Monday, September 8, 2014

Captive: Won!

Guess what option I chose?

When I last posted on Captive, I was in the space station where Trill was being held, but I had run out of ammunition and all my melee weapons had broken, leaving me with nothing but bare fists. Since the nasty creatures in the base require hundreds of bare-fisted blows to perish, techniques like ladder-scumming and the old side-step-turn tactic were out of the question. I had announced my intention to reload from the previous base and stock up on more ammo before attempting the space station again.

Well, I didn't do that. It was probably the best idea, but I just couldn't bring myself to cover all the territory again. Instead, I settled in for a long process of killing enemies with electric bolts. I tried to master the art of luring the station's behemoths one-by-one to a 4x4 area with a power outlet, then dispatching them via the side-step-turn method. Electric bolts significantly under-perform even the weakest guns, so each enemy took 5-10 minutes to die--assuming I didn't make a mistake during the process, which was rare. I'm not very good at anything requiring manual dexterity, and inevitably I'd turn when I meant to side-step or vice versa. This would lead to a period of momentary confusion in which I'd try to figure out what happened, during which the enemy inevitably shot my droids to rubble.

The last base made me kill what felt like a hundred of these damned things.

I was also able to employ the "friendly fire" method in a few places, lining up enemies behind closed doors and letting them blast each other. There were a few areas where I could shoot at foes across obstacles, like fire.

Of course, they were shooting at me, too.

Avoiding areas with pressure plates that closed the walls behind me, I slowly penetrated the station. When I finally found a shop, it was like finding an oasis in the Sahara. Although the shop didn't sell any of the "cannons" that would make use of that skill, it did sell refills for my handguns and laser guns. I also bought a large supply of mines.

The damaged, empty-handed droids encounter the most welcome sight in the world.

With a healthy stockpile of ammo, the base became much easier, though it never became "easy." There were an absurd number of enemies, almost all capable of killing at least one droid in one shot, shield or no shield. I'd push a wall and open up an area with dozens of them. I'd have to let them come to me one at a time and fight battles of firing retreats. I'd finally clear them out, open up another door, and face dozens more. All told, the space station took almost 8 hours to complete. 

Finally healed, and loaded up with guns and ammo.

The station ended up being indistinguishable from any other base. It had a generator room, for instance, even though blowing up the station presumably kills Trill and ends the game. It had a computer that delivered a probe even though I didn't need any more for this mission.

The presence of the generators is a mystery. I assume the procedural method used to create each base insists on putting a generator room in every one.

I never did find a shop that sold cannons, but I did eventually find one that sold lasers, so I outfitted my entire party with laser guns and plenty of ammo, dumping the handguns and melee weapons that had filled non-laser slots until then. Though not the best weapons in the game, they worked well enough.

After an endless series of combinations, doors, passwords, button puzzles, and pattern puzzles, I finally found a combination door like those at the entrances to the bases. Since I knew I wasn't at the entrance, I figured Trill must be behind it, and I was right.

Trill rises from his chair as I enter his cell.

At first, I decided to just kill Trill and see what happened. He died in a single shot and the game immediately ended with the note that "Droid's are to be wasted!" which I don't know what it means. I assume something similar happens if you blow up the station's generators, but I didn't try it.


If you walk up to him instead of killing him, you get the end game message: "Amendment to the legend of Trill: A small party of four droids brutally outwitted the entire federation force, and succeeded in freeing the Creator of Evil.."

If this is supposed to be a twist of some sort, the game really doesn't offer enough information for it to sink in. Granted, Trill's crimes were unspecified in the game's back story. All we know is that he was hoping for community service and got sentenced to 250 years in suspended animation. That seems harsh for most crimes but somewhat mild for being the Creator of Evil, whatever that means.

Trill is transferred to another facility.

