Asterix and the Magic Carpet (French: "Asterix Chez Rahazade"; German: "Asterix Im Morgenland"; Spanish: "Asterix En La India") is a 1987 arcade/adventure game by Coktel Vision, based on the Asterix volume of the same name. As in the comic book, you have to board a magic carpet to get to India and rescue a princess before her time is up.
This game was also published for the Amiga, Atari ST, C64, Thomson TO8, and PC. Presumably, according to the packaging, the game has been published in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, but at least for the CPC version, there seem to be only dumps for French, Spanish, and German.
Gameplay is a mix of graphics adventure and Pacman-like arcade sections. The (primitive) graphics adventure part consists of selecting a character on screen with a cursor to let him talk; sometimes there will be two choices of text. During the voyage, occasionally the carpet will lose altitude (e.g. because Obelix spots wild boars) and this will often lead to arcade sections. These take place in a maze where Obelix moves back and forth in a straight line. You (as Asterix) try to lure you enemies towards Obelix who will then crush them. Also, there may be collectibles like food in the maze.
The main problem of gameplay is that it seems to be fairly random. Whether you make to your intended destination or crash into the sea and have to start over seems to be depend more on luck than on "correct" choices in the adventure section or successful completion of the arcade sections. And on the CPC, loading of graphics from disc is fairly slow which makes having to start from the beginning even more frustrating. (Not to mention you have to turn over the disc too.)
At least the graphics look fairly nice on the CPC; the Asterix comic book palette works very well in CPC colors, much better than the C64's graphics. Some of the character portraits in the upper left corner are hilariously mangled by MODE 0 resolution but other than that the graphics are fine during the adventure parts. (The arcade stuff does not look as good unfortunately.)
All in all, a nicely presented Asterix game on the CPC with weird, slightly frustrating gameplay that makes you wonder if anyone has ever managed to complete this game.
Coktel Vision used a similar gameplay approach in another comic book adaptation, Blueberry (1988).
"Rome, sweet Rome"
And we've crash-landed again…
As always, the pirates are happy to see us.
In a maze aboard the pirate ship
We've made it to the Acropolis.
Links
- Asterix and the Magic Carpet at CPC-Power
- Asterix and the Magic Carpet at the English-language Wikipedia