Dissecting (and mapping) Captive II: Liberation

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by LuMan

Years ago a load of us at school mapped Jet Set Willy. We were REALLY proud... and then a magazine printed their version which was (i) better and (ii) actually accurate!

Great story!

I have tried very hard to find a copy of an old 80'ies computer magazine from Sweden that had maps of Last Ninja that are the coolest maps I ever seen. They were handdrawn with every item and every guard illustrated. Unfortunately they were made in newspaper format so they are difficult to scan.

Originally Posted by LuMan

Keep up the good work JemyM - I'm going to dig this gem out again.

Do so.

[JemyM]

2023: Updated guide and playthrough of the first mission: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...tkslUpG0OLn_6J

Sorry for the outrageous thread necromancy, but this game can be a lot of fun! The plot, cut sequences and atmosphere of the game were the big perks for me.

I remember eventually finding a 'data crystal' when playing this, which had the address of Toyogon, and for some reason it stays in your inventory after you return from the emperor and will then tell you the address of the next captive. Using this I completed a number of missions in quick succession, but the end cut scene of each mission was always the same. I'm not sure if there's a 'final' cut-scene, but given I've just found out there are 4000 missions it seems unlikely!

Can anyone recommend any good similar games? Particularly in terms of the atmosphere/style and setting.

[RetroPaul]

This was one of the games i felt totally out of my depth with and never really played. I remember buying it for my CD32 based on the glowing magazine reviews but aside from showing off the cool intro sequence and cd audio to my friends i dont think i ever got anywhere at all in the game.
I amazed by the complexity, size and mechanic's of it, i never realised at the time, damn good work mapping it out, i think ill give it another go!

[whowasphone]

Originally Posted by JemyM

Right, decided to upload my playthrough of the first mission of the game even though I wasn't happy about it's quality. If there are those interested in this game feel free to have a look.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...8egHHSDF1XJ1Yt

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I wrote a guide for this game using your videos and all the information you uncovered and shared! I made sure to credit you throughout the guide! It was extremely satisfying to fully understand this game after all these years!

I am amazed at the detail of your map work, labeling every street name and recording the type of each of the 987 buildings is truly going above and beyond. Would you be willing to upload your maps to Game FAQs so that they will preserved on another site?

If you have time please have a look at my guide, if you find any errors please let me know!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/cd32/9...4/introduction

Thank you again for all your hard work!

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by whowasphone

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I wrote a guide for this game using your videos and all the information you uncovered and shared! I made sure to credit you throughout the guide! It was extremely satisfying to fully understand this game after all these years!

I am amazed at the detail of your map work, labeling every street name and recording the type of each of the 987 buildings is truly going above and beyond. Would you be willing to upload your maps to Game FAQs so that they will preserved on another site?

If you have time please have a look at my guide, if you find any errors please let me know!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/cd32/9...4/introduction

Thank you again for all your hard work!

Yes, I can't recall why they aren't on Game FAQ's already but I uploaded them today. The liberation walkthrough is one of my older videos and since then I got myself better microphone and recording software that allows me to separate the microphone and game audio and throttle volume independently. You can check my recent Alien Breed 3d II video for example, I think it sounds a lot better.

I have considered remaking that video due to the audio issues but it's not been a priority. Given it is is fairly short I know it do not take much time but there are other projects that I felt to be of greater urgency.

That said; I am very happy for your guide. I did the first mission but realized that there were a potential to continue to play as a rogue-like, building up your robots to more and more powerful hardware, weaponry and configurations. I never quite figured out how to mod properly, even if I did my best and a good guide on that is something I really lacked while I made my maps.

[whowasphone]

Originally Posted by JemyM

Yes, I can't recall why they aren't on Game FAQ's already but I uploaded them today.

Thank you very much for uploading your maps! I'm looking forward to seeing them there!

Thank you very much for making the videos too, I listened carefully and wrote down most of your strategy in my own words into the guide. So I wouldn't worry about remaking the videos unless you really want to!

I made a request on the gamefaqs forums that we share joint credit for the Liberation guide, since you discovered so much of the information about the game. If it goes through, the guide should also appear on your gamefaqs profile! I think you will then be able to edit it, if there are any parts you want to correct.

I also noticed you fully mapped Alien Breed 3D II! What an amazing display of effort! It's an insane achievement! I recently wrote a guide for the first game and it gave me such a headache, I can't imagine mapping the whole game! I'm currently mapping all of Fears, so I can really respect the amount of detail on all of your maps, adding all the enemy locations is going above and beyond!

