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, programmed and drawn by Tony Crowther, aka Ratt. Captive's music was composed on Soundtracker by Chris Crowther aka SuperCC. [1]
Captive is a flip-screen cRPG and 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; better even than Chaos Strikes Back of 1989.
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 map rendered in real-time. First, the player clicks on a destination (a planet or a moon) to set a flight path for the Swan. 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 in the vicinity of the base.
Once they have touched down the droids explore and battle primarily in dungeons beneath the surface, sealed by airlocks with entrance codes. Within such fortress-mazes the droids solve puzzles, negotiate elemental hazards and battle hordes of monsters as they pursue their primary objective, which is to procure a probe and destroy generators with explosives. Once the droids have procured a probe and 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. The probe is then 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 and hit points, 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 of 24.
Dexterity modifies to-hit and damage, Vitality modifies dodge 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).
Droid arms and armor can be repaired by merchants and their energy can be recharged at power-sockets mounted on walls. As well, droid components can be upgraded and droids can gain abilities via attachables such as dev-scapes and optics devices, which show up on video display units (VDUs) that can be toggled on and off. 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. [2]
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 vector map or to the environment and vice versa (except in the case of probe to holamap). Money-bags can be stacked. Items don't just have icons but also assume placeable-appearances when positioned in the gameworld, 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. Likewise, mobs of enemies can be lured into doorways and crushed. The door will open and close repeatedly, crushing each member of the mob, one by one. During difficult combat sequences crushing the crap "for free" is rather satisfying, indeed. However, the money bags dropped by the victims may also be crushed by the door.
Damaged droid legs reduce movement speed to a crawl (lagging input). Likewise, rate of attack is greatly reduced by damaged droid weapons. In such cases we grit our teeth and crawl back to a merchant, hoping not to encounter aggro.
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 ladder shafts and bob around in water. In addition, flying foes are drop-shadowed. These are small things, but they are appreciated.
One of the coolest mechanics and graphics-effects in Captive -- indeed, in computer-game history -- involves the fire hydrants, which are interactable placeables mounted on the floor of some bases. When a fire hydrant is turned on water progressively floods the base, spreading across the floor, pouring down ladder shafts, setting off mines and immobilizing mechanical enemies. The effect is incredible for 1990.
Real-time flooding of levels was also employed by Flood of 1990.
Amiga Captive displays in 32-color 320x200, but its active drawspace is only 144x112. 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 as well as an STE version.
If I were to be allowed a couple criticisms I would say that there are no footstep sounds and the UI is largely silent. Indeed, audio is Captive's only weakness.
Overall, I give Captive 9/10. On the Atari ST and Amiga, Captive is a masterpiece.
Captive manual: 35 pages.
Captive Builds
Crank Brawling to 24 on your droids ASAP. Set your toughest two droids as front-line. Spend experience points after each encounter because you want the Wisdom boosts that increase XP yield. Bash everything on Butre and Pelphi to death, dual-wielding fists / Battle Gloves Super.
You will need to have built your droids towards Handguns and Rifles by mid-Meestre. By mid-Meestre, the front-line droids should be dual-wielding BGS, and the back-row droids should be dual-wielding handguns.
- Butre: Farm Ratt messages for wealth accumulation. Purchase 4x Battle Glove Super and as many Optics and Dev-scapes as possible, especially Dev-scape Basic: Anti-grav and Dev-scape II: Shield. Never purchase or equip Dev-scape V: Power Sapper.
- Pelphi: Purchase 2x Dev-scape II: Shield in readiness for R2-D2s on Meestre. Otherwise, you probably won't survive. I also recommend purchasing Tindron Super armor.
- Meestre: Purchase handguns and Dev-scape Basic: Anti-grav in readiness for Floaters on Triekos. Otherwise, you probably won't survive.
- Triekos: You will need Dev-scape II: Shield to survive. Purchase Rifles and Coppator Super armor. Triekos is the first base to feature fire and water hazards.
- Salstee: You will encounter your first fire hydrants in Salstee. Get your droids rifled-up for the more heavily-armored mobs. Don't leave Salstee unless your inventories are full of devices and ammo for your Super Rifles, Hunters and Shotties. Anti-gravs and Shields are mandatory in Seavy. Droid Attributes should be in the range of 50-60 and their Rifles skill should be maxed.
- Seavy: Droids should be wielding Super Rifles and wearing Coppator Super armor. All Droids should have maxed Rifle skill because you're going up against some extremely heavy-hitters now. If you haven't learned how to play Captive like a boss yet, you will now. Start cranking the Automatics and Laser skills in Seavy.
Note how the difficulty increases greatly in the first few bases. Pelphi is much harder than Butre, Meestre is much, much harder than Pelphi, and Triekos can actually be impossible if you did not thoroughly explore Meestre.
Don't leave a base until you have searched it thoroughly and acquired all valuable items (cash, devices, explosives, probe, arms, armor and ammo). Also, don't leave a base unless your droids are in tip-top shape (fully healed, recharged and repaired).
By the time you are done with a base, you should be so familiar with its layout that you don't need the Optics II: Route Finder to find your way out.
Sell all maps, messages and clipboards after you have read them. Leave bread crumb trails if you can't remember where you have been (drop objects on the ground).
Captive sometimes feels easy but you can get yourself into some real jams. One important thing to remember is that damage is costing you money in repairs. Energy is free, but damage is money. You need to mitigate damage as much as possible or you'll run out of cash and enter a fail state.
Damage is mitigated via positioning, timing, shields, crushing the mobs in doorways and inflicting massive damage in short order.
Captive IBM PC MS-DOS 1992
Mindscape released Captive for IBM PC MS-DOS in 1992 -- two years after the original ST/Amiga versions. The PC version of Captive was programmed by Anthony Taglione aka TAG, who programmed Bloodwych of 1989.
Graphics-wise, the PC version of Captive 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.
PC Captive also features an intro that was drawn and animated by Pete James. PC Captive supports Sound Blaster, AdLib and Roland audio.
The Amiga version has better sound effects and more polished bitmap and vector graphics than the PC version (which is a port), but the PC version features several tracks of in-game music that can be played simultaneously with the (inferior) sound effects. Since different tracks play during exploration and battle, players can get advanced warning of approaching enemies (because the track suddenly changes, alerting the player).
On the PC droids are fully recharged to 100% by power sockets in one action, but on the Amiga the action usually needs to be repeated. However, the PC version's combat is much harder than the Amiga version's combat. I warmed up on the Amiga version before playing the PC version in the exact same way -- the PC version is much harder.
[1] The Ultimate Soundtracker of 1987 by Karsten Obarski of EAS.
[2] Anti-grav Dev-scape Basic (PC version):
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