At this point, the player has the option to "Call it a Day" or "Let Battle Commence," the latter of which sees Trill re-captured by one of the station's behemoths and stuck on a new space station. The droids end up back in space in "Mission 2" with a new set of 10 bases to explore and blow up. If you beat Mission 2, from what I understand you get the same options and can continue on to Mission 3. Eventually, a bug breaks the game in Mission 2315, and in the DOS version, it loops back to Mission 1 after Mission 256. It's impossible for me to imagine any player getting up to either of these numbers. I'm curious what the highest documented mission actually is.

I naturally chose to call it a day, but I can see the appeal of continuing if you actually like the game. When I ended, I had only just received the "Sprayguns" skill and didn't have the chance to use the "Cannon" skill at all. There were several orders of better droid parts that I never purchased. There was, in short, lots of room for continued character development, although at some point the challenge must plateau and descend, once the droids have the best parts and all skills at 24.

I never did find myself really "liking" Captive. It had moments of exhilaration, sure, when tough enemies finally burst into sprays of blood, or when I came upon a much-needed store or power outlet when I was just about to give up all hope. But these are "rewards" in the same way a bully "rewards" you when he stops beating you, or the same way a piece of bread is a "reward" when you're about to die of hunger. You may appreciate them, but it's much better not to be in those situations in the first place. In that sense, I feel less like I "won" Captive and more like I just got paroled from it.

A short post for a long gameplay session. GIMLET coming up.

50 comments:

  1. Congratulations! I found it hard to believe the post pop up on my feed after all that you've gone through in the game, but it's good to see you make it through! Hopefully there will be more enjoyable (or at least shorter!) games in your near future~

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  2. A Creator of Evil is You!

    Congratulations on beating yet another fairly tough CRPG.

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    1. Congratulations!
      I can see hardcore DM fans really loving this game, but for me, it would be pure torture.
      This is also another example of a CRPG having a somewhat silly, badly explained story. "Congrats, you have won. Btw, you're the creator of evil, bye."
      Reading this blog, I noticed that it's surprisingly common for old CRPG to either feature long detailed background stories in the manual that barely effect the game or give you some handwaving explanation at the end to explain what the hell you were even doing. Of course, some games feature both, or neither. At least Captive's story one is somewhat original and you know what your goal is.

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  3. Congratulations!
    I can see hardcore DM fans really loving this game, but for me, it would be pure torture.
    This is also another example of a CRPG having a somewhat silly, badly explained story. "Congrats, you have won. Btw, you're the creator of evil, bye."
    Reading this blog, I noticed that it's surprisingly common for old CRPG to either feature long detailed background stories in the manual that barely effect the game or give you some handwaving explanation at the end to explain what the hell you were even doing. Of course, some games feature both, or neither. At least Captive's story one is somewhat original and you know what your goal is.

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    1. As a hardcore DM fan, I have to disagree. Captive, and also Bloodwych, totally failed to capture the spirit of DM. Sure, the combat might be similar and maybe even feel the same, but what made DM excel are the lots and lots (surely three digit) of clever puzzles. That makes for a totally different pacing in the game. I posted a longer rant about that already two times, the last one being here: http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/2014/08/captive-long-stretch.html?showComment=1409261631028#c2234175991608850122

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    2. I agree with you. If you like the combat mechanics of DM, Captive would be a good fit for you, but the procedural mechanism used to create the dungeons means that the game doesn't support the variety of puzzle types that DM could include. Captive's "puzzles" are only of the most basic sort: find a password in one place to open a door in another, for instance.

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    3. The trick is to keep a balance, doing the same stuff all the time is like eating cake every day. To be enjoyable, a crpg (or any game) has to offer several things, see the GIMLET for reference. ;-)

      I have created several dungeons for DM by myself and when playtesting them, I found that even basic riddles which I exactly knew (because I created them by myself) still make a huge difference over plain fighting and fetching keys.

      I don't think that Captive has a real excuse for the plain dungeon design. Far older roguelikes have predesigned rooms mixed into the randomness and Captive could have done the same. Lots of riddles in DM only take like 2*2 or 3*3 tiles.

