Captain Blood

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Captain Blood was originally designed and released for the Atari ST, having wonderful graphics, sound effects and awesome intro music. You play the role of a games developer, trapped inside his own computer game (quite original huh?). Inside this game, Captain Blood was cloned into 5 different species. Now you must travel across space, visit various planets and discover the rest of his clones in order not to let him transform into a machine forever. You must correspond with a variety of aliens and gain their trust. The communication with the alien species can be accomplished via an icon-based interface known as UPCOM. The UPCOM consists of around 150 different icons, each representing a different concept. As each alien race discovered speaks its own language and reacts differently, you must learn how to negotiate with them by mastering the UPCOM concepts, in a style that suits each race. Captain Blood is a really unique formula, a well executed game that sports some nice graphics, an impressive music and great action and strategy

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The MS-DOS version runs only in EGA/Tandy graphics mode. The graphics are pretty good and close to the ST version with up to 16 colors on screen. Note that the color palette is mostly based on blue shades but when you warp into other planets, you see multiple colors flashing on the screen. This particular scene looks way better on the Amiga and the ST as both versions use fractals to emulate the high speed (which looks more impressive). Back in 1986, most PC-compatible users owned a CGA machine, so people played the game in a 4-color CGA-mode (We have side-by-side the CGA and EGA/Tandy screens for comparison). As for the game's sound, Captain Blood was too old to support sound hardware on the PCs and thus the sound on this version is very limited and "beepy"! Comparably, the Amiga and ST versions feature sampled sound effects and speech while the intro music is in one word fantastic (a cut version from Ethnicolor, composed by Jean Michele Jarre).