off your computer and go to sleep? No. Anticlimax isn't the word for it, but if I'm expecting too much (it is from 1991...), I was at least (and at last), relieved! Also from 1991: glitches such as falling down to a part of an earlier level you can't get out of... urk! Fortunately rare, though.

It wouldn't have been possible unless the game had been uncharacteristically kind: I only had two continues left (I thought I only had one), so was expecting to be finished, but for some reason, maybe because I scored to the nearest 100,000 points during that final section (though I don't know why that would make any difference because it didn't in any other level, other than powering up your projectiles, but for whatever reason...), it never took away another continue and it was down to that, and that alone, I was able to finally put this to rest after around twenty-seven years (it didn't take me that long, that's just the earliest record I have of playing it!), applying adult patience where childish attention span and lack of application denied me much progress back in the 90s. The infinite continues were entirely necessary, I found, because after more than two hours to reach the final section it would've been completely dispiriting to discover I'd have to work out the exact arrangement of kills in order to get my Silver and Gold Stars to unlock the Helmet and transport out of there. I don't know how many attempts I made, but it must have been almost an hour of experimentation until I finally hit on the correct sequence, since there were only a certain number of enemies so if you didn't get it right early on (I think it was something like kill first snowman, trap next enemy, repeat), you wouldn't be able to go through the power-up sequence. If you think you only had two or three bites at the cherry I don't know if even my saintly gaming patience would have stood having to be repeatedly stymied.

It reminded me of another Amiga title, 'The Legend of Kyrandia,' a Point-and-Click puzzler in which a particular puzzle relied on the most extreme trial and error of collecting items and putting them in the right order - not fun, a cynical way to extend a game's life by throwing in a ridiculously hard and time-consuming struggle. That's how this would have been - in that case I looked up the solution in an old Amiga magazine, in this I was fortunate the game had pity on me for no real reason, so maybe I could be said to have cheated (though I staunchly refused to look up the solution for this game, nor even the time-shortening shortcut that supposedly allows you to jump from the first level of each World to the next, which would've made it a lot easier), but I stubbornly refused to give in! It may have been because the specific disk I was using was a 'cracked' copy, so maybe they altered the code somehow (I had a legitimate copy, but unfortunately it was a bit glitchy and wouldn't let me get past a certain point so had to stick with the unofficial). I know when I first played it on this play-through, when I got to the second World, The Jungle, I was somehow awarded infinite continues, but I had no idea how I'd activated it since it never occurred again and I was forced into perseverance and finding the quickest way through each of the twenty-six levels.

This was yet another Amiga game I'd played occasionally when growing up, but had never got out of the second World (I wasn't even sure I ever made it to the Exit at the end of the first level until I checked past records!). I had much less patience and skill in those days and unlike most platform games I played on the system the main character was so lumpen and handled like a breeze block, clattering to the ground if you jumped from higher than one platform up. I came to regard the Kid's ability to fall from any height without damage (a rare choice in the genre, in my experience), as an essential tactic for success, especially since he becomes a weapon when flying through the air (unless you forget that when wearing certain power-ups, such as the diving helmet, he won't spin, leaving you more open to attack), and when he's clattering across the ground at the end of his fall, usefully taking out any enemies he touches. But he was still unwieldy to control, though I wouldn't say this was yet another game with issues of poor control, it just takes a little time to get used to the idea of using his pocket weapon to bounce him up in the air and turn him into a weapon himself. Having to replay the early levels so many times means you also become proficient at them, knowing exactly what best to do, and when, and actually the greatest threat to your lives is complacency and being in a rush to get through the areas you know as quickly as possible when a laidback, but alert approach is more likely to succeed.

What lessened the appeal back in the day was a complete lack of music in the levels, something I was used to in other examples of the genre (although, saying that, the best ever 2D platformer, 'Flashback,' mostly had no background music also), but I came to see it as somewhat useful as it is beneficial to hear the sound effects, such as when you launch your pocket weapon out into the unknown and hear it suck up an enemy or stun them, so you know there's a platform or an enemy offscreen. I'd still rather hear some jaunty tunes as I platform, but it wasn't as much of a put-off as it had been. The graphics are really the area where the game attracts - I just love that kind of pixel artwork and sprites, it's all very beautiful. Not that it was in any way spectacular, nothing like 'Flashback,' the pinnacle on the Amiga (in every way: control, music, effects, visuals, story), little more than functional, but still nice to look at and as always with these very old games that I never got very far with, a real pleasure to at last see later levels for the first time all these years after, connecting with a moment from my own gaming history of so long ago, touching on childhood in a new way. And that's the appeal of something like this. Not that in itself it's a good experience (though satisfying to beat), but that it takes you back. It would still be a better use of my time to play something I know I love, such as 'The Settlers,' but coming back around in later life and completing things I started, or played briefly or occasionally, gives a strong sense of closing the circle as I get older and the young me would no doubt be impressed and overjoyed to see himself succeed at something like that so many years in the future!

For that reason I don't give it the bare minimum of one star, even though there were times when I just wanted it to end - my palms were getting red from holding the Joystick, I wasn't even sure if the Fire Button would hold out and I'm sure the excessive use did make it less responsive the more I played, and even now I'm not entirely happy I had to rely on the game's uncharacteristic generosity in giving me so many chances at the end, nor that I didn't take the time to kill all the bouncing snowmen in the last moment since I just wanted to be sure of finishing for good and all, but like so many games you force yourself to spend time with and power through the hard times, I'm sure it will remain with me as a pleasant memory overall. But I won't be playing it in another thirty years with my no doubt arthritic hands.

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