Heavy on the Magick
I've wanted to write about this game for a while, I've been putting it off as it is such an amazing game, hopefully I can do my memories justice.
I've always loved adventure games and exploration games, far too much Enid Blyton as a child probably. But one day I bought a copy of Your Sinclair magazine and this was on the cover tape. My mind was about to be well and truly blown. Welcome to Heavy on the Magick published by Gargoyle in 1986.
Up until 1987 my gaming world was split into two sides, text adventures and arcade adventures. Text adventures gave me lots of detail and plotting and planning but not too much in the way of pretty graphics that move and arcade gave me lots of pretty graphics but not really lots of statistics and plotting. Being a greedy teenager I wanted both. Back in the early 80's there was Oracle's Cave which did offer a blend of the two styles but the graphics were early graphics and I was searching for something a little more sophisticated and with an easier interface than The Hobbit . Surely the Spectrum could produce such a thing?
Up until 1987 my gaming world was split into two sides, text adventures and arcade adventures. Text adventures gave me lots of detail and plotting and planning but not too much in the way of pretty graphics that move and arcade gave me lots of pretty graphics but not really lots of statistics and plotting. Being a greedy teenager I wanted both. Back in the early 80's there was Oracle's Cave which did offer a blend of the two styles but the graphics were early graphics and I was searching for something a little more sophisticated and with an easier interface than The Hobbit . Surely the Spectrum could produce such a thing?
Of course it could, meet Axil the Able , who has just upset a senior wizard in a pub and been transported to Collodon's Pile. His job is to escape, via spells, summoning demons and monsters and his own luck and skill. Here we come to the first great point about this game, you are given stamina, skill and luck at the start, but you can realign those skills , you can experiment with your character to make him a different person each game (remember this was 1986!) The user interface is very similar to the ZX Spectrum keyboard, press the first letter of the command and the command appears, use speech marks and you can talk to characters. This actually makes for really quite fast game play once you are used to this. No more typing words that aren't known. Plus add in the graphics....just look at that picture above , it was pretty much the game I had been searching for.
At the time I was devouring literature about ghosts and the unknown at an alarming rate ( growing up seeing and hearing the things made me curious about them!) So this game was very much in keeping with my interests at the time ( although I feel I should point out that at this age I had no idea about references to Aleister Crowley in the game.) Although the game is fiendishly difficult , actually seeing the character carry out his moves was a real novelty for me and I just kept coming back for more.
Add in Apex the Ogre , not the brightest button in the box , but still able to give helpful advice, plus you can dismiss him when you want (unlike Thorin in the Hobbit!) plus numerous strange monsters and it felt like a much more advanced experience than Oracle's Cave of just three years previous. I think perhaps we do forget just how fast technology was moving in the 80's ! Some reviewers claimed the graphics were blocky and unrealistic but I think they added a charm to the game. I still think today that the central picture being in monochrome created some very striking images. The longer you played the game the more it drew you in, learning to cast spells, finding doors with passwords, taking your character up a level. All things that we take for granted in today's games I was experiencing for the first time in Heavy On The Magick.
I think I loved this game so much as it had a similar feel to the Jackson and Livingstone Fighting Fantasty books , which I had just been introduced to as well. But despite all the summoning of monsters and spell casting the graphics still reminded you that you were still on your safe little ZX Spectrum, nothing bad could happen to you while you had a magenta screen!
My parents weren't aware I had this game, that was the joy of covertapes ! It was a magazine so it was educational as I was reading about the computer and I used to make sure that cassette came off the cover very quickly before any adult supervision happened. If Pac-Man was discouraged due to the 'ghost' factor I was pretty sure this game would be in the bin very quickly.
My parents weren't aware I had this game, that was the joy of covertapes ! It was a magazine so it was educational as I was reading about the computer and I used to make sure that cassette came off the cover very quickly before any adult supervision happened. If Pac-Man was discouraged due to the 'ghost' factor I was pretty sure this game would be in the bin very quickly.
As the years went by, Heavy On The Magick was replaced by more complicated games, initially DOS based Castle Of Winds and Stonekeep and then Doom and more recently Castlevania. But looking back none of them have that graphical friendliness that this game had. There was certainly magic associated with this game. It was the magic of that little black rubber keyed box once again. Taking ,albeit in a very minor form , a new genre of game for me and making it accessible.