Commander Blood

Overview Commander Blood was developed by Cryo Interactive Entertainment, a French company that created Captain Bood (the game Commander Blood is based on, it is not truly a sequel) and is a science-fiction adventure game. Designed to run on DOS, Commander Blood was released around the year 1994. It is a point-and-click universe, in which you talk with bizarre aliens, travel to many different worlds, cross time, invade robot mainframes and bust vicious warlords out of massive prisons. You begin with a goal given to you by your boss, Bob Morlock; to travel back in time to the Big Bang. Morlock, your creator, desires to see the beginning of the universe before the end of his life, and using your ship and onboard computer assistants, you have to take him to it.

The Story Bob Morlock, a biomechanic mastermind, is the founder of a massive company called Kanary, a group so successful it's costs to build cost negative dollars. Thanks to their brilliant scientists, Bob is the oldest being in existence. His time in this universe is nearing an end, so he pulled together his resources and started on the journey to reach his final life's goal; to see the Big Bang and the beginning of the universe. Kanary's Clone Consortium branch built you, Commander Blood, to help him. You are placed on a high-tech ship, the Ark, with Honk, your onboard computer personality, the Orxx, your biomechanic 'clone', Olga, your onboard translator, a radio, a tv, and other 'neat stuff'.

Gameplay Your repartees with the aliens in this game are very well written and clever, and are completed by clicking on a series of words that serve as topics. To get the whole story from the character, you must exhaust all that the alien has to say on the subject by clicking until he repeats himself. Good thing just about everything said is clever and funny with character animations and sounds! When not chatting with strange beings, you are on your ship, taking in transmissions on your universal 2-way radio, talking to characters you brought on board in your cryobox, watching tv, or warping from planet to planet using Bob Morlock's technology.

Graphics The game focuses on your interactions with the denizens of the worlds you travel to in your search for the Big Bang. Planets you are orbiting are rendered in a still screen before you, and when you launch your biomechanic 'clone' down to the earth to act as your puppet, you watch a 'planet sequence' as you fly down. Strangely, the characters you meet are almost all puppets! The characters dance around and gesture as they speak with you against landscapes of their planet, creating a fantastic and unique conversation system. Some the characters are computer animated quite well. However, the conversations use clips of animation, which are repeated to save the time of animating for each speaking line. This can sometimes become repetitive or seem substandard. (There is one scene where a character's family, which appears with him in many sequences, is kidnapped, yet is still in some animation sequences, even while he is crying that they are gone!) Your onboard television is a neat distraction, with different goofy channels to watch (the curse sequence is quite creepy). Ignoring the 'cyberspace' mini game (which was tedious to begin with, and, on todays faster systems, turns into a mad, confusing mess), overall, the graphics are very nice to look at, and the puppets play their role magnificently.

Sound The 'voice acting' of the characters you meet includes odd sounds bits of comical noises, from the coos of the Izwals, the cackling of the Migrax, or the drones of the many robots, the noises fit the scenes and are fun to hear. Every planet or special event has it's own amazing soundtrack. At this point, I must say that this game has the absolute best soundtrack I have ever heard for a game or movie. It is all original Cryo work, and is surreal and excessively euphonous. Enter link to this soundtrack here!

Written by Dane Tippman