Game 16: Captain Blood - Final Rating

It's time rate Captain Blood, the first game that I've abandoned prior to completion. From that statement alone, it's probably apparent already that it's not going to do very well. The question is: will it go one lower than Mortville Manor?

Puzzles and Solvability
I’m not going to beat around the bush here. The “puzzles” in Captain Blood are incredibly challenging yet utterly boring! Most of the challenge comes from the communication system being overcomplicated to a ridiculous level, the aliens refusing to answer direct questions unless asked umpteen times, and badly chosen planet and alien names that make differentiating them from the mire of nonsense all but impossible. Add to this that the game often asks you to recall a piece of information that didn’t seem important three hours ago to be able to proceed, and you’ve got a game that will cause hair loss and anxiety attacks rather than entertainment and relaxation. If you take all of the above out of Captain Blood, what you’re left with is “Go to Planet X and speak to Alien Y” about twenty times in a row to complete the game. In fact, if the game had a LucasArts interface I reckon I would have found the five duplicates and got my vital fluids back in less than fifteen minutes. Instead, I spent nine hours trying to decipher complete garbage and having my perfectly logical (and in many cases correct) questions ignored.
Rating: 1

Getting new coordinates is the reward for solving pretty much every puzzle in the game

Interface and Inventory
Well there’s no inventory (which is one of the reasons why Captain Blood probably shouldn’t be considered an adventure game), so it’s only interface we’re discussing here. It’s a mixed bag really. Flying the OORXX’s is surprisingly easy and actually enjoyable until you’ve done it fifty times (no fault of the interface), so that should be commended I guess. But the rest of the interface is pretty clunky, with the buttons on the main console screens badly represented and not labelled. This isn’t a problem after you get used to it, but I found myself having to check the manual quite a bit in the early stages of the game just to see what the buttons did. As for the communication console, well I think I’ve made my feelings about that pretty clear. Having 150 buttons (with a scroll bar to view them all) makes for a stupendously difficult interface, particularly when it’s rarely very clear what it is you supposed to say next. The majority of these buttons seem to be used to form the large number of silly planet and alien names rather than for actual communication. It’s also worth mentioning that the save / restore feature, while being a novel way of stopping the player from continually saving their game before experimenting or restoring every time things don’t go their way, is painful indeed!
Rating: 2

Flying is fun for about five minutes. It's a shame you have to do over and over again!

Story and Setting
The back-story of Captain Blood is certainly one of the most intriguing, not to mention bizarre, I’ve ever come across. Read the Captain Blood novella (found at http://www.oldskool.org/shrines/captainblood/ark1.htm) to see what I mean, but I wouldn’t recommend doing so after taking acid or the like. You may not recover! Putting the player into the shoes of a game creator that’s been sucked into his own game is cool, but unfortunately, the unique starting point for the game is all but irrelevant once you actually start playing. As mentioned in the Puzzles and Solvability section, Captain Blood is just one fetch mission after another, and since finding anything out about the duplicates is in most cases close to impossible, the actual story progresses at a snail’s pace (in my case it never actually did). Maybe I’d feel a bit different about it if I’d found some of the duplicates on my own or come across the universal nudist known as Torka, but the walkthroughs I’ve since read don’t leave me with the impression that the quality of narrative improves at any stage. I’m giving it points for the back-story and setting, but that’s all.
Rating: 2

Storytelling at its best: "Like Like Good Good Laugh Laugh"

Sound and Graphics
The sound of Captain Blood is very minimal. At least it is in the DOS version of the game. I believe that the Atari ST version was fairly groundbreaking on this front, with actual audible languages created to accompany the many symbols for each alien race. But I can only rate what I played, which was limited to a dodgy intro theme and a few blips and blops here and there. Even the OORXX guiding and landing sections are completely silent (unless you hit something for which you experience a slight crunch)! The graphics are not too bad I guess and artist Didier Bouchon definitely managed to create a unique look and feel for the game. The aliens are fairly well represented too, but have only basic animations. The planets look pretty nice and both the hyperspace and OORXX guiding graphics are adequate. Still, the whole thing is extremely repetitive after a while, as you can probably tell by the repeition in my screenshots, so it's only worthy of a 4.
Rating: 4

Babe Ruth's home run continued on its merry way

Environment and Atmosphere
I won’t deny it! Captain Blood initially drew me in and made me want to play it. I can only assume that this evil allure is what has given the game its underground status over the years (there are numerous shrines out there on the interwebz). It really does promise a lot in the opening phases and I felt like if I could only come to grips with the interface and the language, I was in for a treat. It seemed like it was my own inability to play the game rather than its inadequacies that were to blame for my slow progress! As the other categories here will attest, this promise turned out to be false, but it’s interesting to try to figure out what the game did right to give that impression. I think the answer is that there’s something really grand and exciting about travelling through an alien galaxy, landing on planets and communicating with strange beings. The fact that you’re tracking down duplicates of yourself so you can terminate them certainly adds to the appeal. If anything, Captain Blood shows what the possibilities are for truly creative game development, but unfortunately the actual gameplay itself couldn’t live up to the rather fascinating environment. In short, Captain Blood feels like a great game, it just isn’t one!
Rating: 6

You mean I can visit any planet in the entire galaxy? That's actually quite cool!