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by whowasphone

Thank you very much for uploading your maps! I'm looking forward to seeing them there!

It's been 6 days and they are still not approved, just status "submitted"... Hopefully they are accepted soon.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

Thank you very much for making the videos too, I listened carefully and wrote down most of your strategy in my own words into the guide. So I wouldn't worry about remaking the videos unless you really want to!

Good. The truth is that once they were done and I realize the audio was off I was exhausted. You can't see it, but it is one of the most frustrating video-series I produced because there are so many things that could go wrong. I even reveal at one point that my gamesave broke. I also remember that the way I planned it out was to get the amount of money I needed exactly. Accidentally misclicking a shop owner meant attacking the shop owner, accidentally combining the wrong credit sticks etc, stuff like that could lead to having to do it all over again. The credit-video was half an hour or planned movement/walkthrough through the world where everything had to go right. I think I rerecorded that bit for half a day.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I made a request on the gamefaqs forums that we share joint credit for the Liberation guide, since you discovered so much of the information about the game. If it goes through, the guide should also appear on your gamefaqs profile! I think you will then be able to edit it, if there are any parts you want to correct.

That's amazing, thank you. The fact you solve the questions I had about chipping was great because that was an aspect I couldn't answer. When I finished the first mission I felt "done", but I also wondered later on how the game scales really. Do you keep your characters for the next missions and do they get better and better? Are there better weapons? Given how 'easy' Mission 1 was really, do you *need* to have very strong weapons and skills? Do the game get harder? I also wonder how you 'solve a map' without a specific walkthrough for it. What A>B>C>D>E steps do you need to take when you spawn into a new sector without any clues on where to begin?

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I also noticed you fully mapped Alien Breed 3D II! What an amazing display of effort! It's an insane achievement! I recently wrote a guide for the first game and it gave me such a headache, I can't imagine mapping the whole game! I'm currently mapping all of Fears, so I can really respect the amount of detail on all of your maps, adding all the enemy locations is going above and beyond!

I felt a bit of a duty to ensure all the classic Amiga games are at least mapped. I actually started on others but never finished.

[Reynolds]

Where can be found the AB3D2 maps?

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by Reynolds

Where can be found the AB3D2 maps?

On gamefaqs: HERE.

[whowasphone]

Originally Posted by JemyM

It's been 6 days and they are still not approved, just status "submitted"... Hopefully they are accepted soon.

There is apparently only one person reviewing GameFAQs submissions right now, so it takes a long time. I wouldn't worry, I'm sure they will be up there by next week.

Originally Posted by JemyM

Good. The truth is that once they were done and I realize the audio was off I was exhausted. You can't see it, but it is one of the most frustrating video-series I produced because there are so many things that could go wrong.

Well, I really appreciate the effort you put into not only making the videos but researching the game and sharing the information. I could really understand how deep the game was and how it all worked!

Originally Posted by JemyM

accidentally combining the wrong credit sticks etc, stuff like that could lead to having to do it all over again.

If you combined the wrong sticks, the wrong droid would have all the money?

Originally Posted by JemyM

Are there better weapons? Given how 'easy' Mission 1 was really, do you *need* to have very strong weapons and skills? Do the game get harder? I also wonder how you 'solve a map' without a specific walkthrough for it.

I also wonder about which weapons are the best, but it seems like you found a good answer with the Super Phaser MK3 guns.

As far as I know the game does not get harder. The furthest I have heard anyone getting in this game is mission 45, but the captive spawned in a room with a glitched staircase and so could not be rescued. This was from a comment on youtube. It seems very likely that due to the procedural generation of this game it is impossible to finish all 4,000 missions.

I think the clues are all obtained from reading newspapers and talking to NPCs, as you did in the first mission. Concerning chipping, I believe that is fully explained in the manual. However the explanation is quite confusing, so it took me a long time to work out what they were trying to say. What some of the ability chips do was revealed in an official guide for CD32 Gamer. I think there are lots of features that seem to be in the game, but were never actually implemented due to the size and complexity of the project.

Originally Posted by JemyM

I felt a bit of a duty to ensure all the classic Amiga games are at least mapped. I actually started on others but never finished.

I also understand this “sense of duty”. Its interesting to map out these forgotten and unloved spaces. Perhaps you could also submit them to Hall of Light, because they also have a separate map section for each game. As you can see there are no maps for Liberation and Alien Breed 3D 2, yours should definitely be there!

http://hol.abime.net/883

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by whowasphone

If you combined the wrong sticks, the wrong droid would have all the money?

