Captain Blood (1988)

[Duddyroar]

Thought about this game the other day for the first time in ages.

A totally bonkers French game for the Atari ST (converted to other formats later), Captain Blood remains one of my fave ST titles. Part of the game involved flying and landing your ship on alien worlds, and once you'd landed you had to hold a conversation with another alien. This was the best bit of the game because you had to use a series of symbols to communicate with the alien, and the sound effects were brilliant!

It was created by Philippe Ulrich and Didier Bouchon, who later went on to form the now-defunct Cryo (who also released the PC follow up in the mid 90's).

Also notable for having a Jean Micheal Jarre song in the intro.

[Beefcurtains!]

I had this for the Amstrad CPC 464, I remember playing it quite a bit and really liking it. I cant remember much about what you had to do though, was it just talking to aliens at the end of the landing or was there more to it than that?

[peeveen]

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I remember getting this game from "The Home Computer Club", that thing that would advertise in the mags. Get five games for tuppence-ha'penny each, then spend the rest of the year buying ill-chosen overpriced games to make up for it.

But I totally loved this game, even once it was crammed into my Speccy. I spent way too long "talking" to characters in those weird symbols, to the extent that I could read their response without looking up the "dictionary". There were basically only about 10 things you could say to them that would provoke any kind of sane result, but it was fun nonetheless. I seem to remember that only one of the characters was fleshed out to any reasonable degree ... Small Yoko. His plaintive wailing for his "pop" would have brought tears to a glass eye, but it was still jolly good fun to teleport him to a planet where he couldn't breathe and hear what he had to say as he asphyxiated ("Pop ... pop ... pop"). Har har.

The actual aim of the game was to find five clones of yourself and re-absorb them to prevent yourself from withering away. I think I spent a good two days once, seeking out the first one. Finally found it, by which point my on-screen "hand" was jumping around so much due, I could barely control it, so my attempts to convince him to allow me to teleport him aboard failed. Turns out that the route to finding all five was extremely simple, and involved asking one character one specifically worded question.

All said, it was a very interesting game ... certain things that each character would say would suggest various subplots that never seemed to amount to anything ... or maybe it was just the product of my over-active imagination back then ... I swear there were many mentions of some kind of "Genesis" style project called "reproduction 101" which involved a "great missile" ... oo-er missus. Titter ye not.

I also bought the sequel "Commander Blood" for the PC, which was a kinda naff FMV-era effort, but still provided a bit of lighthearted fun here and there.

[oblivion_6]

Ha ha superb i remember this on the ST

I used to luv my ST sniff sniff

ha ha and another blast from the bast the Home computing club damn i remember pestering my folks to get this and then it literally took years to be able to cancel it

[Baseley09]

I remember getting this game from "The Home Computer Club", that thing that would advertise in the mags. Get five games for tuppence-ha'penny each, then spend the rest of the year buying ill-chosen overpriced games to make up for it.

Roffles, they were awsome tho, bought so many a ****y game off them in such a seemingly great deal haha.

[peeveen]

There was a short story included in the box, I recall. Some kinda "Tron" thing, where there was a computer game programmer who needed a hit, and so wrote this Captain Blood game, but was sucked into it, and became Captain Blood. Had a bit in it where the programmer met Isaac Newton in a bar ... just gonna have a look for it now ... aha, here it is: http://www.oldskool.org/shrines/captainblood/ark1.htm

[Ady]

I had this on the C64 and enjoyed it. Very fascinating, very weird.

I remember that bleating coward Yoko (he'd run away everytime you even mentioned the word "war"), a gruop of barbaric Arnie lookalikes who all hated each other; one sent me on a mission to assasinate the others and rewarded me by constantly asking for sexual favours!

I remember speaking to another weird alien called Migrax who kep saying "GO PLANET = FREE BRAIN SPIRIT". I obviously didn't know what the hell he was going on about.

[SharkAttack]

I had this game on my Amstrad CPC. I would have been 6-8 years old at the time and enjoyed it...However! It was one of those games that I enjoyed but god knows why. From memory it would take me forever to actually find a planet with an alien on it, and then when I did find them I had to talk to them in a language I couldn't work out, and they would soon bugger off. Only once do I recall them getting in my ship with me (bad memory?). I think I must have lost the language guide booklet if you say there was one...

[peeveen]

There wasn't an actual "dictionary": you could read the meanings of the symbols by moving the cursor over them and it would display the word in English.

And your chances of finding an inhabited planet by chance were virtually nil. You always started at an inhabited planet and had to talk to the resident alien to find another link in the chain, or rather, graph ... sometimes they would ask you a favour (take me to this planet, destroy that planet, and, er, not much else) before revealing more coordinates ... the idea was that, eventually, you'd find the clones you were looking for.

[Sabreman]

Loved this game, but had close to no idea what I was doing. I just played and replayed the planetfall bits. Lovely visuals and great style. I never tried Purple Saturn Day, but I was hooked on Kult (which I do remember finishing).

I was in the Home Computer Club too