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    4. Yes, I agree with you. Skyrim has been criticized for offering such simplistic puzzles, but they serve their purpose of breaking up the gameplay. The messages on the walls of Might & Magic, nonsensical as they are, keep the dungeons from being just a bunch of featureless corridors.

      In that sense, what Captive does with the passwords and codes accomplishes the same goal. However, those other games also featured complex puzzles and quests IN ADDITION to those minor things that just offer "variety" in the dungeons. Captive doesn't.

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  4. I'm no DM fan, but I really liked Captive.
    The problem is that the Addict played it in the wrong way. You have to maximize weapons (attack is the best defense) and armor, spending in it as much as possible. This way, I found Captive to be moderately difficult.
    On Amiga I finished Mission 2 and stopped playing at base 5 or 6 of Mission 3 when character development becomes flat.

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    1. Oh, sod off. There is no "wrong way" to play a game when you're playing it blind and the manual gives you such limited information.

      Although the difficulty made the game drag on a bit longer, it isn't why I didn't like it. This variety of RPG simply doesn't offer the types of things I like most about RPGs, such as a good story, role-playing, and NPC interaction.

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    2. I don't think it is good game design if you trap the player in wrong decissions, especially if you can't know before and the game doesn't give proper feedback at the right time. Also if a game offers different strategies, it's more enjoyable if those allow variations in gameplay instead of being binary right or wrong.

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    3. On the contrary, I think the Addict's gameplay demonstrates a good game design. The Addicts deliberatly did not upgrade even when the overhelming difficulty of the battles clearly hinted at that. Nevertheless, he was able to circumvent these difficulties creatively, using the game mechanics at his advantage, in what we can call "emergent gameplay".

      I have never played Captive, but I have played Chaos Strikes Back, and experienced a similar emergent gameplay, I have not found other RPG in which I have experienced the same tenseness and immersion. I think that not srcripted, emergent gameplay should be an aspect of the game that should be included in a GIMLET-like evaluation of a CRPG (and of a RPG in general).

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    4. Going from what I've seen on the blog, I believe Chet would go the opposite way when 'prompted' to recognise the values of Captive and he'll score it lower than he would have had people not been enthusiastic about it.

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    5. Good game design? I don't buy it.

      Chet made some choices that made sense to him, and was punished for it with soul-sucking gameplay. Grinding your way through ogre after ogre because your random choice was wrong? I might call that "emergent gameplay" if I were being wry.

      A 40 hour game should never make a reasonable sounding character advancement option render the player nigh walking dead. You need to flag that stuff.

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    6. Also an area where some NPCs could have helped, even old-school one-liners dispensing thinly-disguised tutorial information. Things like the fairly unusual ranking system for the weapons, or the weird "damaging your own robots" problem, could also have been telegraphed through dialogue.

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    7. I think the point I'm trying to make is that I would have found the overall gameplay experience very similar even if I HAD made different choices with skills and weapons and such. If the enemies had died in half the time, the game still would have been solely about exhaustively exploring large dungeons and killing enemies with no story, NPCs, role-playing, or even puzzles. It might have gone faster, sure, but it still wouldn't have exemplified what I like about an RPG.

      Helm, where did that come from? I may get annoyed occasionally when readers insist on extolling the virtues of a game that I don't like, but I never "punish" the game in the ratings because of that.

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    8. I don't mean it as an insult at all. You seem like a person who would be very resistant to peer pressure to like something. Perhaps my theorizing that you'd go the opposite way if you were prompted too much is out of step and perhaps it reveals more about me than you. I certainly get sick for example, of hearing how Monkey Island 2 is the best point and click adventure game ever made, to the point where I kind of dislike the game a bit more than it probably deserves.

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    9. The entire point of an RPG is to let the player play it their way, be it in the order they play the game or the way they develope their characters. If there is only one right way to play the game it's a bad RPG.

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    10. Oh come on. Acting like every conceivable strategy and build should always be equally effective is asinine, and would make for a very poor game. If you cannot make a wrong decision, the decision-making itself is meaningless. Besides, the game was clearly beatable even with Addict's suboptimal approach, as he just demonstrated. He was never in a "walking dead" situation.