It's been awhile since I made that video... I remember I had some specific narrow rules for pedagogical reasons. I have a vague memory that I made sure to not accidentally combine credit sticks and made sure they were always kept separated, and I remember that I had to replay the whole segment if I accidentally did so. This might not actually have been a big issue otherwise and I do not remember strictly *why* it was.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

As far as I know the game does not get harder. The furthest I have heard anyone getting in this game is mission 45, but the captive spawned in a room with a glitched staircase and so could not be rescued. This was from a comment on youtube. It seems very likely that due to the procedural generation of this game it is impossible to finish all 4,000 missions.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I think there are lots of features that seem to be in the game, but were never actually implemented due to the size and complexity of the project.

That's a shame.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

Perhaps you could also submit them to Hall of Light, because they also have a separate map section for each game. As you can see there are no maps for Liberation and Alien Breed 3D 2, yours should definitely be there!

I will look into this. I was using Hall of Light heavily on my latest project.

The Amiga have several exclusive Dungeon Crawlers that always been an obsession for me. Liberation is one of them, and I feel reluctant to rest until they are all thoroughly covered.

[whowasphone]

The maps are up! Thanks for sharing them!

The guide didn't go through though, I'll try again.

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by whowasphone

The maps are up! Thanks for sharing them!

The guide didn't go through though, I'll try again.

Inspired by your guide I remade and reuploaded my video playthroughs with a 2023 update and dedicated it to you . I figured I will hide the old 2012 video and may private it once you updated your walkthrough.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...tkslUpG0OLn_6J

The new playthrough is pretty much the same. But some changes;
1. You can reassign numpad in WinUAE to get strafe keys that are not available on CD32 (but you get strafing if you enable the combat setting with Pause).
2. If you bind the CD32 Fast Forward button (aka right shoulder) it can be used to detect items hidden in chairs.
3. It is possible to get even more powerful chips and items from stores if you rest for an hour then interact with the same shop owner again. This time I found 1122 and even 1222 chips. But each NPC have their own unique inventories they can select from, I had to go to the guy with a face in Yoy Abugae Hardware to get the Armour 0AA chip for example.
4. You can move MCROM's around at the start of the game to begin with higher Slug Gun skill
5. I optioned to go for Disruptor Cannons this time. Note that I had to buy 3 than 1, because 4 couldn't be selected.
6. I saved a step in the mission because I ran into a drug dealer. You do not need to go to the Eta district and the location of their contact (who believe you're a cop) may differ from time to time but it is always within the same sector.

[whowasphone]

Originally Posted by JemyM

Inspired by your guide I remade and reuploaded my video playthroughs with a 2023 update and dedicated it to you .

I noticed the videos yesterday, and just updated the guide to add the new link! Then I came here to see you have written in the thread too!

Thank you so much for making the entire series again! Playing this game is hard enough, but making a whole video series on it TWICE is an amazing accomplishment! I hope everyone in the Amiga community sees your videos and appreciates how much work goes into them!

Also thank you very much for dedicating the series to me, I am really honored! I remember coming across this exact thread with your maps years ago, and being blown away by how detailed your maps were. But this thread was years old at the time, so I never thought it would be possible to get in touch with you. It really means a lot to me that you were okay with me writing the guide and that we were able to work on this game together! Thank you so much!

I requested that GameFAQs adds you as the co-author again. I'm sorry it didn't seem to go through last time. If they fail to do it again, I will PM the lead mod. I will update the guide again with the new strategies after I watch the series carefully!

It is crazy that this 10 year old thread is still up, and our last posts were over a year ago! Has a year already passed!?

The game came out 30 years ago this year, probably around this date as the CD32 was released in September 1993, and this was one of the early games. It really blows my mind that new content for Liberation is coming out now! It sat patiently for 20 years and now there is another awesome new series dedicated to it!

I hope the devs see this thread and join in the conversation! I wonder where they are now...

The Liberation: Captive 2 community is finally coming together lol!

[JemyM]

Originally Posted by whowasphone

Thank you so much for making the entire series again! Playing this game is hard enough, but making a whole video series on it TWICE is an amazing accomplishment! I hope everyone in the Amiga community sees your videos and appreciates how much work goes into them!
Also thank you very much for dedicating the series to me, I am really honored!

I felt a duty to do it. First time I finished the video playthroughs I was so fed up with all the issues I had making them that I simply didn't want to put more time into it, but that also meant that the work I put in was kind of wasted with the audio issues. My frustrations had plenty of reasons. Needless to say I was disappointed in the game at first because it wasn't what I wanted. In 1994 I was putting my hope that the game would make Amiga survive since I knew the Amiga really needed Texture Mapping to be competitive to PC and DOOM, and it failed to do so. Then the game when I actually played it wasn't particularly fun compared to the other games I enjoyed like Eye of the Beholder and Black Crypt.

