trudel@caip.rutgers.edu (Jonathan D. Trudel) (11/17/88)
I was also at the WOC in Philly recently, and instead of saving my money for more memory like a good little Amiga-type I bought two new games. 1) Better Dead Than Alien - a typical shoot-'em-up with extra sillyness. Rows of space aliens descend upon you, you shoot 'em. Certain aliens contain power pellets that give extra lives, rapid fire, tri-directional shooting, and more. At the end of each level you have to live through a master alien or an asteroid field. There's digitized sound, nicely done graphics and a lot of nice little touches. The aliens look like evil skulls, chomping wolves, exploding space-potatoes and more! I cracked up last night because the scrolling background on one of the levels has the text "killkillkillkillkill" in it. My major complaint is that the game doesn't handle mouse movement well - there are abrupt shifts in how well the game responds. Mouse, keyboard, and joystick operations are possible. 2) Captain Blood - Ok, so it had a cool-looking back-of-the-box. The concept is that you're a space adventurer who was sucked into the galaxy of Hydra. In the process, your body was split into 5 or 6 clones. You are kept alive by bionic technology, which is deteriorating fast. You have to find all your clones before your bionics take over your body. I was intrigued by the premise. Game play is more like a graphical text adventure. You travel to planets within the galaxy, and talk to the alien(s) that may or may not be on each planet. From these conversations, you are supposed to play detective and find your clones. In order to travel to planets, you are given a galaxy map, and two lines that you have to place on the coordinates of the place you want to go. It's got some nice space warp effects. From there, you control a "landing being" who travels to the place where an alien might be. If an alien is there, a special communicator appears, and you speak to an alien through the use of some standard galactic icons. Each alien acts differently, and you may or may not get any information from them. I've chuckled over some of the conversations I've had. Game play is pretty well done, but falls short of impressing me totally. You need to play for a while before you can grasp the concepts. The rules indicate that as time goes on, your control of the game deteriorates if you haven't found a clone recently, and I can see that as a real problem. It was annoying to pick spatial coordinates (a mere point and click feature would be better). The icons are not arranged in a completely memorable fashion, and since there are about 120 of them, it definitely detracts from this part of the game. On top of that, the game mentions that you start to lose control after two and a half hours of game play. This is real time we're talking about. If it takes anywhere near that long to find each clone, the game will take forever to complete! An interesting note is that the intro music was done by Jean Michelle Jarre(sp?). I think it's an original work for this program. I'm also guessing that the origin of this program is France because of this and because the game computer talks with ze French accent. If anyone can tell me anything about how to get the first alien to say where the "planet = free brain spirit" is, I'd be ever so grateful! And of course, the final word: Both games are copy protected. I tried Marauder II rev 10 choosing several of the copy methods and the "Better Dead..." copy worked, but still requires the original for verification. The copy of "Captain Blood" forces summons the guru (Boo!!!!! Hiss!!!). Jon