Dialogue and Acting
Dialogue? Laugh Laugh Curse Insult! It’s true that communicating with various alien races would be extremely difficult. But surely no-one out there thinks the idea of an Alien Conversation Simulation game would actually be fun do they? Hmmm, now that I think about it, that might be interesting if done well, but it’s not here! “Missile Sex Croolis-Ulv Curse. Me Search Danger. Danger = Sex Spirit Laugh Laugh Curse. Me Know Danger Missile. Danger Not Fear Me Kill Danger. Female Not Danger Me Like Danger.” This is the sort of thing that Howdy Prison said to me over and over when I was asking him for information that I only knew he had because Lars-Erik (he’s a reader, not an alien, at least I don’t think he is) told me. Is it creative? Yes! Is it unique? Yes! Is it useful or fun? Hell no! It’s infuriating! One of the other big problems is the names of characters and planets. It would be really obvious that someone called “Roger” is an alien or even “Pooky the Swift”, but with messages like “Scientist Know Me Small Scientist”, “Crazy Know Great Nonsense” and “Me Say Information Migrax Missile Brave”, it’s difficult to know when you’re being told a name or if you’re supposed to form an intelligible sentence out of it.
Rating: 1

"Planet Kill You" - Sounds like a wonderful holiday destination

I actually doubted whether I was going to find a game that could match the 27 I gave Mortville Manor, but only four games later, I’ve found one! It’s interesting that both games get really similar scores in all categories, yet would appear to be totally different games on the back of the box. They both suffer from terrible dialogue, confusing storylines and dodgy interfaces, yet both were initially appealing due to gripping atmosphere and nice graphics. I’m really very thankful for Sierra right now as once again I get to move on from this tough slog of a week with one of their comfortable and more than likely enjoyable escapes. This time it’s Gold Rush!

Game 16: Captain Blood - Abandoned!

Captain Blood Journal Entry 3: “This will be my last entry. Despite designing the game myself, I have been unable to find the duplicates and therefore unable to regain my vital fluids. Over time my health has gradually degraded and I now have the shakes so bad that I can no longer use the console accurately. My frustration in getting the required information out of the various alien races has shown me that my game would probably have failed on the commercial market anyway (accept with those Atari ST users who are very easily pleased), so I may as well go down with the ship. Captain Blood…signing out.”

Just as this previously existing planet is gone, so too has my will to continue to play this game.

I’m quitting! It has become blatantly obvious that finishing Captain Blood would take weeks (if not months) of restarting time and time again and spending hours asking ridiculous questions to aliens with a flawed communication system in the hope that some piece of unobvious yet required information might come to light. I could complain about so many aspects of this game, and I’ll spend some time doing exactly that in the Final Rating post, but I’ll now focus on the major issues that have caused me to abandon the mission. I always assumed that I would be able to complete every adventure game on the list, mostly because I could always ask for assistance from the readers or use a walkthrough if I absolutely had to. It’s disappointing to fail that expectation, but then it’s questionable as to whether Captain Blood is an adventure game at all.

After all, how many adventure games have you avoiding missiles while flying at high speeds through planetary mountains and valleys.

To fill you in on the small amount of progress I made since my last post, I need to talk about what occurred once I paid a visit to Yoko the Izwal. I’d been told to visit him by Sinox, but given no information about what I should expect there. As with all previous aliens, I was disappointingly not able to get any information out of Yoko about the duplicates, but he did keep talking about the fact his pop (aka Maxon) had been taken away and imprisoned by a “bad warrior”. He didn’t seem to know where Maxon had been taken, but he did mention that his pop had helped out the Croolis-Ulv by giving them the ability to reproduce (or something like that). He gave me the coordinates of the planet Trap 4 and the name Dead Genetic. I couldn’t see how this might help recover his pop, but with no other paths available…

Dead Genetic you say!? Now where have I head that name before?

You might recognise the name Dead Genetic if you’ve read my last couple of posts. Dead Genetic was the Croolis-Ulv that wanted me to destroy numerous Croolis-Vars in my very first attempt at playing Captain Blood. I'd failed to figure out how to get past this part of the game and eventually had restarted, thinking I could avoid it altogether by taking on a different starting point. I now know that the four or five different starts to the game need to be beaten at some point to finish Captain Blood. In fact, one of the starting points is Yoko himself.  The game just drops you in at different stages of the complete path, which really shows how little story development there is. You just go from planet to planet, asking questions about duplicates and trying to do whatever it is each character asks of you before moving on. It doesn't actually matter what order you find them in.

