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 game is pretty good and the Atari ST version is almost identical to the Amiga and Acorn Archimedes! It uses 16 colors on screen with nicely drawn backgrounds. The sprites are well animated, having though a few frame-rate background scrolling problems at times (much like the PC version). The ST sound is very good too, featuring a nice funky intro tune and impressive in-game sampled effects but both of lower quality compared to the Amiga and Archimedes versions.