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Captive Amiga 1990 Mindscape Tony Crowther


Captive Amiga 1990



Mindscape released Captive for the Atari ST and the Amiga in 1990. Prequel to Tony Crowther's Liberation Captive 2 of 1993-94, Captive was designed and programmed by Tony Crowther, aka Ratt. Captive is a flip-screen cRPG.

Captive is a futuristic clone of FTL's Dungeon Master of 1987. However, being a clone that came out three years later, Captive is most certainly more advanced. Indeed, as it pertains to designwork and coding, Captive is inarguably the best flip-screen cRPG ever made.

In undertaking the role of Trill the object of Captive is to escape captivity on an spaceship by destroying generators that are found in bases on various planets. To achieve this goal while in captivity, Trill remotely controls the actions of four droids via an attaché briefcase computer.

Navigation of space is conducted via the "Swan" starship that moves about on a zoomable and truckable wireframe or vector "Holomap" rendered in real-time. First, the player clicks on a destination (a planet or a moon) to set a flight path for the Swan, which then makes its way there. Upon arrival the Swan begins to orbit the planet/moon. Next, the player clicks on the base on the surface of the planet/moon and clicks "Land" to have the Swan launch a droid-occupied lander, which touches down at the base.

Once on the surface the droids explore and battle primarily in dungeons beneath the surface, sealed by airlocks with entrance codes. Within such mazes the droids solve puzzles, negotiate elemental hazards and battle hordes of monsters as they pursue their primary objective, which is to destroy generators with explosives. Once the droids have primed the generators for detonation, destruction of the base is imminent and the droids must reach minimum safe distance or be taken out by the explosion; that is, the droids must escape the base interior and return to the lander, outside.

Naturally, the droids blast off from the surface and dock with the Swan that awaits them in orbit. A probe can then be launched in order to locate the next base to raid and destroy. The ultimate goal is to gain access to the space station.

Captive consists of thousands of missions and tens of thousands of bases to explore. In addition, there are 40 different enemies to encounter, 14 items to find and purchase, 23 weapons in seven tiers and ten armor types in nine tiers. Weapons include fists, melee weapons, firearms and explosives. Armor confers damage reduction, but inflicts power-drain when worn.

The quartet of droids are each constituted by three stats and nine skills. Droid starting stats are assigned when the droid chip is placed into the head socket and the droid is given a name, which the player types in. The stats are based on the characters in the droid's name. The maximum starting stats are scores of 15.

By fighting battles droids gain experience points (XP) which are spent on skills such as Brawling and Robotics. Skills are progressively unlocked. For example, a score of 9 in Brawling unlocks Swords and a score of 9 in Swords unlocks Handguns. The higher the skill level, the more XP is required to increase the skill to the next level. Arms and armor have skill level requirements. For example, in order to wield or dual-wield the Super Battle Glove/s the droid must have a Brawling score equal to or greater than 24.

Dexterity modifies to-hit and damage, Vitality modifies damage reduction and Wisdom increases experience-point yield, which is awarded in combat encounters. Each time a skill is increased, one of the three stats increases. Skills do not increase randomly in the save-scummable sense. The difference in power-progression between a low- and high-wisdom droid is noticeable (as is illustrated in the image of the bottom row in the above infographic).
 
Droids can be repaired by merchants and their energy can be recharged at power-sockets mounted on walls. As well, droid components can be upgraded. Moreover, droids can gain abilities via attachables such as dev-scapes and optics devices, which show up on video display units (VDUs). Devices confer anti-grav, maps, routes, radar and various readouts.

Here you can see the VDUs along the top and the drawspace and cluster of icons beneath them:


Anti-grav is called Dev-scape Basic. A droid equipped with anti-grav can fire at flying enemies, walk on ceilings and fall onto the floor above. That means Captive employs verticality.

Droid inventory is grid-based. Each droid can hold 20 items or item-stacks in its backpack and one item or item-stack in each hand. Items can be seamlessly transferred from one droid to another and from the droid to merchant, to holomap or to the environment and vice versa (except in the case of probe to holomap). Like-items can be stacked. Cameras assume a placeable-appearance when positioned in the action-window, which is cool.

Droids can incur damage by taking hits, bumping into walls, walking in water or fire or standing under raiser walls or in doorways when the door comes back down.

Captive is mouse-controlled via an intuitive and efficient cluster of icons most of which can be left- and right-clicked. An icon can be clicked even when an item is being held on the cursor. Icons also auto-ghost when they are inapplicable to context.

Players need to get good at pointing, clicking and using the keyboard because Captive's gameplay is at times hectic; so much so, that it could be easier play Captive cooperatively.

Items can fall down ladders and bob around in water. These are small things, but they are appreciated.

Amiga Captive displays in 32-color 320x200, but its active drawspace is only 146x114 [1]. The Atari ST version displays in 16-color 320x200. The Amiga version is noticeably superior in terms of audiovisuals, but in terms of the all-important gameplay the ST version is its equal.

Captive was distributed on 1x 3.5" 880kB DD diskette. It was not hard disk installable. Captive requires an ST/Amiga with just 512K of RAM. There are also 1 meg versions for ST/Amiga.

If I were to be allowed one criticism I would say that there are no footstep sounds and the UI is largely silent.

Overall, I give Captive 9/10. On the Atari ST and Amiga, Captive is a masterpiece.

Captive manual: 35 pages.

Captive IBM PC MS-DOS


Mindscape released Captive for IBM PC MS-DOS in 1992 -- two years after the original ST/Amiga versions. The IBM PC version of Captive was programmed by Anthony Taglione aka TAG, who programmed Bloodwych of 1989.

Graphics-wise, the IBM PC version can be run in 16-color EGA 320x200 or 256-color VGA 320x200 graphics modes, but VGA Captive does not take advantage of the VGA palette range because its graphics were simply ported from the 32-from-4096 color Amiga version. Naturally, the 16-from-64 color EGA version does not look as good as the 16-from-512 color ST version.

IBM PC Captive also features an intro that was drawn and animated by Pete James. IBM PC Captive supports Sound Blaster, AdLib and Roland audio.

The Amiga version is the definitive version of Captive.

[1]

Flip-screen cRPG active drawspace size comparison (in horizontal and vertical pixels):


Other:


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