"Me Give You Great Information" Blah Blah Blah

I spent another hour or so trying to figure out what to do with the Croolis-Ulv and Croolis-Var, but I just couldn’t figure it out. Both sides wanted me to kill the others, but doing so didn’t result in progress. I’d asked all the questions I could think of to the numerous Croolis-Ulv and Croolis-Var, but wasn’t get any useful information. Eventually I asked the readers (see the comments section of my last post) and Lars-Erik came to my rescue. He gave me two tips, one a hint and the other an outright spoiler. The hint was “Maybe destroying isn’t the right way forward? Have you tried visitng all the planets he wants you to destroy?” I had tried that, so I moved onto the spoiler: “Visit all the planets of the Croolis-Var and the Croolis-Ulv, get their names, go back to Howdy Prison to push him for the coordinates for Great Destroy.”

Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I might need to know all the planet names, but I’d already written them down in my notes, so I was all set on that front. I also noticed on my notes that one of the Croolis-Var (the ridiulously named Good Nonsense) had mentioned someone called Great Destroy (his exact words were “You Kill Dead Genetic. You Not Destroy Great Destroy. Great Destroy Friend Me Give Bounty. Great Destroy Give Information.”), but any questions I asked him about Great Destroy were simply ignored. I think I asked a couple more of the aliens on both sides of the war about Great Destroy with nothing coming of it. I don’t know how I was supposed to know to press Howdy Prison about Great Destroy?! What made matters worse though, was that even after I got Lars-Erik’s spoiler, I still couldn’t get the information out of Howdy Prison.

I'm running out of interesting screenshots to show you. This is what hyperspace looks like.

This is one of the major problems I have with Captain Blood. You can ask something very specific to an alien (for example, “You Know Great Destroy?”) and have them answer with either nothing or complete nonsense (“Me Destroy Enemy Laugh Laugh Curse”). You can then come back later and ask them the exact same question and have them give you the answer (“Me Know Great Destroy Like Bounty. Great Destroy Friend Croolis Var. You Kill Great Destroy. Great Destroy Planet Great Trap. Coordinate 63 / 35”). This is just not cool! Imagine playing King’s Quest and going up to the goat and typing “offer carrot to goat”, and having the game tell you “the goat just looks at you”. Then imagine, after walking around aimlessly for an hour or two, going back to the goat and typing “offer carrot to goat”, only for the game to respond favourably and the goat to follow you! Surely I’m not the only player to assume that if you ask a question once and get nothing, asking it again won’t change anything!

63 / 35 hey?! Well why didn't you tell me that hours ago!?

This happens numerous times in Captain Blood. When I had to convince the four antennas to let me teleport them, I was forced to ask them the same questions over and over until they somehow, for no particular reason, accepted the offer. If this was the only issue with the game, I’d clench my teeth, accept the challenge, and soldier on. But two subsequent events pushed me over the edge. As soon as Howdy Prison gave me the coordinates to get to Great Destroy, I saved my game and headed straight to him. After much coercing, he asked me to give him the identities of the Croolis-Ulv planets, which I accordingly did. Rather predictably, Great Destroy then directed me to another planet called Idea 762 with coordinates, but gave me no reason at all as to why I should go there or what I might expect.

This is what it looks like on the Atari ST by the way. Yes, I'm getting really low on screenshots now...

By this stage I was getting very sick of going from planet to planet with no real payoff, but it was all made worse when my cursor started jumping around all over the place. It would move around the screen uncontrollably for about six or seven seconds before giving me control again for another ten to fifteen, then do it again. I noticed that I’d just hit the two hour mark of game time, and during my research for the game I’d learnt that you need to recover vital fluids within a certain amount of time or else you’ll start to suffer side effects. Obviously the game figured I should have found at least one duplicate by now and was starting to punish me for my failure. My last (and only) save game was made at around the 112 minute mark, but instead of going back immediately, I decided to push on and see if I could find a duplicate before heading back to the save game and bee-lining to it.

Imagine trying to press the right buttons to type a message when the cursor keeps jumping all over the place!

The short of it that the occupant of Idea 762 is yet another Izwal, this time called Small Friend. He told me about his friend, called Good Friend, who lives on a planet called Small Home, and gave me the coordinates. Still no duplicate! Yet another trip through hyperspace to yet another planet to speak to yet another alien! I was well and truly bored of Captain Blood. The reward for figuring out bizarre and for the most part unsatisfying puzzles is simply to be faced with yet another one. I grit my teeth again, and headed to Small Home, promising myself that if neither of my next two destinations lead me to the first (the first!!!!!) duplicate, I was going to quit the game. Well, the first destination didn’t, after much questioning resulted in Good Friend telling me to go see a Sinox called Brain Radioactivity, with accompanying coordinates. (sigh)

This...is Good Friend! More like Good Friends!

