Age of Pirates: City of Abandoned Ships is coming soon. The preview looks smashing - let’s hope it doesn’t suck as much as its predecessor.

So I had this Captain Blood video embedded right here, but it wouldn’t work – something about their age protection (because no minor would lie about their age online so as to see a little pixelated gore.) Anyways, you can still view a high def preview.

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Rating:
www.playlogicgames.com/aopct

I hate to be so blunt, especially with a game that I had hoped to love:

Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales is an uncut diamond buried deep within a bottomless dung heap. It could have been great, it should have been great, but for whatever reason it was sent to market incomplete in most every respect, and is therefore not worth your hard-earned doubloons.

I’m an enormous fan of the original Seadogs. For all it’s quirks and bugs, it was still wonderfully fun, and easily set the standard for 3rd person pirate adventure games. Pirates of the Caribbean (Seadogs 2 before jumping on board with Disney) was also flawed – the last minute Disney changes seemed half-baked and disrupted the original intentions of the developers. But just the same, it was quite the improvement over Seadogs, and with the various mods created by fans it soon evolved into an ever-growing pirate world of near infinite options. [read more »]

Rating:
pirates.bethsoft.com/firstsite/main.html

I admit being perturbed at the name change. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVED the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. But I also loved that Seadogs was made by a small company I’d never heard of. I loved that they were making a sequel. But I didn’t love that Disney came along and bought that sequel and slapped their logo on it. [read more »]

Rating:
www.bethsoft.com

I bought this game on a whim – didn’t know a thing about it but the box looked good. One of the best spontaneous purchases I ever made. Beautiful graphics, relatively easy ship controls, and absolutely wonderful music (this holds espically true when you visit a pirate village, where the background music is ripe with “yo hos” – very fun.) In the game you play Nicholas Sharp, a pirate captain that you can take ashore to buy goods and chat with the locals, or take aboard your ship to pillage and plunder. Best of all, whenever you give a command you hear a piratey voice say things like “Full sails, aye captain” or “Cannons loaded, captain.”

A fine, fine game, but it does have about three real sticking points. First, it’s buggy as hell. But this is easily fixed with a patch available at the official website. The second point is that there seem to be multiple missions and plotlines interwoven, and it’s tricky to tell what you’re supposed to do when in order to keep the story moving along. And the third is that the game starts you off in a weak little boat making it almost impossible to survive. But when you do finally climb up the ladder to bigger and better ships, it almost becomes too easy.

A beautiful but flawed game.