Captain Blood
ERE Informatique of France released Captain Blood originally for Atari ST in 1988, but Captain Blood was available in France since 1987. Captain Blood is an adventure game notable for its fractal-generated landscapes, icon-driven language interface and exceptional presentation and audiovisuals.
Captain Blood was designed by Philippe Ulrich, programmed by Didier Bouchon, drawn by Didier Bouchon and Michel Rho and composed by Jean-Michel Jarre.
The cut-down rendition of Jarre's Ethnicolor 2 of Zoolook of 1984 stands as some of the best ever title-screen music heard on ST/Amiga.
In assuming the role of Captain Blood players are tasked with searching for and assimilating clones of Captain Blood, whose genetic structure has been fragmented. Via his ARK spaceship and OORXX dropship, Captain Blood must explore the HYDRA galaxy and communicate with aliens in order to locate the clones.
On the ARK the galaxy is navigated via coordinate-based galaxy map and planets are viewed via Planet Vision and GeoPhoto Vision modes. Navigation of planet surfaces is presented in a real-time, wireframe fractal-generated drawspace. To rendezvous with aliens players fly the OORXX over planetscapes and weave through canyons. Players are sometimes forced to fly or hover at low level to avoid missile systems. Naturally, players need to turn the OORX and adjust its altitude to avoid collision with the landscape.
Communication with aliens is conducted via an icon-driven UPCOM interface; that is, there is no text-input from the keyboard. Instead, statements and queries are assembled by clicking on verb/noun icons in succession. In their responses, aliens can inform or mislead.
Captain Blood Features
- 16-color 320x200
- 32,768 planets
- 12x alien species
- 5x clones (aka duplicates, numbers)
- 120x icon UPCOM comms
- Stereo sampled sound & digitized speech
- Real-time wireframe fractal planetscapes & canyons
- Fractal landscapes can be rendered on-command
- Increase/decrease altitude & direction of flight
- Tailorable ship speed
- Fly under missile radar in landscape mode
- Galaxy map with draggable coordinates
- Hyperspace warp special effect
- Destroy planet special effect
- Fridgitorium for transporting or disintegrating aliens
- Icon-based mouse control with hardware mouse cursor
- Draggable and auto-scrolling icon-bar
Captain Blood was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes.
Amiga Captain Blood is identical to ST Captain Blood; it is a direct port of the original ST version.
Captain Blood IBM PC MS-DOS 1988
ERE Informatique ported ST Captain Blood of 1988 to IBM PC MS-DOS 2.1 in 1988.
PC Captain Blood was programmed by François Lionet.
PC Captain Blood was distributed on 2x 5.25" 360K floppy disks and extracts and installs to hard disk drive via custom installer. The install size is 750K and consists of 57 files.
Indexes:
- Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
- Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
- The First REAL Amiga Game
- Best Amiga Games
- History of Computer Games 1976-2024 (Master Index)
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