So it was that I travelled to see this Brain Radioactivity, only for him to request the identities of the four Robhead planets. Remember the Robhead planets? Way back when I needed to appease the original Sinox by removing four Antennas from four planets, the way to get them to allow me to teleport them was to ask them about planet Robhead. Each of them gave me different coordinates, but after visiting the first two of them, it was obvious the aliens there were speaking nonsense. I didn’t bother going to the other two planets and therefore never got their names. I also didn’t record the coordinates of the unknown planets I left the Antennas on (I did on my first playthrough, but didn’t on my second playthrough after restarting) so I couldn’t go ask them again. There’s a chance I might have got the four planets’ coordinates from Sinox and then been able to visit all four Antennas on the planets I teleported them to to get the coordinates of all four Robhead planets, and then travelled to each of them to get their identities, and then come back and given them to Brain Radioactivity (deep breath), but...well...I just don’t care anymore!

Brain Radioactivity - His parents were clearly not fond of him

It wouldn’t have mattered if I did care anyway, as the shaking of my hand (the cursor) became unbearable at the 170 minute mark (literally unplayable). If I wanted to make any further progress, I was going to have to start again, and that’s just not going to happen. I spent the next twenty minutes looking at a walkthrough for the game and to be honest, I’m glad I’ve stopped. I actually missed a duplicate that I could have found hours ago and I can guarantee you that even if I’d restarted the game another ten times, I wouldn’t have found him. I know from my notes that I asked Brave Missile about duplicates several times, but apparently you need to be very persistent for him to tell you the location of one. I really wanted to see a duplicate, so I loaded my last save game, went straight to Brave Missile and started asking him about it. I reckon it took me about five minutes of asking the same questions over and over again for him to finally tell me. How can anyone be expected to be so persistent when doing something that’s merely a guess to begin with?! I also could have met Torka (the near naked woman on the cover of the US version) if I’d asked Great Bounty about Planet Spirit straight after I dumped him on an unknown planet (but not before that).

So the duplicates of Blood, who are trying to avoid being found by him, are wearing his symbol on their jacket.

The rest of the game seems to be just as ridiculous (if not more so), so I’m very happy with my decision. Certain things later only happen at certain times. You have to give one alien a code that Brave Missile only gives you if you ask him for the code specifically, even though he gave me no suggestion that he knew one. You only get the coordinates for the fifth duplicate if you promise not to kill Duplicate 1, but then you have to kill Duplicate 1 anyway (and he lets you!) to get your vital fluids. To even find Duplicate 1 to begin with apparently takes a stupendous amount of interrogation of Yoko, but once again he gave me no idea that he knew where any were. I literally need to leave the game until tomorrow before I consider giving it a final rating. I'm sure it won’t be pretty then, but it would be damn ugly if I did it right now!

Disintegrating duplicates might have been satisfying if I'd ever managed to do it without cheating

Session Time: 3 hour 00 minutes

Total Time: 9 hours 00 minutes

Game 16: Captain Blood - Great Information My Ass

Captain Blood Journal Entry 2: “I’ve had to take a different path in my attempts to track down the five duplicates. After struggling to get information out of either the Croolis-Ilv or the Croolis-Var, I was forced to find another race of aliens to request assistance. Thankfully, my dealings with the Migrax have been much more fruitful, and I’ve now made good progress through various parts of the galaxy. That’s not to say that the Migrax have been completely agreeable, and I’ve had to use fairly persuasive tactics (such as teleporting a Migrax called Great Bounty to an unknown planet) to get the information I needed. I was finally sent to a Migrax called Missile Brave, who gave me the coordinates and the secret code to speak to a being named Sinox. Sinox offered to assist me, but only if I could rid four planets of their Antenna occupants. I’ve done so, once again through not particularly honest means, and was rewarded with the coordinates of the planet Bow-Bow, where I’m to assist an Izwal named Yoko. While I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere, I still haven’t located a single duplicate, and fear time may be my biggest hurdle.”

Destroying planets is fun. But so far is it hasn't produced results.

I’m six hours into Captain Blood and I haven’t even managed to find one duplicate. The main reasons for this could be split between challenges in coming to grips with the language and fighting the game’s technology and losing. I mentioned in my introduction above that I’d taken a different path since the last post, but the truth is that every time you start the game you are confronted by one of four or five possible aliens. Since I was struggling to figure out how to proceed with the Croolis-Ulv / Croolis Var beginning, I simply started a new game and tried my luck with the Migrax’s path. I have to say that finding the correct first step seems to be one of the biggest challenges in the game so far, no matter which alien race I choose to begin with.

I gave up on solving the Croolis war problem and starting the game again with a whole new confusing one.

The Migrax (named Great Bounty) seemed very happy for me to teleport him, but no matter what I spoke to him about, he simply refused to give me any planet coordinates. In the end, I dumped him on a random planet, which didn’t please him very much, and then continued to question him. He gave me the coordinates of a planet called Reproduction 128, where I would find a “Great Migrax” called Missile Brave. He then said bye and disappeared, which seemed a strange thing to do for someone wanting to be returned home. Anyway, I accessed the grid, selected the coordinates, and clicked the hyper drive button. Missile Brave was pretty pissed off with me for stranding Great Bounty on an unknown planet, and demanded I go get him and take him home.

