Magic Boy

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Hewlett, a young wizard, is trapped into a basement where the grand wizards assortments of magic creatures are kept. Those creatures escape on the grounds surrounding the Sorcery School and now you have to scour the landscape and return them back to the basement.
The game is split into different worlds like the Sand Land, Wet World, Plastic Place and Future Zone, each of which is progressively more difficult than the previous. Each level is divided into a number of stages, giving a total of 64 different sections.
To complete a level you must successfully stun all of the creatures, put them in your bag and get them back to the place they escaped. You have to do this quickly though, as each creature will only remain stunned for a few seconds before recovering its composure and will start to hunt you down again. Most of the levels are upwardly scrolling business, and most of the time the vest tactic is to work your way from the bottom to the top, grabbing the creatures as you go. In some later levels though, you have to plan your route more carefully, as some platforms disappear making it impossible to reach certain areas. Fortunately, you can restart a level at any time without losing a life, which is a pretty innovative feature.
Apart from the creatures, which will instantly kill you, there are several other hazards like ice platforms (that will cause you to slide around uncontrollably), sticky blocks (that can slow you down preventing you from jumping), toxic pools and more.
Magic boy is an ordinary platform game, offering a rather simple (but addictive) gameplay set in a very colorful and smoothly scrolled 2D world.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the DOS version, look great and support EGA, Tandy and VGA graphics hardware. But all screens have up to 16 simultaneous colors, even on VGA, in contrast to the Amiga and ST that have way more colors. The differences are mainly spotted at the background colors. The screen scrolling and the sprites' animation are really good, the backgrounds are well designed and all the monsters are imaginatively created in a cartoonish style.
To the game's sound, DOS version includes a few (rather irritating) tunes and sound effects (via AdLib or Soundblaster hardware) but of low sampling quality.