During my 2024 summer holiday I took along my trusty Toshiba Libretto as my portable retro PC of choice as usual.

Unfortunately the replacement keyboard I bought a few years ago has developed the same flaw as the previous one, which was meant I've needed to bring along an external keyboard to use it. 

The poor laptop looks a little dwarfed sitting next to all of the peripherals! 

I decided to pick through my file system to find a suitable game for this year. For previous summer holidays I'd treated myself to long play sessions with Warcraft 2, Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior. 

What would be suitable for this summer?

Epic Pinball is alway great for a quick blast with it's silky smooth gameplay, vibrant graphics and solid sound - but it's not something I could play for a long period.

The same with the original GTA really, as much as I used to enjoy playing around with this one growing up it just doesn't really hold my attention enough for a long play

After a little more browsing (and trying to fire up games that wouldn't work, of course) I came across Magic Carpet

It was when I played this game growing up on a Toshiba 4700CT that I realised the laptop had a Windows Sound System chipset built in. Although I saw it had audio input and output ports, I didn't know how to get it's soundcard working prior to this game recognising it. 

After firing up the game I realised that this version had the Hidden Worlds expansion pack included. 

I've played the original games many times over the years, but had never tried the expansion before. Perhaps it was finally time? I must admit to being a little apprehensive, as Bullfrogs American Revolt add-on for Syndicate is hard as nails. What would this be life?

So what's it like? Bloody hard!

On entering the first world I picked up many of the spells within a few minutes, but also had to contend with a very aggressive CPU opponent who would constantly attack my castle!

It was only due to the inadvertent help from other enemies that I managed to take the wizard down and benefit from stealing their spells and mana a few times. 

As I played I constantly wondering about quitting, as it just felt relentless. I was just about surviving, but was I actually making any progress? Everytime I expanded my castle it would be attacked and shrink back down, time and time again.

Finally I actually had enough mana to use the lightning spell, which meant I could finally put up a solid defence against that bloody wizard whilst also going on the offensive!

With the aid of some high level spells and a solid amount of mana I finally hit the tipping point and go on the offensive. I flew over to the enemy wizards large castle and repeatedly unleashed powerful attacks that smashed it down and blasted over a circle of mana that I quickly cast my possession spell on. 

The fighting was very intense but then I suddenly realised I'd done it. I'd killed the wizard whilst his castle had been destroyed, meaning he couldn't respawn. 

That was the hard part over, right?

Kinda... although I didn't have to worry about the constant attacks from the enemy wizard, the rest of the map was very happy to throw everything it could at me.

• Volcanoes (multiple)
• Dragons (multiple)
• Genies (multiple)

Plus basically every other enemy type repeatedly!

In the end it took me 40 minutes to battle through that level, which was the first of the expansion! Will I make it through the remaining 24? Unlikely! But it was fun to finally give the expansion a go