Captain Blood

The Good
Captain Blood was one of the epics, and back in 1988 it was one of the best reasons for ditching your 8-bit machine and buying an Atari ST or Commodore Amiga instead.

The game was released at a time when the 16-bit machines were still quite new, and there was a sense of boundless possibilities and distant frontiers. As a game Captain Blood has nothing going for it, but it wasn't a game, really; it was an experience. It had a spacey, eccentric atmosphere and it was very stylish, with a moody blue colour scheme and some glowing special effects.

The gameplay boiled down to two elements. Firstly, you flew through a jagged fractal canyon, reminiscent of "Rescue on Fractalus" but with less freedom of motion. It was clear that the designers had come up with a fractal canyon routine but had no idea of how to turn it into a game, but no matter. The canyon run was smooth and fast. It looked stylish, and still looks stylish in 2005. As with Starglider and Battlezone, the vector graphics transcended fashion and still look "futuristic".

The meat of the game was an ELIZA-like conversation simulator, in which you used a long strip of icons to talk with alien beings. You would say things such as ME BLOOD SPACESHIP HOME FRIEND FRIEND CODE and the aliens would say ME IZWAL FEAR SPACESHIP YOU GREAT BLOOD and you would say TELEPORT SPACESHIP ONDOYANTE YES and they would say BIG FRIEND TORKA HA HA HA and you would say DIE EVIL NO PLANET BIG FRIEND PRISON and they would say HA HA HA and eventually you would get bored with this and enter random characters until the alien gave you a pair of co-ordinates, at which point you would consult a tips guide in a magazine or just fly somewhere randomly. The conversation engine was imaginative and surprisingly easy to pick up, but as with the fractal canyon run it seemed as if the designers had been unable to turn a set of good ideas into an actual game.

But it was beautiful. There was a novella which made no sense. Games don't have novellas nowadays; at most there is some blurb on a website. In 1988 this game had a mystique.

The Bad
There were several other visionary, ahead-of-their-time projects which came out in the years before and after Captain Blood. Midwinter, Damocles, Hunter and so forth were stylish and had gameplay, and although they are lost to everyone except historians they were just generally better and more influential than Captain Blood.

Captain Blood resembles Elite, which came out on the BBC Micro and other 8-bit systems several years before, but it is not even as complex as that; although you are free to explore several thousand planets, only a dozen or so are inhabited. The rest are barren and of no interest. There is no space combat or trading, indeed there is no real test of skill, as the flying sequence is no challenge at all (to dodge the missiles, you just have to stop and fly low). Captain Blood will live forever, just like classic old silent films, but even in 1988 it seemed shallow and image-obsessed. Nowadays the style is still impressive, even though the technology is old-hat, but after a few minutes the spell wears off and you're left with a nice impression but no game.

The Bottom Line
Really, there wasn't much of a game. I have said this. People have finished it, written playing guides, and it makes a certain twisted sense, but it's basically a fractal flying simulator bolted onto an ELIZA program, albeit that it was haunting and special - and it had nudity, which was unusual in 1988 and probably had a powerful impression on the target demographic. On the Atari ST the aliens would talk with individual, recognisable sampled phonemes, and the sonic environment is still impressive today; on the ZX Spectrum the aliens beeped, although the gameplay was essentially the same. It's best to play this with an ST emulator, however, as I doubt you would get the PC version to work nowadays.

The Good
From the back story to the user interface, this game was one of the most original released at the time or even since. Special mention goes to the iconic alien dialog interface. You assemble various icons depicting "concepts" to exchange ideas and the aliens that you encounter communicate in the same manner. The result is heavily stylized phrases such as "Me like teleport you ship" (I'd like to teleport you to my ship). Furthermore, certain icons are unavailable for use with certain races, simulating the linguistic problem of concepts for which there simply are no words in certain languages.

The game universe is randomly populated each time a new game is started, giving the game lots of replay value (and making game saves essential!) The game universe is huge. There are 32,768 planets to explore. This is a great game if you like exploration.

The graphics are quite good for low-res EGA.

The Bad
Gameplay can get repetitious. It goes something like "Fly to planet, land on planet, talk to alien, get coordinates of next planet, rinse and repeat as necessary".

