Blood Money Amiga 1989
DMA Design released the original version of Blood Money for the Amiga in May of 1989. Eight months in the making, Blood Money is the sequel to Menace of 1988. Blood Money is a multi-directional shoot 'em up notable for its two-player coop mode, professional presentation and sprite animations.
Amiga Blood Money was programmed by Dave Jones, its music was composed by Ray Norrish, its sound effects were composed by David Whittaker, and its graphics were drawn and animated by Tony Smith.
Blood Money displays a digitized HAM load-screen, plays sampled speech and features a digitized sprite-scaling intro with sampled music.
In Blood Money players undertake a "space safari" that spans four planets: Gibba, Grone, Shreek and Snuff. On Gibba players control gunships, on Grone submarines, on Shreek jetpack-men and on Snuff spaceships. The object of Blood Money is to blast through and plunder the forces on each planet.
Each vehicle is moved about the playfield in eight directions. Planet landscapes slowly auto-scroll horizontally and to a lesser extent vertically, but players can face their vehicle and fire their weapons both left and right.
Destroyed enemies drop collectable coins that are used to purchase weapons and power-ups at equipment shops dotted about each of the sprawling landscapes. Blood Money weapons consist of skybound missile, earthbound missile, rear-fire missile and neutron bomb. Missile range and vehicle movement speed and energy shields can also be increased at equipment shops.
Due to the nature of its sprite system Blood Money does not employ the Amiga's hardware scrolling but rather its bit-blitter.
Blood Money was marketed as "simply the best arcade game you've ever seen", but Blood Money's sluggish performance disappointed me back in the day. Blood Money features a lot of on-screen objects but its collision detection is somewhat off and its scrolling and sprite-shifting are not smooth.
Audio-wise, Blood Money does not even combine sound effects with music: players must choose between sound effects or music. In addition, capturing a coin should have had a confirmation sound. Also, the font is too difficult to read on the patterned backgrounds, which adversely affects readability.
To be fair, Blood Money shifts around a ton of sprites and some of the sprites have many animation frames -- the walker-robots, for example, have 18-frame walk-cycles; not to mention the moving, rotating and gleaming collectable coins that shower the playfield -- thus, cutting down on sprite numbers, sprite sizes and sprite animation frames would most certainly have increased performance and made Blood Money more enjoyable to play.
Still, Blood Money sprites and animations are inarguably impressive for 1989.
Blood Money Amiga Technical Feature List
- 320x216 active drawspace
- ~9000x2000px planet landscape size
- Single-player or two-player coop
- 1 meg of graphics data
- 250K of music
- 64K of sound effects
- 100x144 pixel maximum sprite size
- 19 frame maximum on sprites (fighter jets on Shreek)
- 16 frames per second gameplay
- 50 FPS player sprite update
- 50 FPS joystick scan
Amiga Blood Money is a better game than I remember it to be. Overall, I give it 6½/10.
Blood Money Atari ST 1989
Wayne Smithson undertook the difficult task of converting Blood Money to the Atari ST based on the code of the original Amiga version. Released in August of 1989, Atari ST Blood Money lacks an intro, has weak audio and its scrolling and sprite-shifting are not as smooth as Amiga Blood Money, but Atari ST Blood Money stands as a well-ported replica of the original. ST owners could not ask for more. Indeed, considering the sprite-count and complexity of their animations, it is amazing that Bloody Money was successfully converted to the ST.
Blood Money IBM PC 1990
Tim Ansell of Creative Assembly ported Blood Money to IBM PC MS-DOS in September of 1990. PC Blood Money displays in 16-color EGA 320x200 and requires 551K of free conventional RAM.
Blood Money Commodore 64 1990
Mike Dailly of DMA Design converted Blood Money to the Commodore 64 in July of 1990.
DMA Design would go on to release Lemmings for the Amiga in 1991.
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