Blood Money

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Blood Money is the official sequel to 'Menace', a poor arcade shooter with ugly graphics and extremely crappy gameplay. Fortunately, Blood Money beats its predecessor in every aspect. The game's world is divided into 4 different planets and there are 4 different ways to fight. The first world is made of metal and you fly through it with a helicopter. The second one is a large sea world where you sail through with a submarine. The third one is a frozen world, where you pass through wearing a spacesuit and the last one is a volcanic world of fire where you fly using jetpacks. The whole weaponry you use can be upgraded through stations found in various places along the levels. In order to buy new goodies you must first collect coins after killing your enemies and spend the cash wisely. Enemies vary in every world, from small insects to even giant dragons. The game can also be played in a 2-players mode. Although a classic and famous shooter, Blood Money was never able to be one of the best shooters of the home computers era due to its high difficulty level and lack of innovation.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The PC graphics are good, with 16 colors on-screen on the EGA or the VGA mode (well, I saw no difference between those two modes!) and have nicely drawn foregrounds and sprites but fail to reproduce the original (Amiga) background details. Although the sprites move smoothly, the overall level of scrolling (background and foreground) suffers from frame rate drops here. Also, the PC sound features some "dull" sound effects and no in-game music at all (while the Amiga and the ST versions offer either music or sound effects) which is quite disappointing considering the potential some sound cards like Ad-Lib could show back in 1990.