The Migrax Great Bounty happily hopped onboard, but won't be too happy soon! Sob Sob

Fortunately I’d recorded the coordinates of the random planet I left him on. I went back and got him and took him back to his home planet (Reproduction 14). He then told me how awesome and great I am (despite dumping him on a random planet to begin with) and gave me “great information”. He told me that “Antenna Know Planet Robhead”. Since that meant absolutely nothing to me, I travelled back to Reproduction 128 to see whether Missile Brave would now be of any use. It turned out he also thought I was super awesome for saving Great Bounty and gave me the coordinates of Planet Sinox, where I can find a “great scientist” named Sinox. He also gave me a code that I would need to speak to Sinox, which was “Impossible Not Sinox”.

"Me Great Migrax Missile Brave" - Not a particularly humble bunch these Migrax's

Sinox also wouldn’t give me any useful information until I helped him first. He demanded I “Teleport Antenna Planet Unknown” and proceeded to give me the coordinates of four planets. Each of these planets were occupied by an Antenna (a stupid green alien) who I needed to convince to allow me to teleport them. Unfortunately the Antennas were not happy with the idea of being teleported without knowing what the destination was. This is where I recalled the “great information” given to me by Great Bounty, which was “Antenna Know Planet Robhead”. Using the command “Me Teleport You Planet Robhead”, I convinced each of the Antenna’s to allow me to teleport them. This is where things got tricky though…

Sinox - Great Neon Warrior

Each planet can only be occupied by one alien at a time. If you have one alien teleported to your ship and you arrive at a planet already occupied by an alien, you are simply not able to teleport the one on your ship to the planet. You would have to remove the planet occupant first, and I see no way of doing that. So there was no way I was going to be able to put all four Antennas on a planet called Robhead. Thankfully, when I questioned each of the Antenna’s about the coordinates of planet Robhead, they all gave me different coordinates (I told you they were stupid). However, the planets that match the coordinates they gave me were all occupied by an alien race that speaks utter nonsense. It was very quickly apparent that they were never going to make any sense, so I gave up on the idea of removing them to make room for each Antenna.

One of the Planet Robheads - Who would have thought a sparkling decapitated head would make such little sense

The only solution was to convince the Antenna’s to let me teleport them by promising to take them to planet Robhead, and then to dump them on random “unknown” planets. This does line up with the request made by Sinox who asked me to “Teleport Antenna Planet Unknown”, but hardly seems the most honourable thing to do. This reminds me of a comment Ilmari made on my last post. He suggested that I should try to negotiate peace between the Croolis-Ulv and the Croolis-Var, instead of doing what they asked me to do, which was to destroy each other. That’s the thing though! Captain Blood seems to have little in the way of a moral code. It’s anything goes and sometimes the honourable solutions are rewarded while other times only brutality and seemingly unethical decisions result in progress. King's Quest this isn't!

I genuinely felt bad for the Antennas as I betrayed them and left them to rot.

It’s here that I need to spend some time discussing some of the technical issues I’ve faced while playing Captain Blood. I’ll start by saying that I don’t have what the manual calls a reference guide. My Google searches for “Captain Blood reference guide” failed me, so I was forced to read the manual and hope I could figure out the rest. In most cases I could, but the Save / Restore feature turned out to be somewhat perplexing. Up to this point in the game, I’d been saving my progress fairly regularly by clicking the floppy disk button on the console interface. When I later started Captain Blood, I was then able to click the same button to restore my game successfully. It did seem strange to me that I was pressing the same button to save and restore my game, but it was working, so I didn’t question it. Just in case you're wondering, when you click the save / restore button, nothing appears to happen. You don't type a name or a have the ability to create a new save file.

This button here is the save button...and the restore button...don't ask!

The problem started when I arrived at what I thought was Planet Kristo 08, the fourth planet that Sinox wanted me to clear of Antennas. I was surprised to find the planet was uninhabited! My immediate thought was that I must have entered the wrong coordinates. I checked my notes and compared the 171 / 76 I had written there to my current location. I was in the right place unless I’d written down the wrong coordinates when Sinox was communicating them to me. There was nothing else to do, so I went back to Sinox to see what would happen. He thanked me for clearing the first three planets of Antennas, but demanded I clear the fourth. No matter what I asked him, he simply refused to confirm the coordinates for Kristo 08, so I was forced to restore my game. The problem was…my save game was after Sinox originally gave me the coordinates!

Hello? Anyone seen a strange looking green thing around here?

