Captain Blood

The game was original designed and released on Atari ST having wonderful, for its time, graphics, sound effects and music. You play the role of a games programmer who was trapped in his own computer game (!). Inside the game, Captain Blood is being cloned into 5 different clones. Now he must travel across space, go to various planets and discover the rest of his clones in order not to turn into a machine forever. You must speak to various aliens and gain their trust. Communication with aliens occurs via an icon-based interface known as UPCOM. This consists of around 150 icons, each representing a different concept. As each alien race discovered speaks its own language and reacts differently, you must learn to negotiate using these UPCOM concepts in a style that suits the races. A really unusual concept, execution, and graphics mix in an awesome game!

The MS-DOS versions runs only on EGA/Tandy graphics mode. Graphics are pretty good and look identical to the ST version and uses up to 16 colors on screen (32 for the Amiga version). Note that the color-palette is mostly based on blue shades but when you warp into other planets, you see various colors on screen, flashing around. That particular scene looks way better on the Amiga and ST version, as fractals are used in order to depict the speed (which looks more impressive). Due to its age, back to 1986, most of the PC-compatible users own a CGA graphics hardware though, thus most people played the game on a 4-color CGA-mode (I have side-by-side the CGA and EGA/Tandy screens for comparison)).
Well again, the game was too old to support sound hardware on the PCs and thus the sound was limited, and bleepy, but that's what you get when you've only got a PC beeper to use! Note that the Amiga and ST versions featured digitized sound-FX including speech while the intro music is, in one word, fantastic and it is a mixed version from the famous score Ethnicolor, composed by Jean Michele Jarre.