This received 83% positive votes from a total of 199 back in early May this year.
This is an edited version of my posts from then:
I’ve only just finished playing the demo of this and was most impressed with it. Although there are a lot of Luxor clones around these days, this one has it all. There are three different styles of game play, Classic, Arcade and Action. Power ups to help or hinder you with the progress (although there are lots more positives than negatives) and great graphics as well. I’d recommend this especially to Luxor enthusiasts. The ball tracks weave their way around inanimate objects that cause your ball to bounce and even disappear under its own track where there are intersections. All of which add up to a great game. You can also use the sides of the playing arena and the objects to bounce the colored balls if you wish. :)
The option menu gives you the ability to change the screen resolution and create a windowed or full screen game. For slower computers, you can turn off special effects to help the game run better, then there’s the usual music and sound sliders, together with an on/off toggle for both. I love the sound effects, but not sure about the music. It’s fresh and reminiscent of an old time arcade, or silent film, so I don’t mind it; but it could get a little annoying after a while.
I give this game 7 out of 10 for breadth of game play and re-playability
There was several comments damming the game because of it being a clone of other games such as the Luxor series and Zuma, which I then posted:
In reply to one specific comment I replied: “you’re very unlikely to get anything original here or any where else because ‘virtually’ all games are a clone of at least one or more of the early commodore/Atari classics. Totally original idea’s are few and far apart”. Gumboy Crazy Adventures, Gish and the recently released Peggle spring to mind with respect to originality, (although someone pointed out, without giving any examples, that it was copied from an old arcade style game. I have since found something similar in Moleculous, but that’s the operative word, similar), however I doubt they would appear here because the first two have a limited distribution base and are award winning arcade games and; (however, I was wrong about Roboball, which I purchased as soon as it was released in February and was given away last week) All three are marvellous games, which I’ve already purchased. Gish has several free add-on levels and adventures as well as an editor, with a small fan site hosted on the developers site Chronic Logic. Just Google the other two if your interested. You get a Gumboy features game that isn’t time limited with the Gumboy Adventures demo, which basically gives you an overview of all that’s available in the game. One complete level.
You can read all 70 of the comments from the previous giveaway by following the link below:
http://game.giveawayoftheday.com/magic-tea/#
It seemed several community members had problems with mouse controls with this game. I posted another post in answer to this and have expanded on it today in the hope that if the problem persists, you will have several options to try and sort it out. I only go to this effort because I think the game is worth it:
For those who are having problems with poor mouse performance, try turning down the screen resolution and turning off the special visual effects, which can be found in the options menu together with the usual options. It’s not guaranteed to help, but it will take some work off the graphic card and CPU and may just be enough to enable your mouse to work properly. There is a large selection of screen resolutions to choose from the lowly 640 x 480 to 1680 x 1050. You may ask why are the lower ones required. Well for those with sight problems setting a lower resolution will increase the games apparent size on the screen. The periphery of the game boards are not actually required, so with some experimentation you could increase the visual size of the playing area to use all of the screens usable area.
There are other things you can do to improve you computers performance (without having to buy a new cpu or other hardware).
Although there are some excellent clones of this particular style of game such as those mentioned above as well as others such as Sparkle, if you don’t have any of then, this is a worthy version to have. There are enough differences (it would seem to me anyway) for this to be part of your games library even if you do have others like it. I would certainly recommend the latest luxor release Luxor 3, which has a variety of mini games within the main game as well as a shop to buy upgrades from the collected Egyptian style tokens that fall whenever you have accomplished something.
Check out the following Googled images of the game to get a better idea of what you are downloading:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=Magic+Tea&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
Unfortunately Alawar don’t sell this version yet, otherwise I would have posted the link to their catalogue, there’s no online version of this game yet.
http://www.mumbojumbo.com/game/game/82
I have to give this the best possible marks I can without going over the buy me mark (8), but that’s only because I’ve spent far too much on games over the past few years. So I give this a 7.5 out of 10.
Thank you Alawar and the Game Giveaway team for another great repeat. It’s much appreciated. :D
Helpful Hints:
1)
Improving the performance of your computer:
If you have 512Mb or more of RAM memory, you can increase system performance
by having the core system kept in memory.
1. Start Regedit
2. Go to the following Hive location………..HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive
3. Set the value to 1
4. Close the Registry editor
5. You will need to reboot the computer before the change takes place though
Or download the following registry file and just click on the file and follow the prompts. Be sure to create a restore point by going into the tools which are found in the Start/accessories menu usually:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/reg/disable_paging_exec.reg
2)
Defragment you drive by using windows own tool the disc defragmenter, which can be found via the start menu in the systems tools folder under accessories (usually) or get a proprietary defragmenter such as diskeeper, which I swear by as it keeps my computer virtually 100% defragmented.
3)
Disabling windows services that are not required can boost your performance and speed significantly, especially if you have a low to medium spec' computer:
http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm#services_disable
For many other windows based queries check out the computer guys web site, (which I discovered yesterday while looking for a particular problem to solve, it has a wealth of information and gives links to downloadable registry files for most of the changes you can make to your registry:
As always though, create a restore point before making any changes to your registry.
:)There are many helpful sites that can easily be found using a few key words and a good search engine when searching the net for useful tutorials, ranging from How To's, Effective use of Resources to Maintainance, Repairs and total rebuilds. Don't restrict yourself to one search engine either as they all have their good and bad points.