Basically I was screwed, and there was no way to know whether I took down the wrong coordinates or the game just screwed me over. I was going to have to start again! OK, I thought, it really wouldn’t take me long to get back to where I am now that I know what to do. With no “restart” option available, I closed and reran Captain Blood, and started a new game. Annoyingly, I kept getting different starting aliens, which would mean everything I'd done so far would be for nought! I had to restart the game about six times before I finally had a game that began with Great Bounty the Migrax, and I couldn't know that until I'd guided an OORXX down through defense systems onto the planet surface. Excited that I could finally get under way, I decided to save my game. Pressing save restored my old game, back to the uninhabited planet. Despite having done exactly the same thing in the past with the same result, I can tell you I was not impressed, and needed to walk around (in the real world) for a bit taking deep breaths. I'd wasted the last half an hour for nothing!

I went through the game's starting procedures and flew down to the surface of the first planet about 20 times in one hour.

It turns out that the save / restore button changes its function after a five minute period. If you’ve just started Captain Blood, the floppy disk button acts as Restore, but if your game has been running for over five minutes, it acts as Save. I found this piece of information out after Googling “Captain Blood Save and Restore”, and it meant I had to restart Captain Blood another four or five times and guide an OORXX down to the planet surface to see if Great Bounty the Migrax was there, then play for more than five minutes before finally being able to save my game and continue. In total I wasted an hour during this whole process, and if it wasn’t for this blog, I probably would have given up pretty quickly. It took me around 40 minutes of straight playing to get back to where I was prior to the issue and thankfully, the fourth Antenna was there this time around. I dropped all four Antennas onto unknown planets and went back to Sinox, eager to find out what “great information” he might have to offer. It better have been worth it!

"You Go Planet Bow-Bow" - notice my total game time is down to 41 minutes after restarting...again

Well, there was still no mention of any of the duplicates, and instead Sinox directed me to a planet called Bow-Bow, where I’m supposed to assist an Izwal called Yoko. If the game continues on in this fashion, sending me from planet to planet, trying to understand what mundane task each alien wants me to undertake so they’ll give me “great information” that simply leads to the next task, then it’s going to get real repetitive, real fast! Given the mechanics of the game, I can’t really imagine what else it can offer up, but I’m still holding out for a surprise or two. If I do finish the game, it’s looking likely that it will take up a heck of a lot of my time (six hours already with no duplicate in sight), so I’ll have to make a call at some point in the next couple of days as to whether Captain Blood is worth the dedication.

OK Mr Izwal...what do you want in return for "great information"?

Session Time: 4 hour 00 minutes

Total Time: 6 hours 00 minutes

Game 16: Captain Blood - Me Not Good Insult Curse

Captain Blood Journal Entry 1: “Surely I’m hallucinating! Or perhaps this is just a bad dream and I’m going to wake up sometime soon! After spending the last few weeks obsessively developing a new video game, I now find myself trapped in the game itself, having to face all the challenges that I designed. Here I am sitting in a spacecraft, guiding OORXX’s through planetary defences to reach zones where I can communicate with various alien species, all in an attempt to track down the five duplicates that contain the rest of my vital fluids and disintegrate them. Why did I have to make communication so challenging in the game?! I guess I could never have known that my own life would depend upon successfully gathering information from Migrax’s, Croolis Ulv’s, Buggol’s etc. Thankfully, I’ve managed to form a bond with a Croolis-Ulv called Great Bounty, who wants me to destroy his enemies. He’s given me the coordinates for four planets which are inhabited by Croolis-Var. I assume in return he will give me information which might lead to one of the duplicates I’m tracking.”

There are five duplicates somewhere out there. Shouldn't be a problem.

Captain Blood is, as expected, one of the strangest games I’ve ever played. That’s not to say it’s bad! It’s just unlike anything I’ve experienced previously and offers a serious challenge in a bizarre environment. I won’t lie! So far I’m shit at this game! It’s taken me ages to figure out what I’m supposed to do and how I’m meant to go about it. Even now, after two hours of playing, I feel like I understand only a small portion of what’s going on and what I’m supposed to do. It’s going to be a tough game to blog about and I’m afraid you’re all going to have to experience my confusion along with me. Despite everything I’ve just said there’s something about the game that draws you in. I can sense the promise of a true gaming experience, if only I could wrap my bewildered brain around the game mechanics and in particular, the communication system. Before I talk about that though, let’s start from the beginning.

My console, complete with OORXX, ready for service

The game begins with the player (Captain Blood) sitting at spaceship console, looking at the planet vision screen. From what I can tell, the planet in front of you is random, so there’s no guarantee which one you’ll be looking at when you start the game. It’s important to write down the planet coordinates, as you may need to come back to it later on in the game. The aim of the game is to find the five duplicates and take back your missing vital fluids, but the duplicates could be hiding on any of the 32768 planets that are available in the game. Going off into space and hunting planet by planet would obviously be suicide, so the first thing to do is to go down onto the planet you can see and try to extract information from whatever alien species inhabits it. The goal seems to be to get coordinates of another planet that might lead to information about duplicates.

