Captain Blood

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.