Captain blood
The story to captain blood is quite a strange one, you are a games programmer but now you find yourself trapped in one of your own creations. Worse still five clones were made of you and each of them has taken some of your blood making you less human. The clones have hid themselves across the galaxy and now you must find them and regain your own blood as you are slowly turning into a machine. Travel across the galaxy questioning aliens about possible whereabouts of the clones before you are turned completely into a machine and you cannot escape your own game creation!
The game is played from your spaceship and once you start the game you are facing a random planet in the huge galaxy. You can launch a small craft onto the planet at which point you must navigate across canyons and mountains before you reach something of interest. The flight sequence is done using a 3D terrain renderer and altough it has only wireframe graphics it still captures the feel of flying. After navigating the terrain with the help of a handy locator device that tells you where to go you are most likely faced with an alien that you can question. Questionning is done with a unique system of short phrases that you can construct yourself from simple words. You end up with some broken english but enough so that you can understand what the alien means. What you want from him are coordinates for a planet which might hold information about one of your clones of maybe the clones themselves.
Captain blood contains things that were never seen before in a game such as the fractal terrain generator which gives mountains and canyons a curved organic look instead of the square and triangular look that other simulations had. The communication system is also unique with pictures representing the words that you can use to make up a sentence. However the game does have it’s faults as there is a lot of repetetive gameplay, the main goal is to simply gather coordinates from an alien for another planet at which point you travel there using your galaxy map and then you must find the aliens living there and go over the whole thing again. There aren’t many other things to do but you can blow up an entire planet which serves no real purpose other than to satisfy your own pleasure. If there would be more variation to the game then it might have been much better but the uniqueness of the game, especially at the time of release, makes it worth trying out.
Overal rating: 7/10
This game was released for many different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1988. The fractal graphics are slightly more detailed because of the extra processing power. |
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1988. Almost completely the same as the C64 version. |
| C64 | Released in 1988. The fractals aren’t very detailed at times but gameplay is all there. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1988. Graphically the least version but gameplay is all the same. |
| Others | These versions are not available. Atari ST released in 1988. DOS released in 1988. |
| Date added | Feb-18-2006 19:23 |
| Name | Captain blood |
| Developer | ERE informatique |
| Publisher | Mindscape |
| First released | 1988 |
| Genre | Action |