One of the random planets I've started out in front of

So how do I guide Captain Blood down onto planets to talk to aliens? The answer is i don’t! Captain Blood stays exactly where he is, sitting at his console in space. He directs half organic half machine creatures down to the planet surface to do his dirty work. The player does have control of these creatures though (known as OORXX’s) and have to guide them through rough terrain, avoiding the missiles sent by defense systems. Some planets have no defences, which makes landing pretty straight forward, whereas other planets have lots. Whenever there are incoming missiles, I need to keep my OORXX as low to the ground as possible to avoid them, which can be pretty difficult when the terrain is filled with mountains. My technique for high defense planets is to fly pretty slowly, then stop altogether when missiles are in close range and drop to the surface floor. Once the missiles have gone out of range, I pop back up and make some more ground before they come back.

Even the harshest of planetary landscapes have handy runways for landing.

My OORXX comes to a stop as soon as I reach the landing zone, and I find myself confronted by whatever alien inhabits the planet. This is where things get interesting (and bewildering). All aliens speak and are spoken to using the 150 symbols that are available in the interface. I’m not entirely sure how it’s decided upon, but a handful of icons are not available at any time. Despite this, there are still a heck of a lot of icons to choose from (look at the scroll bar at the bottom of the image below for an idea what I'm talking about) when trying to extract information. The best way to describe how communication is handled is to lead you through a typical conversation.

This is a Migrax. As much as he looks like the creature out of Alien, he's actually annoyingly happy and laughs a lot.

ALIEN: Howdy You. Me Croolis-Uly Dead Genetic. Planet = Trap 4. Me Great Warrior

(Each of the above words is communicated with a symbol. Putting your cursor over the symbol reveals what its English translation is. It took me a long time to figure out that this particular alien is of the race Croolis-Uly and that his name is Dead Genetic. This is typical of the way the aliens talk and some of their names could easily be used in other contexts such as Brave Missile and Good Nonsense, which is damn confusing. I assume they’re completely random given how silly they are.)

CAPTAIN BLOOD: Me Want Information

ALIEN: Me Like Information Enemy

(I figure the translation of this is “I like information about my enemy”)

CAPTAIN BLOOD: Me Search Information Enemy

ALIEN: Me Search Enemy Curse. Me Search Danger Curse. Me Like Information Enemy. Me Like Brain Enemy Dead Great Laugh.

(The aliens often laugh, insult and curse to emphasise their feelings. Don’t ask me what the rest means.)

CAPTAIN BLOOD: Me Kill Brain Enemy You Give Information?

ALIEN: Me Search Enemy Curse. Kill Yes Yes Insult Curse. Izwal Small Brain Insult Curse. Me Not Give You. You Give Me Yes Curse. Me Like Information Enemy. You Give Me Idea? Me Like Brain Enemy Dead Great Laugh. Me Kill Time Laugh Laugh. Me Croolis-Ulv Dead Genetic. Me Want You Destroy Planet Croolis-Var. You Kill Croolis-Var. Planet Trap 2. Coordinate 13/90. Planet Great Fear. Coordinate 219/91. Planet Kill You. Coordinate 213/116. Planet Trap 1. Coordinate 103/92 Kill Kill Laugh Laugh. Me Give You Great Information. Bye Good Blood.

Dead Genetic: "You Give Me Clothes. You Give Me Boots. You Give Me Motorcycle. Laugh Curse."

So, as you can probably tell, I got the information I was after. It seems that the Croolis-Ulv called Dead Genetic wants me to destroy all the Croolis-Var (another race of aliens) on the four planets he’s given me coordinates for. I can only assume that if I complete this mission, Dead Genetic will give me some info that will help me find the first duplicate, or at least lead me to someone else that might. If you wondering why all of the above took me two hours, the conversation example I gave is a massively summarised one that doesn’t include the fifty other things I tried saying with varied results. I’ve tried all sorts of things ranging from “Me Like Dead Genetic You Help Me” to “You Not Help Me Me Destroy Planet”, and I imagine I’ll have to be re-educated every time I come across a new race of aliens. I guess it’s time to go kill some Croolis-Var and see what happens. I’ll report my progress in the next couple of days, unless I get sucked into the game.

The little dots are defense systems. Something tells me my next landing approach will be a rocky one.

Session Time: 2 hours 00 minutes

Total Time: 2 hours 00 minutes

Game 16: Captain Blood - Introduction

It’s time for something a little bit different. It’s not conclusive whether or not Captain Blood (known as L’Arche du capitaine Blood in French) should be considered an adventure game, but when I put it to a poll, the community made it clear that it’s a game you want me to play regardless. Made in 1988 by ERE Informatique and released by Infogrames, it sure looks like a strange piece of work. One gets the feeling that Didier Bouchon and Philippe Ulrich, the game’s joint developers, might have been partaking in a bit of the old happy stick during its creation. Bouchon had originally been hired to design covers for Ere Informatique’s releases, but he quickly learnt to program in the Atari ST’s assembler after Ulrich provided one for him. The assembler allowed him to create a fractal generated real-time graphic system, impressing Bouchon enough to join forces and develop a science fiction game.

