Magic Pockets

STORY / GAMEPLAY
A young boy, known as the Bitmap Kid, has a pair of magic pants that contain pockets with an infinite amount of storage space, and therefore he stores all of his toys in his pockets. One day the creatures who live in his pockets decide to keep his toys for themselves and play with them, so the Bitmap Kid must go on a journey to retrieve his toys from the creatures. The game is a platform game with standard abilities of walking, jumping, and hurling items to defeat foes. There are four areas in the game; Cave, Jungle, River and Mountain areas, each of which is split into several stages including a bonus stage where the Bitmap Kid must outdo the creatures depending on what toy is to be retrieved - for example, the Bike is found in the Cave area, and so the bonus stage is a bike race against the creatures. Although interesting enough, I found the gameplay rather slow in all versions.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The MS-DOS version is good, supporting VGA graphics but with only 16 colors on each screen. Both backgrounds and sprites are very close to the Atari ST, Amiga and Archimedes versions, having only some minor and hard to spot differences. The sprites are well drawn too, having smooth animation. The only drawback is the scrolling, which sometimes suffers from frame-rate drops (also happens on the ST version). The sound is good, featuring the nice funky intro tune and several sampled sound FX during gameplay, provided that you own a Sound Blaster sound card.