Then when I recorded the videos in 2012 WinUAE had issues with the CD32 saves that caused them to become corrupted so I tried to make big chunks of gameplay in one sitting, with a whupping 45 minute session for the Money Grind that had to be in one go. And it had to be below 45 minutes due to a time limit for how long a video could be, so getting things done in 45 minutes was necessary. Then I lost my save anyway. The combination of this lead to me playing the game over and over and over and over again for many hours in a few days, where its just the last attempt that I uploaded. It wasn't even my first playthrough video I finally uploaded, the first one was even more broken so I had to remake the videos from scratch. This time this was a lot easier since things work, I have much better software that can splice videos like I want to and even record/edit voice and music separately.

I had expected others to make better videos over time but a decade later it hadn't happened. I also realized when I got wiser and older that ripping on the games with a bad attitude is a disservice to those who come to see a playthrough out of interest of what it was. In a way, these kinds of playthroughs I make is a historical presentation best done in respect. I am more curious now about the game as it was intended to be rather than what I wanted it to be.

I am also ashamed to admit that I hadn't considered just sleeping for shops to update their inventory on my first playthrough, that really was a gamechanger... And the fact that I could just change MCROM's around in the very beginning of the game to beef up my Slug Gun, and even boost my running/dodge (which I forgot to do).

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I remember coming across this exact thread with your maps years ago, and being blown away by how detailed your maps were. But this thread was years old at the time, so I never thought it would be possible to get in touch with you. It really means a lot to me that you were okay with me writing the guide and that we were able to work on this game together! Thank you so much!

I was sad to realize that the maps were only useful for the very first mission of the game. I guess that is enough to get into it but I realize that the game then goes into a gameplay loop where you need to find reliable ways to find locations over and over again, bribing people until you run out of money.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I requested that GameFAQs adds you as the co-author again. I'm sorry it didn't seem to go through last time. If they fail to do it again, I will PM the lead mod. I will update the guide again with the new strategies after I watch the series carefully!

It is crazy that this 10 year old thread is still up, and our last posts were over a year ago! Has a year already passed!?

Yup, time passes. Your walkthrough really prompted me to get the update done but I haven't had much time (or mood) to record videos this year, but I was at least active at planning new videos out, including preparing for Xenomorph which is now up. I usually get into the mood to cram in a few playthroughs out at the end of each year it seems. Almost like a December thing.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

The game came out 30 years ago this year, probably around this date as the CD32 was released in September 1993, and this was one of the early games. It really blows my mind that new content for Liberation is coming out now! It sat patiently for 20 years and now there is another awesome new series dedicated to it!

Someone pointed out that there is a newer game called Shadows of Doubt which does what Captive II: Liberation intends to be (except of the Cyberpunk setting). I haven't tried it yet, but based on what I seen of the game it is.

I considered to make a video about the Mission 2+ gameplay loop when you get into Mission 2 and beyond but its a different project. I did put in some effort in my new videos to understand and present how the coordinates and GPS functions work since they become more important when you can't rely on maps.

It's also a bit of irony I never finished Mission 1 of Captive. It is the only Amiga dungeon-crawler I never "finished" in a satisfying state. I did however finish Knightmare this year which was a personal achievement of mine since it was the only Amiga game I ever returned to the store when I was a kid since it was too hard. And I still consider it one of the hardest games I ever finished ever.

Originally Posted by whowasphone

I hope the devs see this thread and join in the conversation! I wonder where they are now...

The Liberation: Captive 2 community is finally coming together lol!

Antony Crowther is still working it seems, but doesn't seem active in videogame production. I realized when looking it up that "Ratt" is his nickname, and the name of one of the engines Liberation runs on.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by JemyM

Antony Crowther is still working it seems, but doesn't seem active in videogame production. I realized when looking it up that "Ratt" is his nickname, and the name of one of the engines Liberation runs on.

I might be wrong, but this could be him: https://www.facebook.com/antony.crowther

Most recent video game credit is for Crackdown 3 in 2019 on Mobygames.

[Octopus66]

Tremendous effort! Love this.

[copse]

There's an interview with Crowther by Lemon Amiga on the youtubes. It's a pity there isn't a longer form one, as Crowther did a lot of innovative early game development.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Cherno]

For what it's worth, I once started a project inspired by Liberation as a mod/tc for GZDoom. Disregard the bugged enemy movement and animations

[ Show youtube player ]