Philippe Ulrich and Didier Bouchon

The resulting game seems to avoid genre classification, being some sort of adventure, space simulator, strategy hybrid. It was first released on the Atari ST, but eventually was ported to C64, Macintosh, Amiga, Apple IIGS, PC and various 8-bit platforms such as the ZX Spectrum. Due to all the differences in these technologies, each of the ports had variances in graphics and sound, and not surprisingly it’s the Atari ST version that looks and feels the best. As usual, it’s the PC one that I’ll be playing, and if you’ve read my Request for Assistance post earlier this week, you’ll know that it’s taken a fair bit of effort just to get to the point where I can play the game with the desired graphical quality. The short of it is that there are at least two different versions of Captain Blood out there for download, and the EGA one only works in DOSBox if you run it from an actual floppy image.

The US Captain Blood box. I wonder whether the woman plays any role in the game

I’ve found a PDF version of the manual (thankfully given how complicated it all looks) and also come across the Captain Blood novella, that I think came with the original release of the game. The story is just bizarre and goes something like this: Bob Morlock, a game designer who goes by the name Captain Blood, develops a new video game based around space travel and communications with various alien races. On completion of the game, Morlock starts it up for the first time, only to find himself sucked into his own gameworld. Appearing in a spaceship of his own design, Morlock (now solely going by the name Captain Blood) is forced to go into hyperspace to avoid imminent danger. Unfortunately, something goes wrong, with the end result being that Captain Blood is cloned thirty times, with each of the clones holding onto part of his vital fluids. He spends the next 800 years tracking down the clones and regaining his vital fluids a piece at a time, but while he manages to hunt down twenty-five of them, the remaining five have evading him.

The UK Captain Blood box. More sophisticated but less appealing.

This is where the player comes in. Tasked with tracking down the remaining five clones and disintegrating them, the player must communicate with aliens on numerous planets to try to get the coordinates of the final five. To reach the aliens, the player must send out crafts, which are actually living beings called OORXX’s, guiding them through canyons to the landing spots, where communication takes place. This communication appears to be handled through the use of 150 icons, with each race of alien speaking in different ways. I’ve had a quick go at it, and while I get the idea, it seems that it’s going to be extremely difficult to figure out what to say to each alien when there are so many icons to choose from. Given the rather cult following the game has (it even spawned a sequel called Commander Blood a few years later), I can only imagine I’ll eventually come to grips with it given enough practice, and I look forward to the challenge of what is clearly a very unique game on the list.

24 of the 150 possible communication icons. Happy days!

Captain Blood - Assistance Required

I've started playing around with Captain Blood to make sure I can play the game. I'd hate to waste my time doing an introduction post, only to find out the game is unplayable. It sure looks like a complicated beast to play, but I'm also likely to face some technical challenges.

I notice on a few sites out there that people are playing Captain Blood on the PC in EGA rather than CGA. Can anyone explain how they're achieving that? Even if I select EGA in DBGL, I still only get CGA. Any suggestions for other things I can try? Points given for any helpful advice.

This is how it looks for me.

This is how it looks on Moby Games.

EDIT: I've now looked into this further and have found that there are numerous versions of Captain Blood available for download. From what I can tell, the majority of these versions don't have EGA as an option. Unfortunately, the one I've found that does is the only one that I can't get to work. It freezes as soon as I press enter on the setup screen.

Here's the setup screen for the one I can play. Notice there's no EGA option available.

Here's the setup screen for the one that freezes. Notice there is an EGA option.

I'm going to keep playing around but any info would be much appreciated.

EDIT: I've got it working! Never have I spent so much time trying to get a game to run properly. Having this blog really drives me beyond my normal patience thresholds. I hope the game is worth it!

For anyone wanting to play Captain Blood on the PC in EGA, here is what you need to do. The game will only run off a real floppy image, so you need to use a bootable floppy. I found the answer in the Vogons forum so can't take the credit, but here's the instructions.

1) Find a bootable DOS floppy image from wherever. (MS-DOS, FreeDOS, Win9x rescue, it doesn't matter, as long as it's a .img floppy image.)

2) Download DiskExplorer from http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA013937...dex_e.html and open the .img floppy image.
3) If there's not enough free space on your bootable floppy image, delete stuff until there's enough space. (Generally you can delete everything except for command.com and the .sys files, other than config.sys.)
4) Go to File->Import . Find the folder containing all the files from Captain Blood, select all the files, and click Open.
5) Close DiskExplorer and open DOSBox. Type "boot [whatever the path is to your .img file]".
6) Type "BLOOD" and the game should start.

The EGA version of the game can be found here:

http://www.xtcabandonware.com/index.php?id=201

Works perfectly! :)

This is how mine looks now! The game looks complicated as hell though, so I might regret the effort.