I just learned of this series and it seems really uniquely engrossing. Trouble is I'm having a hard time emulating the first game in its entirety, can't emulate the second at all, and the third is French-exclusive. Apparently there is/was a remake/sequel happening a few years back but there hasn't been any progress for nearly a year...
Has anyone here played them?
>>3352402
The intro scares the shit out of me.
>>3352402
I played all 3 of them. Long story short (it's the middle of the night for me so I'mma sleep right after that):
-there's a faulty rom of the first (Captain Blood) that blocks your progress after a while. If you can get a working one it's IMHO a marvelous game. Though at its core it's a standard adventure game the immersion offered by the interface and icon language and the relative nonlinearity (there's four possible beginnings, two opposing ways to reach the final stretch of the game, and two possible endings from there IIRC) and freedom of action make it a really great game. And it's out there, really weird. Weird graphics, weird goals, weird plot. No one knows what to know without the manual though (find and juice your clones to save yourself). There's a race of alien pacmen, and a race that always looks like the ideal female mate of the observer.
Emulate the atari ST version because that's the one with the alien speech synthesis.
-Second (Commander Blood) and third (Big Bug Bang) can be emulated with dosbox, never had a problem with that so I dunno what yours is. Where the first was weird, second is completely bonkers. CGI/Puppets/live action mix, Pigs in Space on acid. Your new ship's got a bigger fridge, TV and a 28.8k modem. You can get an ancient space curse that'll make it so there's nothing interesting on TV. It's not exactly a sequel and not exactly a remake, you'll have to poke around to find out what the relation to the first game is. Your goal is to escort the richest guy in the universe through blackholes to the beginning of time so he can have a look at the big bang before he dies. He's already so old he's only got a few hours to live and is stored in the fridge. The game's got a bunch of really good meta jokes.
>>3352592
continued:
The alien language interface is gone though, it's just standard dialogue trees and the game's completely linear, also there are two scripting errors that can get you stuck. Also the game's ending is a cop out, they couldn't finish the game in time and put a half parody half cliffhanger ending. Definitely a less good game than the first, but not a bad idea if you want a laugh.
-third game's where it gets really hairy. Basically it's entirely made using assets, used or not, from the second game to finish the plot they left hanging and the end of Commander Blood. The universe has gone belly up and your task is to accelerate evolution and rebuild the whole thing until it produces the ultimate lifeform (ie Bob Morlock, your client from the second game). It's got some vague spore-ish life sim tacked on but that's pretty crappy.
Everything's crappy, in fact, and the devs knew it. The whole game's written as a testament of disdain and hate, hate for the player who was stupid enough to buy it and for the producers who were shitty enough to order the game made on a shoestring budget as a cash-in. The whole express-galaxy-building plot is a metaphor for crunch time. In that respect it's quite interesting. Also it features the real ending, the one we didn't get in Commander Blood. Still, not worth playing.
-the remake/sequel is vaporware, or a scam, depending on your terminology. It's a fanproject by an "idea guy" and has never been anything more than a bunch of photoshop files, and it's actually been in "production" since 2010 at least, with almost no progress. It got press attention because the devs of the Blood series let him use the game, but make no mistake, nothing is ever gonna come out of it.
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So yeah, the first's the one that had the real international success and the one you really wanna play, second is nowhere near the same genius but funky stupid linear fun and the third's a turd that was shat out with intense fascinating hate.
>>3352649
Also, for the anecdote, Purple Saturn Day takes place in the same loose continuity as the Captain Blood games, and possibly so does Zero Zone (haven't played it but it's got Kanary Korp, Bob's megacorporation).
Back in the Captain blood era the devs were really nuts. They held press events where they'd sacrifice the computer used to compile the game's final version, destroying it with maces while chanting prayers to Exxos, the god of game development. Ata ata hoglo hulu! One of the other games that company made is a strip poker where in the final image the girltears her own skin off, revealing her true biomechanical nature. Stuff like that.
>>3352402
>Got this game on pc when i was a kid back in 86-90 and played the shit of it on my amstrad pc1512
>It was a budget edition without proper instructions, just a letter sheet folded by the middle.
>They skim through the game gui but they didn't tell you what is your objective exactly, nothing apart "you must consume the numbers to survive" that's was exactly the phrase, no explanation what the numbers are or how they look.
By pure stubborness I almost managed to finish it without knowing what were doing, I think I got tree or four of the clones.
I realized this almost a decade after, when, out of pure curiosity, checked that fan page about the game.
Probably one of the most "out of the box", original, exotic and crazy game I've even played, it's a pity that it uses some weird cpu/graphics trick and cannot be emulated, and the atari st version have a weird bug.
>>3353337
>cannot be emulated
On which platform? I've been able to successfully emulate is for amiga, atari and dosbox. Also for the atari version you just gotta find the right version.
Thanks for the replies guys, I'm gonna figure out what the hell I'm doing wrong and emulate these. What a strange history, I wonder what the devs are up to these days.
It's a shame about the sequel/remake/thing. I would love to see somebody take these ideas and do something new with them. The lexogram keyboard interaction system is particularly fascinating to me.
>>3354021
>I wonder what the devs are up to these days
Ere Informatique, the company that made the first game, made several other games (Kult may be worth looking into) and got fucked over royalties by their publisher Infogrames (the current Atari, they have a long history of being despicable). They then rebranded themselves as Cryo Interactive and became one of the most prominent french companies during the CD-rom era (during which they made the second and third game). The company eventually crashed when the internet bubble burst.
The lead dev himself was in the music industry before and after the whole videogame thing.
>>3354726
Didn't one of them have a hand in the Dune RTS? I fucking loved that game.
>>3355725
Cryo's second game was Dune, the action/strategy hybrid, not Dune 2 the RTS. You can see the filiation with Blood if you think about it.
It's an interesting story, too. Basically Virgin had acquired the rights to Dune and due to restructuring and producer problems they funded two concurrent Dune games, each unaware of the other. So Cryo's became Dune and Westwood's became Dune 2.
>>3353378
Yeah that's outdated information. The game is completely runnable on 0.74.
Also, and this may be a noob question, but what exactly is a prefetch queue trick?
>>3356453
long story short, that's an optimization that relies on an obscure processor behavior that wasn't emulated.
>>3356453
http://www.rcollins.org/secrets/PrefetchQueue.html
This kind of explains it.
