Slightly Magic - Potassium Frog Ltd

[RiotingSpectre]

This thread is for the discussion of Slightly Magic. (note to developer - send me a private message if you would like to edit this thread)

He's back! Slightly returns in an authentic remake of the original classic arcade adventure.

‘Slightly Magic does what few other games do. It takes a garbage truck full of fun and makes daily deliveries!’
89% Sinclair User

‘The graphics and presentation are excellent too – full of colour and some nice bits of animation… All in all, Slightly Magic is, well, absolutely ‘magic” Your Sinclair 94%

Your Sinclair Readers voted Slightly Magic one of their Top 100 Games of All Time!

[anatomality]

Anyone try this? I'm kind of curious... The colors . love dem

[Pat1986]

there is a demo out that you can try. its decent. the controls are kind of confusing.

[anatomality]

I'll try it out tomorrow for sure, it keeps catching my eye

[doki]

I was considering making a thread on this myself. I recognised this game the second it hit Discover. Let me explain about the colours…

At risk of going off topic… whilst NES was a walkaway success in the US, us lucky Europeans had a lot of choice in the 8-bit era not only with the Sega Master System (with all its PAL exclusives), but the computer market exploded with the Spectrum, Commodore, Amstrad CPC etc computers. A lot of developers (Potissium Frog probably included) would say that the Speccy was a unique computer to work for, due to the graphical quirks such as only six colours apart from black and white to play with. As a young lad of around 8 years old, I got a Spectrum for Christmas and found out that anyone could learn to program and create and distribute games for it (sound familiar?), Slightly Magic was one of the games I remember playing and thinking 'I wish I could make something like that'. It's a great mix of platform and rpg and is kind of 'cute' in a similar way to Clarc, I guess.

Slightly made great use of limited colours back in the day and it's nice to see its creators have kept it as authentic as possible yet sorted out glitches such as colour clash and flickering (search for Spectrum colour clash!)
The game is pretty much as I remember it- I found the control scheme a bit weird with 'Y' to jump, 'U' to crouch but I think that's down to the dev getting carried away with a modern controller in his hands and wanting to make use of all these lovely buttons that weren't available on retro joysticks (the spectrum ones had one button). I got used to it after about 2 minutes, mind.

I'll keep coming back to this one, I hope to play through the entire commentary soon as i find this a fascinating feature, especially as the dev, Colin Jones is a childhood hero of mine. And before people think 'blow it, I'll just download a rom', you're wasting your time. Codemasters are very on the ball when it comes to piracy and plus you'd be missing out on the full Slightly Magic package that I feel only the OUYA offers. I hope the developer continues to build for OUYA (apparently there's a plan to complete a trilogy), I'd would love other Codemasters developers get behind the OUYA too.

If you're curious to see what some of us Brits were playing back in the early 90s, check this out! This brings back so much nostalgia to me :-)

[Another World]

I've just posted my review of this game over at GBAtemp.net.

http://gbatemp.net/review/slightly-magic.206/

-Another World

[doki]

Very solid and fair review. I agree completely, the little tweaks are enough to enhance the original, and the controls annoyed me at first (Y to jump!?), but like I say, I think the dev got a bit happy with having so many buttons at his disposal while he used to make do with one! Is it me or is the OUYA version easier than the original? I think the collision detection is better. I've completed it with and without commentary now, started doing speed runs because I'm not ready to put it down! :-)

As well as your informative and thoughtful review, I'm interested to hear the thoughts and opinions of people who approach this game cold, without prior knowledge of Slightly or its Spectrum heritage? (ignore my lat post, then. Lol!) As an OUYA gamer, I wonder what I'd have thought at seeing this strangely coloured title appearing on my Discover screen without that 'kick' of nostalgia that came with it in my case? I'm surprised it's only got six votes; do people not like the demo?

[Steven W. Hunt]

Having watched pretty much the entirety of Stuart Ashen's video catalogue, I've become quite familiar with the Zed-Ex's unique graphics quirks. As such, I'm definitely not going to have that nostalgia trip from this, but I'm going to look into this regardless due to not ever having experienced anything like this palette-wise myself.