Blood Money - Atari ST (Gameplay Footage & Opinion)

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Published on June 11, 2016 7:44:50 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFthc9vmLyE

Game:

Blood Money (1989)

Duration: 33:14

185 views

5

Blood Money is a 1-2 player side scrolling shooter released in 1989 and was the third game of DMA Design who would later go on to create the GTA games (1-3). Psygnosis handled the publishing and it came out for the Amiga, C64 and DOS, as well as this Atari ST version. I haven’t played the others so I can’t tell you how different the ports are.

Like most space shooters it has a simple premise, just get to the end of the four levels, of which two are available from the get go, making sure you stay alive long enough to meet the boss at the end. Along the way certain enemies drop money which of course links into the name of the game. With this money you can frequent one of the shops and buy up to seven different ship upgrades, all of which are used at the same time. So if you have enough money you can a real death machine at your disposal. You’ll need to do this because the initial weapons that you have on the ship has a really limited range and won’t do a great deal of damage.
Graphically the game looks very good with some detailed sprites and a whole bunch load of enemies filling the screen with no noticeable slowdown. I did like to see the big sprites on the screen such as the huge crab claw which frequents the screen from time to time during the submarine stage. The music isn’t too bad however it does noticeably repeat often.

Game play wise there really isn’t a lot wrong here. You use the joystick to move about and the fire button to shoot. My biggest problem comes with the difficulty which is rather unforgiving. The first thing that you will notice is that touching the walls will kill you. This is a particular problem as a lot of the smaller enemies guns are mounted to the walls so you’ll need to be horizontal with them (unless you purchase some weapon upgrades) in order to hit them and you’ll end up accidentally hitting the wall in doing so. It also doesn’t help that you lose all of your upgrades the very second that you die. Furthermore in most games when you are hit by an enemy bullet there is a short space of time where you are invulnerable, this is to stop you from unfairly getting hit multiple times within the same second. But here an enemy can drain your entire life bar in one swoop if you are not careful, which undermines the whole purpose of having the life bar.

Overall Blood Money is a good game, but I wouldn’t put in the top tier of shooters in the system. It’s certainly a challenge but ultimately I’ve owned this for 20 years and I’ve barely played it in that time.

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