Some of the gameplay elements seem frivolous and unnecessary. On some planets, missiles are launched to shoot down your "Oorx" (a remote, unmanned explorer) making it necessary to fly low, dodging jutting peaks and canyon walls in order to evade the missiles. Yet, if your Oorx is destroyed (either by a missile or by hitting a rock), you simply launch another. You have an unlimited supply, so what's the point? It's also possible to destroy each planet either before or after exploring it but, again, this accomplishes nothing beyond eliciting an evil cackle from the more mean-spirited among us.

While the iconic dialog interface is a wonderfully original idea, its implementation is somewhat awkward requiring much scrolling back and forth through a long list of icons. Completing a conversation requires considerable patience!

Finally, the game music was written by Jean-Michel Jarre. While it sounds fantastic on an Atari ST, or Commodore Amiga (on which systems the game was originally released) and may even have been passable on the Commodore 64, the PC version's complete lack of any type of sound card support completely destroys any enjoyment one might hope to get on the PC.

The Bottom Line
Captain Blood is a refreshing change from the over-used game formulas that we've seen so often. If you're patient and enjoy exploration and detective-like clue gathering, this game is certainly worth your time.

The Good
Captain Blood is a very special game. Without wanting to sound pretentious, it blurs the line between entertainment and art. It works as a game, an art-piece or a demonstration of technology. In 1988, the Atari ST original really blew everyone away. The sampled music, the sampled alien language, the amazing graphics, the fractal flight-engine, the icon-based communication system and the whole wacked-out scenario were all years ahead of their time, and had really never been seen before. Yes, I know the way this review sounds (vomit-worthy :) but Captain Blood really was (and still is, in my opinion) dazzling in the way it melded together so many elements, all so original and inspired, to create a fully-formed whole. Captain Blood oozed style and elegance, creativity and technology.

(a brief pause)

So, basically, Captain Blood has it all. It's just a totally cool game. It has a great plot, with heaps of atmosphere, great and excellently designed graphics, and it's not a case of style over substance, either; It actually plays well, too. It's a full science-fiction creation, equivalent to a great sci-fi novel or movie.

There's too much good stuff for me to write it all here, but another few points, as I think of them: (1) Discovery: I remember playing this game in the late '80s and feeling the real excitement of getting a new set of planetary coordinates, especially when it could well be a new alien race, that I'd never seen before. The 'joy of discovery' is one of the best things about Captain Blood, and I haven't played many other games that have that same kind of feeling. (2) Immersion: The game never leaves the first-person viewpoint of your ship's control panels, not even during the fractal flight sequences. (3) Play style: You can generally play the game the way you want. You could get the same information out of an alien by being evil (e.g. killing his friend) or being nice (doing him a favour). You can complete the game with a huge stack of corpses behind you, or with (almost) no deaths.

The PC version doesn't have the Atari ST's excellent graphics and sound, but it does have the same gameplay. Many fans would say that the game can only be properly experienced on the ST, but I think the gameplay is the most important element, which is why Captain Blood still works so well on the PC, or on the C64, or the Amstrad. The graphics are still good enough (even in CGA), it still plays the same and it still retains its atmosphere.

The Bad
The icon-based communication system (the UPCOM) is revolutionary, and unique (I've never seen it imitated in any other games), but it is quite basic, and often shows its limitations. It can be frustrating, as you're trying to communicate a simple idea to an alien and it refuses to understand. Another not-so-good thing about the game is its gameplay and characters are not consistently of the same quality, throughout. While some alien races have a lot of depth and character to them, others are clearly there for one single purpose, and can't be interacted with, much. The gameplay is sometimes more interesting than at other times: There are some great, detailed plot elements and things to do, earlier in the game, but later on, there are too many things that end up being like 'shopping lists' (simple, quite boring and repetitive tasks). This isn't a major problem, though. The only other thing I would comment on is down to the PC conversion. It's the only version of the game that doesn't include some rendition of the Jarre theme music. I know it was 1988, but I think something could've been arranged (Purple Saturn Day, released the following year, had a short loop of sampled music, played through the PC speaker).

The Bottom Line
Captain Blood is in a class of its own. Philippe Ulrich and Didier Bouchon are the creators of one of the most memorable computer entertainment products, ever. Captain Blood was way ahead of its time, and the designers' vision couldn't be implemented fully on the home computers of the '80s. But look at Captain Blood in connection with today's 3D and AI technologies, and you might see how that vision could now be a lot closer to being made reality.