Captain Blood's Ark

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Captain Blood's Ark
Original title L'Arche du Captain Blood
Studio ERE Informatique
Publisher Infogrames
Senior Developer Philippe Ulrich (idea), Didier Bouchon (graphics and programming), Michel Rho (graphics)
composer Jean-Michel Jarre
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 1988
platform Atari ST , Amiga , Apple IIGS , IBM PC , Amstrad CPC , Commodore 64 , ZX Spectrum , Thomson TO7 , Macintosh
genre Adventure , space flight simulation
Subject Science fiction
Game mode Single player
control Mouse , joystick
medium Datasette , floppy disk
language German English French

The Ark of Captain Blood (French original title: L'Arche du Captain Blood , English title: Captain Blood ) is a French computer game by ERE Informatique (later renamed Exxos) from 1988.

It was later distributed in the UK by Players Premier Software.

action

The game is about the fictional computer game developer Bob Morlock in the 1980s, who gives himself the nickname Captain Blood as an homage to the title character of the pirate film of the same name . Morlock is developing a new computer game about aliens , alien worlds and space travel. When he tests the finished game for the first time, he is sucked into the game and finds himself on a spaceship in his self-created galaxy as part of the program. Shortly thereafter, he is forced to make a hyperspace jump and is accidentally cloned or duplicated 30 times due to an accident . Then Morlock spends 800 years under the name of Captain Blood to find his clones in this galaxy, each of which carries a part of his original life energy ("life fluid ") and he gets it back by teleporting them on board the " Fridgitorium " beams and "disintegrated" in it. The action of the game begins when Blood has already successfully disintegrated 25 clones and now only has to track down the last five copies. But it turns out that these last five duplicates are particularly difficult to track down. Should Captain Blood fail to capture them, he will finally disintegrate and die.

Game mechanics

The player starts on the bridge of a biological spaceship called "Arche". When the game starts, the ship is located near one of four predetermined planets, each of which is inhabited by an intelligent alien life form. The ship is able to scan planets for defenses, has a hyperspace drive, an interactive star map, a teleporter (the civil servants are teleported to the so-called " fridgitorium " and can be disintegrated or moved to another planet) and can even destroy planets .

The aim of the game is, as Captain Blood , to locate and disintegrate his five clones (which are called duplicates or "numbers" in the game) under time pressure. To find them, the player must talk to several aliens and gain their trust. In order to be able to communicate with them, the so-called UPCOM is available to the player , a symbol-based text language interface that adapts to the respective language. Every alien has its own character traits and a level of intelligence.

In order to make contact with them, you first start an OORXX , a biological probe on the planet's surface. The player has to steer the probe undamaged over the mountainous surface of the planet in order to reach the alien life form in a valley if successful. Then the UPCOM opens in the spaceship and you can contact the alien and elicit information, in the best case the coordinates of an inhabited planet on which other typing aliens or even a clone are located. The star map coordinates are "rolled out" by a random generator every time you play.

One of the game mechanics is that the more time passes, the more the captain's health deteriorates , so his arm ( mouse pointer ) is trembling as a symptom , making the game more difficult to operate. When the player disintegrates a clone, the shaking stops for a while.

Ports

The game was first released for the Atari ST and was later released on the C64 , Macintosh , Amiga , Apple IIGS , IBM PC and many other 8-bit systems , including the ZX Spectrum .

Others

  • The title melody is a shortened version of the song " Ethnicolor " by the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre .

Web links

Sequels

  • Commander Blood (1994)
  • Big Bug Bang: Le Retour de Commander Blood (1996, French voiceover only)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ mobygames.com - Commander Blood (English)
  2. ↑ mobygames.com - Big Bug Bang: Le Retour de Commander Blood (English)