LEARNING ALIEN LOVE LANGUAGES - Captain Blood (Amiga)
13Ever see that movie "Arrival" that's all about trying to reach a common understanding with weird aliens through a shared language? I don't remember Amy Adams tickling a spaceship's nose and gleefully crashing it into the side of an alien's home, and yet...
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Captain Blood (L'Arche du Captain Blood in France) is a French video game made by ERE Informatique (soon relabeled with their short-lived Exxos label) and released by Infogrames in 1988. It was later re-released in the UK by Players Premier Software.
The game was first released on the Atari ST, and was later for the Commodore 64, Macintosh, Amiga, Apple IIGS, PC, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and Thomson TO8 and MO6 . The ST version is the only version that includes the full set of alien language sounds.
The title tune is a stripped down version of "Ethnicolor" by Jean-Michel Jarre.
The titular character of the game is a 1980s video game designer, Bob Morlock, who had picked "Captain Blood" as a nickname in tribute to the film starring Errol Flynn of the same name. Morlock develops a new video game about aliens and space travel. While testing for the first time his new project, he becomes warped inside the spaceship of the very game he had designed. Soon after, Blood is forced to go into hyperspace mode and, due to an incident, gets accidentally cloned 30 times. For 800 years, Blood tracks down every clone, as each one took a portion of his vital fluid. When the game begins, Blood has successfully disintegrated 25 clones but he needs to kill the last five clones who turned out to be the most difficult to track down or he will lose his last connection with the human species.
The objective of the game is to track down and disintegrate five clones (referred to as Duplicates or Numbers depending on the version of the game) of Captain Blood. To find them, the player must speak to various aliens and gain their trust. Communication with aliens occurs via an icon-based interface known as UPCOM. This consists of around 150 icons, each representing a different concept. As each alien race discovered speaks its own language and reacts differently, the player must learn to negotiate using these UPCOM concepts in a style that suits each race.
Other unique facets of the gameplay of Captain Blood included changes in the player interface as the game progressed; as time wore on, the character's health deteriorated. This was represented in-game via an increasing amount of shaking of the mouse cursor, making the game more and more difficult to control. Disintegrating a clone would temporarily relieve the symptoms.
The player starts the game at the bridge of a biological ship, the Ark. The ship begins in the vicinity of one of four predetermined planets, each inhabited by a single alien. To make contact with an alien, the player launches an OORXX—a biological probe—to the planet's surface. The player must successfully navigate the probe over a fractal landscape, eventually reaching the alien at the end of a valley. The UPCOM interface then appears so that the player may talk to the alien and find out more information—most importantly, the coordinates of other inhabited planets.
Computer Gaming World gave the game a positive review for its unusual concept, execution, and graphics. Info magazine—January/February 1989—gave the game 5 out of 5 stars, remarking: "Captain Blood is a marvelously alien experience. The graphics & sound are first rate. The more we played, the more we wanted to continue playing, if only to meet more aliens. There is a fully realized universe here that's easy to become completely immersed in."
Captain Blood sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide.
Wikipedia contributors. Captain Blood (video game). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. October 26, 2020, 23:16 UTC. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Captain_Blood_(video_game)&oldid=985617681.