      I would also say that people here are awfully quick to lay blame at the feet of the game when the player has confessed not paying attention to shop inventories, effects of devices, etc. things revealed by a cursory examination. It's not always the game's fault if the player is impatient and tries to rush through it.

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    11. Bit of strawman, MOZA. My claim was that seemingly reasonable decisions made at point x in the game, shouldn't leave you with terrible grindy gameplay 20 hours later.

      That doesn't imply that all decisions should be equal. That would be pretty boring.What I'd like to see, in the instance of captive, is a situation where swords become distinctly suboptimal, rather than essentially useless.

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    12. MOZA I never said or implied every build should be equal, but most builds should be fun or at the very least interesting. And if the game doesn't make clear that certain seemingly reasonable choices will make the game a repetitive slog, it's poorly designed.

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    14. Actually, in MOZA's defense, Chet didn't actually "build". He was hoarding cash meant for building up his droids to repair them instead.

      A "build" would be like 'Melee Tank', 'Mid-Range Brawler', 'Fragile Powerhouse' and such. 'Frequently Damaged Droid Due To Lack Of Upgrades' is not a "build".

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    15. I was under the impression that he put points in weapon skills that were massively worse than the higher tier weapons.

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    16. "What I'd like to see, in the instance of captive, is a situation where swords become distinctly suboptimal, rather than essentially useless."

      That doesn't make real-world sense though. Think about it: this is a game where the weapons range from brass knuckles and knives all the way to flamethrowers and anti-tank missiles. Of course high tier weapons are going to be orders of magnitude better than low tier ones: it's not like in D&D where every weapon type is essentially a pointy metal object. There's a world of a conceptual difference between swinging at somebody with an axe and blowing him up with an autocannon, especially when the "somebody" is a tank, an ED-209 ripoff or a ten-foot-tall armored cyborg. It's not like this distinction is hidden in the game either, when one of the cheapest devices you can get is one that shows the exact damage values of all your attacks.

      Also it wouldn't make game design sense either, without a total overhaul of the skill system at least, because not only are low tier weapons vastly weaker, their related skills are also vastly cheaper. Raising Brawling all the way to maximum costs less that getting level one at Lasers, and since every skill gives you stat increases and you continue to get freebie disposable versions of lower-tier weapons (the purpose of which is to save ammo for your real guns), you're not really wasting points when you spend them on low tier skills. In fact I'm going to make the claim that the negative impact of Addict's skill setup is minimal: his real problem is that he didn't realize the importance of buying upgrades until he was almost at the end of the game.

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    17. The thing is, the game design certainly encourages hoarding cash. Based on the Addict's posts, you have a fixed supply of cash (you can't reasonably grind more). If he had spent all of his money on upgrades and then gotten damaged droids, could he have repaired them? So it's not clear how much you need to spend on repair vs. upgrade, and it's got a slippery slope situation. If you upgrade poorly, you have to repair more, which makes you feel like you *really* need to save cash for repairs, which makes you upgrade worse...

      The decision can seem perfectly reasonable at the time.

      I suspect that if there had been a reasonable way to get more cash safely, then he would have upgraded more, and perhaps not even needed to grind for that cash. But I know that in games where I have fixed resources, I'm very careful about not upgrading too early, and that's usually the right call - especially if you have no stats about how much better a new weapon is. Double damage and 10% more damage are very different things.

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    18. I agree that the lack of info on damage output (and defense increased) certainly does make an impact on upgrading decision. That said, if you see things in the long run (spend $1,000 now to kill enemies 20% faster and reduce damage taken by 40%) rather than the short run (spend $100 now to repair, go out and come back within 10 minutes to spend another $100 to repair again repeatedly), it should clue you in when the economics of scale starts failing.

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    19. Probably I didn't explain myself in a correct way: I didn't mean to criticize the Addict's way of playing, but this game (just like ALL the other RPGs) has some hidden rules that make the game relatively easier, if you follow them. And I didn't have any manual... ;)
      The last post from Kenny McCormick explains what I meant by saying "wrong".

