Commander Blood

The Good
This game is a sequel to Captain Blood - an old sci-fi adventure game where you where a captain of a space ship, going from planet to planet talking to aliens, who gave you clues on where to fly next.

Commander Blood is exactly the same thing. But with graphics and music which captain blood really lacked. It's more an update than a sequel really even though the story has changed. It's real nice to play. The whole movie is like animation sequences you unfold as you find new clues. The play is written with great humor, it's fun to play.

In other reviews I've read it's criticized for not allowing the commander to go to all possible planets in the universe just as you could in its prequel. Well it's understandable, the planets aren't randomized graphic balls anymore, they are detailed animations, frankly I didn't ever like that about capt. blood to begin with, meaningless planets with nothing in them. Actually Commander blood has one or two of them too =)

Another thing that is unique about the captain blood series is that it has created its own language. In captain blood it was really tricky top communicate, you had lots of icons, each representing a word, and combining the words you tried to communicate with the aliens in some broken language. Well, you don't need that anymore, Commander blood gives you choices on what topics you should ask an alien. Even that is far better than the prequel in my opinion.

The Bad
Well, depends how you see it. If you want an adventure game where you solve puzzles this game might not be one for you. It's pretty much spelled out for you what to do next. And if you ever get stuck you will know it's not a good experience, the repetitiveness is annoying, you don't want to see the same animations over and over again. You want the story move along. So its really not an adventure game, but an interactive movie kinda.

Yet this hasn't changed from the prequel, it's just made easier to follow the story. so you don't get stuck. Not many people has solved Captain blood on their own. They eventually get tired of a game with repetitive arcade sequences (the flying and landing) and that's what you do in the games jump from planet to planet.

Also the conversations are merely topics that you must go through. Its a click all alternatives conversations, not which to choose choices.

The Bottom Line
Well it's an experience. when the game starts you find yourself in a spaceship, and don't know the controls. the phone is ringing, and you will have to push everything you see, till you hit the right button. Its a ball next to a screen. Next you see some explanations and talk to the on-board computer honk and get the story, why you are there, what you are supposed to do. Story goes you are assigned to bring a guy to the beginning of the world, the big bang itself through black-holes and such.

The controls are basically a menu, where you have honk (the on-board computer with quite a personality), the cryobox (the inventory), load/save options, phone, a map and propulsion device, your orxxs (space delphins to send to planets) and a TV-set. You can watch music videos in the TV.

It's pretty much what the game is about, nice animations and music. It will last a day or two until you solve it all.

For people with windows. This is a dos game. If you have windows that no longer run on dos (like NT, 2K and XP) you need to run it on dosbox. Mount the CD-ROM to F, mount a small portion of your hard drive to C, and put the dosbox CPU cycle high =4000 so that the animations/movies go smoothly.