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    20. It's definitely a game that rewards a second play, after you understand the rules and have mastered the mechanics. I'm sure if I started over, I'd know enough to take very little damage on the early levels, thus minimizing my repair costs, thus allowing me to upgrade weapons and parts faster.

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    21. I think there is a simple solution to this that the game missed: Give the player some upgrades early on, so you can see that going up a tier is the right choice. Then the player has a chance to learn that is the optimal approach.

      The other idea I had is reduce the cost of repairing old upgrades as you go on, so that the player builds up cash they can use to buy new upgrades.

      Oh or let you*find* upgrades in chests or on dead enemies, that way you'd never fall hopelessly far behind.

      Really, the fact I can think up multiple ways to mitigate the problems makes it even more damning.

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  5. Congratulations!
    The game sounds to me like a clever shooter with technical deficiencies. On the one hand there's action, but with stats, and several available strategies, and on the other hand, it's still no real, fluid 3d environment.
    So I guess it has turned out that Trill is a terrorist and the killing of innocent shopkeepers is consistent with the story.

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    1. I had the same thought: Trill being the "Creator of Evil" explains why he wanted to have the droids destroy the bases, kill the innocent shopkeepers, etc. It actually answers an earlier question!

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    2. On the other hand Captive II gives you an entirely different view of the events https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS35qazA2PQ
      I had thought that ending in Captive 1 would have reflected it.

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  6. Sir, you are a Legend! I am glad that you stick to this game and did not give upon it. I somewhat like dungeon crawlers like these, though this game is something, which is in my opinion a rather bland example of the genre.
    Another game completed. Long live the Addict! :)

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  7. That's cool that you fought through a situation that most people would reload. Hardcore.

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  8. Isn't the player supposed to be Trill, trying to rescue himself using the droids? If so, what does it matter that Trill is the creator of evil? Unless there is something else that I am missing is seems that the programmer forgot the backstory.

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    1. Yes, the game sets up the "player" as Trill, but either way the back story leaves his crime vague. I think you're supposed to get the sense from the framing story that Trill is wrongfully convicted, in which case the end serves as a kind of plot twist. But without more information, it's not a very GOOD twist.

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    2. Taking into account the droids can murder Trill when they find him, maybe he isn't evil at all and simply has an undiagnosed mental condition.

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    3. "Evil" is defined in a manner that is dependent on the philosophies of the current ruling regime,

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    4. Yeah, we don't know who the narrator is, so calling him creator of evil is actually irrelevant.

      If the narrator is on the side of the game's antagonists, who seem to fill their bases with mutants, killing machines and fire, then maybe 'Evil' is not such a twist anyway.

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  9. Congratulations for your perseverance!

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  10. Well, that's another slow-clap anticlimax. Bravo, but boy, this seems like a dull slog to me.

    However, I guess you could argue that for a very narrow sub-genre (not merely "DM-style games" - something else) it's well-optimized. Based on your posts, it's arguably not a "role-playing" game, in that there is basically no role to play; you have a tactics-level command of purchasing decisions for the robots and a sort of "slowed-down shooter"-like command of them in the 3D environment. The one sop to pretending this is a world you inhabit rather than a series of levels you survive is putting the shops in the stations - the rest of the game seems to kinda want them to be a between-station interregnum, "Level 4 Complete! Upgrade droids?" moment. Given the fixed supply of cash, it might as well be that kind of setup - could just ditch money entirely and say at the end of each level that you can choose to put a fixed number of points into different upgrades. We're still a couple years away from Wolf 3D (and Ultima Underworld); some of the itches this game seems like it'd scratch would, I suspect, become the province of FPSes in the 90s.

    All of which is to say that the option to keep on fighting when the "story" is "complete" lays bare what's already implied by the procedural dungeons: this is a combat-oriented difficulty machine that you test yourself against, not an adventure/puzzle/role-playing experience. The (effectively) infinite array of dungeons means that if you want this high-stakes, tense combat experience, there will always be a "new" dungeon for you to try it on; the game would be more honest if it ditched the Trill story and just established from the outset that you're playing as four robots programmed to destroy every space station in the universe, much as one's goal in Asteroids is to destroy all the asteroids.

    This sounds like an argument for evaluating this as something other than an RPG (the old "good game, low GIMLET" story), but it's not, really, because even as Space Combat Simulator 2.0 it sounds like a drag, just because the combat seems so twitchy and one-screwup-you're-out. If all there is is the combat and the upgrades, then obviously it lives or dies on how well those things work. However, this is the one reason I'm kinda sympathetic to the fans here who have been insisting that you're playing it "wrong" - if this game has joys to offer, presumably they relate to a combat experience where your robots stand a fighting chance without having to resort to the tedious maneuvers you've had to use to make it. If I tried to play Doom without ever realizing I could switch weapons with the number keys, I might come away thinking "Not much of an RPG, more of a shooter, that's okay...but man, the combat plays out so weirdly, so much luck based on what weapon you most recently picked up. That's distracting and really makes this a chore instead of something fun." Y'know? Your point about it being unfair for the game to give you play options but make certain approaches to upgrades into very slow, long-term dead ends is legitimate....but on the other hand, if you bought this in 1990, I suspect you might have started over a few times earlier on, trying different approaches, discovering what works, etc. It'd be interesting to ponder whether the desire to check the game off and move forward in the list really changes the way you relate to the games and stage your exploration of them. But I ramble.

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    1. Of course you have a point in the last sentences, but that's true of every game on my list. You may note that when I like a game, I tend to linger on it a bit--for instance, winning Quest for Glory II multiple times. Sure, if I bought the game in 1990 and it was the only game I could afford for six months, I'd have spent a lot more time on its intricacies. But it would have still been a sad state of imprisonment. There's simply no way to replicate this in 2014, and it would be a mistake for readers to ever expect anything more than my reactions to games right now.

      "However, I guess you could argue that for a very narrow sub-genre (not merely "DM-style games" - something else) it's well-optimized." Yes, absolutely. I've said it repeatedly: if you like this game's mechanics and don't care about a story, NPCs, or role-playing, and you're fast with your fingers, you'll rate this game a lot higher than I do.

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    2. Oh, definitely not "expecting" that - it's not a criticism, and my goal here is definitely not to soften your blows against Captive! Just an idle musing about different ways of relating to games; when I say "it'd be interesting to ponder," it's not a chastisement - some of my favorite posts on here are the moments where you've pondered some more general topic that gets, incidentally or directly, into why these games are enjoyable (or in this case, not enjoyable).

      So, specifically, I think "the player is expected to start over a bunch" was not an unreasonable thing for a designer to think in 1990, and probably influenced lots of design decisions that now produce (or at least worsen) a crummy play experience. So it goes. Even retro-gamers not on a quest to get through many, many games will probably not sit around, take the punishment, try again with a different approach, etc. That's just the way it is; games "work" differently when played at different personal and cultural moments.

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    3. Clearly some people liked the game a lot. I never played it, though I loved Dungeon Master and liked Bloodwych. It seems this is a bit higher on the difficulty level, and I prefer fantasy games to SF in general, so I probably wouldn't have loved Captive. But it's a case of different strokes for different folks. Clearly the addict is not really keen on the genre at all, as is his right.

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    4. My own fave setting lean towards Cyberpunk (followed by Post-Apocalypse, Horror, Renaissance, Asian/Middle-Eastern, Primitive Tribal, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Mystery/Detective & so on). Pity Deus Ex is so far down Chet's list and the 2 faithful pre-Kickstarter Shadowrun's RPGs were released on consoles.

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  11. Perhaps your feeling that you got paroled is eventually consistent with the story. I mean if the game is so difficult, then Trill (yourself) deserves to be paroled after this ordeal, even if he is the creator of evil.

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  12. My best memory of Captive for the Amiga is the good soundtrack

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